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“Unforeseeable” Is the Wrong Word- What Camp Mystic Teaches Us About Risk June 4, 2026

Posted by Chris Mark in Risk & Risk Management.
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There have been some heated debates online about Camp Mystic. For those who don’t recall, Camp Mystic was a Christian Camp that was flooded in July 2025 and took the lives of 27 people including 25 young campers. In reading some of the comments from people, I am dismayed at the defense of the safety officer. In fact, many people online simply said we “should forget about it and move on”. That is irresponsible. Accountability is key to prevent this from happening again.

More disturbingly is the basic lack of understanding of ‘foreseeability’ and ‘risk’. This brief blog post is intended to explain, in laymen’s’ terms, how risk management applies to Camp Mystic and how this could have been mitigaged.

On July 4, 2025, floodwaters from the Guadalupe River swept through Camp Mystic, an all-girls camp in the Texas Hill Country. Twenty-seven children and counselors died.¹

In the aftermath came a word I’ve heard after nearly every preventable tragedy in thirty-five years of security work: unforeseeable. A local official captured the mood when he told reporters they had “no reason to believe” the flooding would be anything like what happened.¹

I want to take that word apart, because it doesn’t hold up—and understanding why it doesn’t hold up is one of the most useful things an ordinary person can learn. You don’t need an engineering degree. You just need to understand what risk actually is. The mistake at the heart of “unforeseeable” isn’t a Texas mistake or a summer-camp mistake. It’s a thinking mistake, and juries, executives, and well-meaning people make it constantly.

Risk Is Just Two Things

Most of us use “risk” as a fancy word for danger. It’s actually simpler than that. Risk is two things multiplied together: how likely something bad is, and how bad it would be if it happened.²

A paper cut is likely but trivial. A meteor strike would be catastrophic but is almost impossible. Neither keeps us up at night, because in each case one of the two numbers is tiny. The situations that demand real attention are the ones where both are meaningful—things that can plausibly happen and would be devastating. A camp full of sleeping children beside a river known to flood is exactly that.

Here’s the first thing worth understanding clearly: flooding is a natural hazard. Unlike a burglar or a hacker—who studies your defenses and adapts—a river doesn’t scheme. It behaves according to rainfall, terrain, and history. That makes flood risk one of the most predictable risks there is. We have decades of records, known flood maps, and a National Weather Service that issues warnings hours ahead. So the usual excuse offered after a surprise—“no one could have seen it coming”—carries almost no weight when the hazard is a river that has flooded the same valley for a century.

You Already Think Like This

Before we go further: there’s a good chance you’re already an expert at risk and don’t know it.

For years, teaching risk to people with no background in it, I’d tell a room full of parents: mothers are some of the best risk managers alive—they just don’t know they’re doing it. That got puzzled looks, so I’d walk them through it.

When it’s cold out, what do you tell your kids before they go outside? Every time, the same answer: put on a jacket. Why? “Because I don’t want them to get sick.” So I’d push a little—they can’t get sick unless they’re cold? “No,” they’d say, “but there’s a greater chance if they’re cold.”

That, right there, is risk management boiled all the way down. She spotted a hazard (cold), judged that it raised the likelihood of a bad outcome (illness), weighed the consequence, and put a control in place ahead of time (the jacket). She didn’t wait to see exactly how cold it would get, or whether this particular child would actually fall ill. She acted on the category of risk, in advance, with a standing rule.

Hold onto that, because it’s the same move that should have protected the children at Camp Mystic—and the same move whose absence is the whole story.

“Foreseeable” Doesn’t Mean “Predicted to the Inch”

This is the most important idea in this piece: foreseeability is about the kind of event, not its exact size.

When people call the Camp Mystic flood “unforeseeable,” they’re quietly swapping two very different claims:

1.  “We didn’t know a flood could happen here.”  This is false. The camp sits in a region locals literally call “flash flood alley.” The river had flooded before—including a deadly 1987 flood on the same stretch of water that killed teenagers being evacuated by bus.³ The hazard wasn’t just known; it was famous.

2.  “We didn’t expect a flood this severe.”  This may well be true—and it doesn’t matter. The exact height of the water is never known in advance. But you don’t need to predict the precise crest to know what to do.

Think of a smoke alarm. When it goes off at 3 a.m., you don’t lie in bed calculating how large the fire is or whether it’ll reach your bedroom. You get everyone out. The alarm tells you a category of danger exists; your response—leave the building—is the same whether the fire turns out to be small or total. Flood warnings work identically. Once “dangerous flooding is possible here” is established, the correct action—move people to higher ground—doesn’t change based on the forecasted number of feet. The warning triggers the action. The water’s eventual height does not.

That’s why “we didn’t expect it to be that bad” isn’t a defense. It’s an admission. It means someone decided in advance how bad a flood would have to be before they’d act—and then bet children’s lives that the real flood would stay under that line. It didn’t.

The “It’s Never Happened Before” Trap

A second common defense is some version of “we’ve been here for decades and never seen anything like it.” This sounds reasonable. It’s actually one of the most dangerous errors in all of risk thinking, and it has a name: the base-rate fallacy—treating “rare” as if it meant “won’t happen.”

Rare and impossible are not the same thing. A once-in-a-century flood doesn’t politely wait a hundred years between visits; “once a century” just describes its odds in any given year. It can arrive next Tuesday. And how often something has happened in the past is a separate question from whether you should be ready for it.

A rare-but-catastrophic event is precisely the kind you must plan for in advance, because—unlike a common nuisance you can learn from over time—it gives you no second chance. You don’t get to practice surviving the flood that kills the children. You get it right the first time or you don’t.

Responsible planning aims at the credible worst case, not the typical case. This isn’t paranoia; it’s the ordinary standard we apply everywhere lives are at stake. Hospitals keep backup generators that sit unused for years. Planes carry life vests for water landings that almost never happen. We don’t call those measures wasteful when the emergency finally comes. We call them prudent.

What the Record Actually Shows

The strongest answer to “unforeseeable” isn’t an argument at all. It’s the timeline.

Two days before the flood, on July 2, a state inspector reviewed Camp Mystic and confirmed it had a written disaster plan—including instructions for evacuating campers and emergency duties for each staff member. The camp’s director signed that report.⁴ Then the warnings came in stages: a National Weather Service flood watch on July 3, a flash flood warning in the early hours of July 4. According to the state’s own investigation, the director was receiving alerts on his phone overnight and grew concerned about the rising river before 2 a.m.—yet no evacuation of the children was ordered.⁵

Here’s the fact that collapses the defense entirely: you cannot claim you never imagined a danger that you had formally written a plan to survive. A disaster plan for floods is, by definition, an admission that floods were foreseeable. The failure wasn’t a failure of knowledge. It was a failure to act on knowledge already in hand. A Texas legislative investigation reached the same conclusion, finding the deaths preventable and the failures beginning “long before” the river ever crested.⁵

Why This Matters

There’s a fair objection here: after any disaster, the warning signs look obvious. Psychologists call it hindsight bias—the “I knew it all along” effect.⁶ It’s a real danger, and it’s why we shouldn’t blame people for missing subtle, ambiguous signals that only became clear afterward.

But that’s not what happened here. The signals weren’t subtle. There was a written plan naming the exact danger, official government warnings issued in advance, and a director awake and alarmed at the river’s rise. None of it is reconstructed after the fact. Hindsight bias protects people who faced a genuine fog. It doesn’t excuse those handed a clear warning and a ready-made plan who didn’t use them.

I learned long ago, working maritime security, why this distinction matters so much. A ship’s captain once told me, “Every safety measure we have is written in blood.” Every rule in his manual existed because someone had already died learning the lesson. That’s what accountability is for—not to punish the grieving, but to make sure the lesson gets written down once, so the next set of children doesn’t have to pay for it again.

“Unforeseeable” is the wrong word for what happened at Camp Mystic. The honest words are harder: the danger was known, the warnings arrived, the plan existed—and the gap was between knowing and acting. That gap is not an accident of nature. It is a decision. And decisions, unlike floods, are something we are responsible for.

References

1. ABC News. (2025, July 7). At least 27 dead at Camp Mystic as officials say they were caught off guard by the storm. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com

2. Kaplan, S., & Garrick, B. J. (1981). On the quantitative definition of risk. Risk Analysis, 1(1), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1981.tb01350.x

3. The Texas Tribune. (2025, August 14). After a 1987 flood killed teenagers on the Guadalupe River, Texas officials took little action. Retrieved from https://www.texastribune.org

4. Associated Press. (2025, July 9). Texas inspectors approved Camp Mystic’s disaster plan two days before deadly flood, records show. Retrieved from https://apnews.com

5. Associated Press. (2026, April 28). A timeline of key events in the deadly flooding at Camp Mystic in Texas. Retrieved from https://apnews.com

6. Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 288–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.1.3.288