In 1868, when Christian Dietert built his fourth mill in the Texas Hill Country, he built it with flooding in mind. Dietert’s first three mills, including one called Perseverance, had all been washed away in floods. This fourth mill, on the Guadalupe River, was ready for rising waters. Designed with a differential flywheel, the mill sat on the bluff, while the wheel sat in the river below. When floodwaters came, the wheel might break away and get carried downriver, but the mill, on high ground, would remain intact.
The mill stood for the better part of a century, providing flour and lumber to the growing town of Kerrville before eventually succumbing to a combination of floods and changing times. The remains of the mill are still visible from Water Street in Kerrville’s downtown. Also visible is the aftermath of the catastrophic flash floods that swept through the area earlier this summer: At Louise Hays Park, the giant trees downed by floodwaters have been hauled away for mulch, and the riverbanks have been scraped down to dirt by heavy machinery.
This flood was horrific. In the early hours of July 4, when the riverbanks were crowded with vacationers and campers, a stalled tropical storm system dumped months’ worth of rain on Central Texas in a few short hours. The Guadalupe River’s levels rose 26 feet within 45 minutes near Kerrville. Witnesses described a wall of water that tore houses from their foundations, swept RVs and Ford F-250 trucks far downstream, and left survivors clinging to trees. At least 137 people across Central Texas were killed, including many children at Camp Mystic, a summer camp upriver in Hunt. Months later, two people are still missing.
The first responders—the search and rescue teams, the mobile kitchens, the volunteer crews scraping mud off walls and tenderly washing waterlogged stuffed animals—are mostly gone now. On Water Street, posters advertise a “Rise and Rebuild” concert series in the town’s historic theater. But the work of recovery is only just starting.
In the aftermath of the floods, area residents and government officials are talking about what needs to change: flood warning systems, flood maps, and flood insurance. Meanwhile, cuts to federal agencies, including FEMA, the National Weather Service, and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), raise concerns about the future of preparation and response for disasters of this scale. Along the river, contractors from the Texas Department of Emergency Management are still hard at work removing traces of the flood; thousands of cubic yards of debris, most of it organic material, has been trucked off to commercial compost facilities in San Antonio and Austin.
In Kerrville and the surrounding towns, there’s also another conversation underway. Some community members are suggesting that the most impactful change might be a slow one; not federal or state funded, not the kind of large-scale infrastructure projects that reshaped Central Texas a hundred years ago, not 21st-century technology, but rather, the steady work of learning how to live with the river all over again.
More Resilient Riverbanks
When Dietert’s mill went up, Kerrville was not yet a town. It was a shingle-makers camp, populated, in the words of Joe Herring Jr., Kerrville’s longtime historian and current mayor, by “some of the German immigrants, eager for a sight of crystal waters and fertile valleys, a few Tennesseans in search of adventure, and some businessmen of San Antonio.” These men looked at the giant cypresses flanking the river and saw roofing materials for a booming population of new Texans.
Over the years, the town grew slowly, adding a library, a mercantile store, and eventually a college. By the 1990s, The Wall Street Journal was calling Kerrville “one of the wealthiest small towns in America.” The river was an asset. It was also a threat, rising to destructive levels at least every few decades. The river’s volatility was met with a fraught ambivalence, one that was reflected in the town’s built environment.
Jeremy Walther, a Kerrville native and business owner, describes this as a missed opportunity. “The pattern language of Kerrville has not recognized the value of the river, even from an economic perspective,” he said, with a nod to Christopher Alexander’s classic work. “All of the buildings along the Highway 27 corridor, the road that follows the river across Kerr County, all of those buildings have their backs to the river, even the restaurants.” Accordingly, said Walther, business leaders tend to view that part of the river as an industrial zone: a place for gravel pits, steel tank manufacturing, and the regional airport, along with smaller businesses like oil-change shops and mattress stores.
But Walther, who has opened two venues in Kerrville—Pint & Plow Brewing Company and Trailhead Beer Garden—sees in the aftermath of the flood an opportunity to do something different. “We need to recognize that we’re here because of the river,” he said. “We can design spaces that allow us to connect directly to the land and the river in an ordinary, daily way.”
What Walther envisions, first, is a trail system. “Trails have this extraordinary ability to drive conservation efforts and economic development,” said Walther. “If we can figure out how to fund and build a trail, basically extending the river trail into this industrial corridor, we can change the narrative. We can do some creative housing or mixed-use [along the river], we can expand the parks system, we can partner with developers where they set some land aside in a permanent conservation easement and they build out along the frontage road.”
This isn’t hypothetical talk. Walther has already been instrumental in extending the Kerrville River Trail, a 6-mile hike and bike path along the Guadalupe that was first proposed back in the 1970s. It hasn’t been easy. “Kerrville is a staunchly conservative place,” said Stephen Brady Dietert, a Kerrville native and the great-great-nephew of Christian Dietert. “The fact that we got the river trail built, that’s a huge thing. People want this place to be nice, to be a place for families to enjoy. People want to be down by the river.”
But for a riverside trail to exist, there has to be a riverside. These days, Walther and fellow community members are focused on keeping the riverbanks from being stripped bare in the name of recovery. All that woody debris that’s getting hauled away would, if left in place, prevent erosion and give new growth a chance to get started. “We’ve pulled all the contracts, sneaked mulch samples to a lab to prove it’s not contaminated, talked at council and commissioner meetings, and called every TDEM, TCEQ, and contractor we can find numbers for. It looks like a $50 million job to strip the river of the most important thing it needs to recover.”
An Absorption Problem
Dietert, who is an architect and rancher, understands the necessity for a regional approach to land management. And land management, of course, also means water management. Periodic flooding, while often devastating for human inhabitants, is a necessary part of the hydrological cycle in a karstic landscape with aquifers that get emptied by faucets and refilled by rainwater. For that recharge to happen, though, the water needs a chance to soak in. As Bryan Hummel, an aquifer recharge specialist presenting at the U.S. Green Building Council’s Flooding and Resilience Symposium last month, put it, “We don’t have a flooding problem. We have an absorption problem.”
Under current land-management strategies, there are only two kinds of water in Texas: too little and too much. In 1927, a state meteorologist described the state as “a land of perennial drought, broken by the occasional devastating flood.” A look at Central Texas’s flood history proves this to be true. Austin suffered through several floods between 1869 and 1938, when construction started on the dam system that has—so far—protected the city from severe flooding. A devastating flood in San Antonio in 1921 spurred the development of the San Antonio Riverwalk. More recently, 13 people died in a flash flood there just weeks before the Kerrville floods. The Guadalupe has flooded many times, including an instance in 1987 that drowned ten teenagers at a church camp near Comfort. The list of tragedies goes on. These patterns will continue to be exacerbated as climate change brings more deadly storms and extreme temperatures and as population growth and data centers pull more water out of the aquifers.
Jameson Courtney, certified floodplain manager and environmental program coordinator for the City of Austin, a few hours from Kerrville, noted that while emergency management (flood warning systems, for example) is important, floodplain management is also essential. As we think about the way the state is growing and changing, the floodplain management needs to be considered in all future plans for development. “Emergency management is about how to respond: How do you help the people who are in harm’s way? And floodplain management is about keeping people out of harm’s way,” said Courtney. He cautions that designers need to take the time to incorporate more flood protection measures and infrastructures into their plans. “There’s always such a big push after a disaster to build back right away. And part of that is practical: Where do people live in the meantime? But at the same time, there’s this question of what are they returning to, what’s going to be their risk going forward?”
According to the State Flood Plan 2024, almost a quarter of Texas’s land area is in the 100-year floodplain. Approximately one in every six people in Texas lives or works in known flood hazard areas. There are some 878,100 buildings within the 100-year floodplain and another 786,100 buildings within the 500-year floodplain. And there are 9,322 low water crossings within flood hazard areas, which might not sound like a big deal until the bridge to your neighborhood is washed out. NOAA is set to release new rainfall data; this will inform new floodplain maps, which are likely to designate even more area as floodplain.
Those numbers—100 years, 500 years—can be misleading. As Dietert noted, “It’s not about people being stupid. Here’s how it happens: You have riverfront property, and it flooded in 1987, and it hasn’t flooded since, and there’s a drought.” The risk is hard to imagine. “If we call it a 100-year flood,” said Courtney, “people think that must be a really big flood but it only happens once every hundred years.” He prefers a different way of describing the risk: “If there’s a 1 percent chance every year, that means there’s a 26 percent chance of a flood occurring over 30 years. That’s a typical mortgage period. So in the length of time it’s going to take you to pay for this house, there is essentially a one-in-four odds of this size flood occurring. Suddenly it seems more likely.”
Materials and design choices matter, too. “All the trash and building supplies and septic systems that [we are seeing] come washing down are a reminder to the psyche that what we build doesn’t last,” said Dietert. In flood-prone areas of Austin, like Shoal Creek, Courtney counsels business owners to lift their HVAC units above the projected flood line and to consider using materials like cement board wall cladding that can be hosed off in case of flooding. He’s also working on public education efforts, including art installations that keep the flood line in the public consciousness.
Of all the strategies for prevention and mitigation, absorption still tops the list. When heavy rains come, that water is going to go somewhere: downhill, through houses, and into creeks and rivers. Green infrastructure systems, which can be as complex as a constructed wetlands or as simple as leaving downed trees and woody debris in place after a flood to prevent further erosion, give that water a chance to get absorbed before it becomes destructive.
Embracing the Slow Build
Five weeks after the floods, a group of landowners gathered on the tree-shaded patio of the Trailhead Beer Garden to discuss riparian restoration. It was a hot afternoon. Neighbors nodded to each other from under hats, and the mood was calm and even cheerful, a more relaxed counterpoint to the desperate action of the previous month. These people owned summer houses, full-time residences, or ranchland along the river, and they were beginning the long, arduous process of clearing flood debris—downed trees, mattresses, mud-logged cars—from their land.
Daniel Oppenheimer, Land Program director at the Hill Country Alliance (HCA), started out with some advice: “Slow down.” He showed images from the Blanco River flood, which killed 13 people in 2015 and destroyed 400 homes, to illustrate his argument. Photos from after the flood showed scoured banks and uprooted cypress trees. Ten years later, native bunch grasses (“riparian rebar”) had grown back along the shore and leaves were emerging on young cypresses. “Slow down,” Oppenheimer repeated. “Use what you have.” Specifically, he suggested designating an area to clear for access to the river while allowing the plants to come back untouched everywhere else. Leave woody debris in place to shelter new growth. Downriver and upstream, organizations such as the HCA, the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, and the San Antonio Botanical Garden are working to grow and share seeds and plugs for new trees and grasses to be planted along the riverbank, and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is working with Walther and his colleagues to design and build riparian management demonstration sites.
For architects and others asking how to rebuild after this and other disasters, “slow down” might feel counterintuitive. Alternatively, we might think of it as working toward future rebuilding well before a disaster strikes. “Creating positive change is a long-term project,” said Dietert. “Directly after a disaster, we don’t need drawings; we need first responders. And then we need a regional master plan.”
“Slow down,” Oppenheimer said again as the sun began to set over the Guadalupe. “The river needs time to heal, and so do we.”
Jessie Temple is an architect and writer based in Austin, Texas.
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