Texas Republicans have a responsibility to support all Texas Hill Country disaster relief including accepting FEMA financial help

Federal Emergency Management Agency: A functioning FEMA is there after volunteers have done the best they can. Who helps to finance the actual damage recovery❓😕😧

An echo report published in the Houston Chronicle by Leah Binkovitz.

Bryan Wofford walks through what is left of his brother-in-law Mark Mosty’s rental cabin along the Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, on Monday, July 7, 2025.

'Pallbearers in the mud’: Texas Hill Country flood volunteers fill the gap government leaves - but what happens after the volunteers are gone?

By the time Meagan Ruth and a fellow disaster relief volunteer, Paul Middendorf, pulled into Central Texas after devastating floods ripped through towns up and down the Guadalupe River, officials in hard-hit Kerrville were already turning down volunteers.

Instead, the two volunteers pulled into a gas station a few miles away in Comfort.  There, they found a man with eyes so red, it was clear he hadn’t slept since the flood. Ruth told me he must have been in his 70s.

“He said they had just been pulling body after body out of the river down in Center Point,” she remembered.

She reached out to the man and told him, “We’ll take the next shift.”

The pair headed to the small unincorporated community where the volunteer fire department was coordinating newly arrived volunteers.

It wasn’t Middendorf’s first time witnessing such a scene. He is a Houston-based disaster responder and former field director with Houston-based CrowdSource Rescue, a non-profit formed during Hurricane Harvey, which is when I first learned about his work. He has deployed to and led search and rescue efforts across the country, including after the recent fires in Los Angeles and flooding in North Carolina. 

But, he said the work in the Hill Country has been especially tricky.

The devastation from the flood had completely realigned the landscape. The water swept away everything from cabins and RVs to summer camps. Center Point’s bridge was damaged because a dislodged house smashed into it, he told me.

“I’ve never seen it before,” he said of the uprooted tree trunks and large logs that formed a sort of woven wall of debris. “It was almost impossible to get in there unless you had a chainsaw and a bulldozer, which they started getting after day three because the ground was just too soft.”

More rain and flooding made the job that much harder.

“In search, there’s no such thing as ‘I looked there,’” explained Ruth, “because they will tell you, ‘Look again. Look again. Look again.’”

They didn’t just scour the mud. The water had been so high, they searched the tree tops for bodies.

Heavy, sacred work is how Ruth described it. And we, everyday Texans grappling with the impacts of one climate disaster after another, are left to do much of it on our own.

Early on, Ruth was in touch with the mother of a missing child. Part of Ruth’s role after disasters is to help connect survivors with the resources they need, whether it’s a therapist or cases of water.

“I just need you to find [her],” the mother told her.

As she searched the ground, Ruth looked for anything out of place: a backpack, a shoe, a limb. But she thought constantly about the missing girl, a Houston-area elementary school student who attended Camp Mystic. Neither Ruth nor Middendorf found anyone directly but teams around them were regularly finding bodies that were then handled by officials to get them cleaned and identified.

Even with the strict protocols in place limiting who handles the remains, the spiritual load is clear: “It’s like being a pall bearer in the mud,” she said.

By the following Tuesday, the girl was confirmed dead.😢 In Houston, community members lined her school’s fence with flowers and put up ribbons in her honor. Ruth attended the funeral, offering the girl’s grandmother the rosary beads she had prayed with while searching for her.

The Hill Country floods are among the first major disasters under Donald Trump’s radically reshaped, significantly reduced vision of federal disaster relief. It’s a vision Texas Governor Greg Abbott is helping shape. Just a few weeks before the floods, as part of a council tasked with helping overhaul the federal emergency agency, he was critical. FEMA, he said, is “slow and clunky,” while states can act “more nimbly, more swiftly, more effectively” to disasters.

There’s plenty of truth here. FEMA itself encourages states, especially big ones like Texas, to build up their own capacities. And we have. As we learned after Hurricane Beryl, under Nim Kidd, the Texas Division of Emergency Management has poured billions into building up our resources here at home.

But Abbott’s assessment misses something critical, even irreplaceable: volunteers.

Some more libertarian-minded Texans might embrace the seemingly outsized role volunteers play. But, I have deeply mixed feelings about it. It can be a challenge to get people where the need is.

Right after the flood, Leander, for example, had to turn volunteers away. A week later, they were begging for more help to clear debris.

And it is hardly a fair burden to shoulder.

Still, it seems heartbreakingly necessary.

“I used to believe that the government, local, state, or federal, should absolutely be leading in times of disaster,” Allison Zapata, another volunteer who responded from Houston to the Central Texas flooding, told me in an email. “But after working in this recent tragedy, I’m not so sure.”

She was also in Center Point alongside the volunteer fire department, where she said, “what I witnessed was a well oiled, community-led effort that was more organized, compassionate, and effective than any government responses I’ve seen.” The volunteers working are skilled and experienced, some coming with search dogs, drones, heavy equipment and other valuable resources.

This isn’t her first time dealing with recovery. She lost her home in Harvey and FEMA was of little help then. “My rescue came from family, friends, and neighbors,” she shared. “And in every major crisis I’ve been part of, it’s always the regular people who make the biggest difference in those first chaotic days.”

Yet, surely there’s a big caveat here.

What happens months after the flood waters recede?

“Relief and rescue? Let communities lead — if they’re organized,” said Zapata. “Rebuilding? That’s where we need government, especially financially.”

We need a functioning, fully-staffed FEMA. We need a robust state response. And we need the volunteers.

After a long day in the river, Ruth walked into the local Center Point bar to meet a friend. She was still in her muddied clothes.

“The owners embraced me and poured me some whiskey,” she said. They showed her images of the town. The spot where she parks her car? Just days ago that was a playground. Other patrons joined in, sharing their flood experiences.

Eventually the conversation turned too heavy. They sat in silence.

If volunteering isn’t easy work, being inundated with volunteers isn’t easy either. It’s a complicated balance. But it’s one Texans are committed to getting right.