What the Guadalupe River left behind
By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN
(CNN) — When the Guadalupe River surged through Texas Hill Country last summer, Elida Sierra Lutz and her three children were swept into the deadly flooding like debris in the current.
The family fought for three hours last July Fourth to stay alive after more than a summer’s worth of rain fell overnight on bone-dry soil, pushing the waterway from about 3 feet to 30 feet in just 45 minutes.
It wasn’t long after they were rescued that they realized everything they’d brought camping with them was gone: the black zippered hoodie Elida’s 18-year-old son was rarely seen without, plus his wallet, glasses and cell phone; her daughter’s Nintendo devices, lifejacket and a pair of white Crocs for which the 10-year-old had handpicked charms; even their travel trailer.
About 10 miles away at Heart O’ the Hills, a girl’s summer camp along the river, program director Bailey McEachern returned from a scheduled break between sessions to a similar scene – amid shock the flood had killed the camp’s cherished director and co-owner.
The ferocious waters had swallowed key pieces of the camp’s rich history: cabin signs; 1950s-era sterling-silver necklaces with thunderbird and crossed-arrow pedants worn by each sisterhood’s Firelighter leader; a trophy known as The Cup, awarded at the end of each term.
Also missing were slats of crown molding from Director Jane Ragsdale’s office spelling out on weathered red wood the camp’s Eight Traits, among them courage, trust and faith.
Whisked away. Taken. Gone.
The survivors, of course, were grateful just to be alive, knowing the surging water that rose without much warning had claimed the lives of at least 136 people, including dozens of children at other sleepaway camps, a doting grandmother, a heroic father and a beloved coach.
And, yet, they wondered about their possessions: Where had they landed? Would they turn up? Would they ever be returned? Though it all was replaceable, those items had been pieces of their lives – and now also were symbols, in a way, of their harrowing survival.
As it turned out, an army of strangers with an unlikely leader soon would launch a mission to reunite them – and many, many others – with the things the river stole.
‘I would want my things’
Soon after the flood receded, recovery efforts ramped up. Dondi Voigt Persyn, a mother of three and grandmother of four from Boerne, Texas – on a hill above the Guadalupe River about 35 miles from the disaster zone – joined as a volunteer.
A perfume maker with a background in pathology, Dondi didn’t know it was the start of an enormous project she would come to describe as a calling.
On that first day alone, she found a handful of mixed-metal necklaces, a photograph of a small child, some clothing and a bag full of stuff – all items that once belonged to someone. She quickly realized flood survivors, who’d just experienced such horror, would now have to face the notion of their personal belongings strewn across the Central Texas landscape.
“They’re gonna want their things,” she thought, “like I would want my things.”
But reconnecting all these jettisoned objects with their owners would take more than rummaging and luck, Dondi knew. So, she enlisted the help of the greatest internet sleuth she knew: her best friend, DeAnna.
Soon, the pair were pouring their energy into FOUND on the Guadalupe River, a Facebook group where people could post about items they had lost or found.
Tangled necklaces in the dirt
In the early days, the page teemed with posts sharing objects found, along with heartfelt and, at times, gut-wrenching pleas for missing personal items.
Photos of wallets, textiles, sports equipment, photos, jewelry, signs, flags, quilts, stuffies, toys and camp trunks filled the page as strangers banded together in the comments sections, tagging potential rightful owners or friends with any leads.
Before long, it started to work.
Of all the reunifications, Dondi would always remember her first.
On July 7 around lunchtime, she published to FOUND on the Guadalupe River a post about five necklaces she’d found tangled up in the dirt and debris. She’d taken them home, cleaned them off and arranged them neatly in a clear container.
Within hours, her post yielded this comment: “Oh my goodness those are mine,” wrote Patty Hyatt, a retired schoolteacher.
Patty and her grandson had barely made it to safety before the floodwaters ripped through her trailer, sweeping up everything she owned, including the necklaces.
By dinnertime, Patty knew she’d get them back.
Handing the survivor her jewelry and hearing her story a few days later gave Dondi and her team of volunteers a reassuring nudge to push forward with their work. But it soon became clear an online operation wouldn’t be sufficient for a job this big.
So, Dondi set up shop.
The warehouse of missing things
The warehouse in Ingram, 20 miles from hard-hit Kerr County had a station to clean recovered photographs, a station to clean hard goods, bins to collect items in need of a power wash at the local car wash, bins to collect clothing that was laundromat-bound.
Dondi assembled a small but mighty team and established swim lanes.
DeAnna oversaw the Facebook page, in part ensuring it remained a respectful space. Teri handled higher-value finds and saw that potentially dangerous items – like firearms and knives – got to the local sheriff’s office. A team of women focused on washing and restoring clothing, provided they had enough laundry detergent, vinegar, Dawn dish soap, OxiClean and quarters for the machines.
Meanwhile, Dondi’s son and son-in-law kept combing the flood area for objects, as did her husband, who also transported bins of things back to the warehouse and coached volunteers. One of her daughters, through her nonprofit, helped pay to extend the warehouse lease.
Piece by piece, every recovered item got carefully cleaned, dried and restored to the team’s best ability, then photographed, catalogued and, if small enough, sealed in a Ziploc bag.
Dondi did a little bit of everything. But she was most proud of the safe space she had curated: the warehouse where volunteers restored items and where survivors soon scheduled pickups to collect their belongings.
People who showed up wanted to hang out. They felt OK telling their flood stories. They didn’t want to leave. Some walked away with nothing. Others left with large, plastic storage bins of possessions they thought they’d never see again.
Either way, for a community facing such deep loss, the space felt to Dondi like a warm blanket.
A survivor spots something lost
Weeks after the flood, Elida found herself scrolling through FOUND on the Guadalupe River when she saw something she recognized.
With a million ways to customize Crocs, she knew the white foam clog almost immediately, not for its shape or color but by its two remaining charms: a pink sugar-sprinkled animal cracker and a brown chocolate chip cookie.
This was her 10-year-old’s shoe.
Elida arranged a private pickup of it, plus other items she spotted on the site: her son’s black hoodie and his glasses and her daughter’s lifejacket.
As she rummaged through a tote bag at the warehouse, searching for anything else that belonged to her family, the weight of it all in her hands – and in her mind – consumed her.
“It was so much stuff,” Elida would recall months later. “Even going through one or two totes, it was so much stuff. They had them clean and folded and in these Ziploc bags.”
Even with everything so nicely put away by size, it was still so overwhelming, and Elida felt her chest tighten with every new item that met her eyes.
“I knew that some of those items that I was touching and moving around were items to people that had passed, and they may never come reclaim these things, or their family members may never come reclaim these things.”
Thousands of memories, returned
As anyone who has experienced loss knows, grief isn’t linear.
After the holidays, some survivors skipped out on appointments they’d made to collect their items. Dondi watched her group of matchmakers ebb, with some volunteers going back to their lives. Their warehouse work dispersed to other places, including a barn on Dondi’s Boerne property and nearby storage units the size of a two-car garage.
The Facebook page shifted to a private setting to create a more intimate space. But even as the deadly flood’s one-year mark approached, it boasted nearly 57,000 members, near and far – still working apace – to return many of the 8,000 or so found items.
The group’s mission to reunite people with their treasures and, in some cases, to offer a semblance of closure was also multiplied beyond the Facebook effort.
Volunteers with FOUND on the Guadalupe River and others working outside the group helped Heart O’ the Hills get back so many of its precious artifacts – the sisterhood plaques and cabin signs, the 70-year-old pendants worn by Firelighters, The Cup, pieces of crown molding – in time for its reopening for summer 2026 at a new location some 10 miles north of the original, flood-wrecked site.
“While it seems like such a small thing,” Bailey McEachern, the program director said of the molding, “it was really a powerful thing for a lot of us to just have that recovered.”
Still, the pieces of ceiling trim dedicated to the pillars of courage and trust remained missing, a nod perhaps to the traits most easily lost when disaster strikes – and most needed to rebuild.
Hope for all that’s still missing
As this July Fourth approached, FOUND on the Guadalupe River still had about 1,800 items awaiting reunification, about half of them photographs. Elida still hadn’t found her son’s wallet or phone, her daughter’s Nintendo gaming systems or, somewhat surprisingly, their trailer.
She would have been happy to have any of it back, even if only as keepsakes – simple reminders that hope can emerge from the ordinary.
She also knew strangers in the Facebook group and across Central Texas’ hills and valleys were still searching for flood survivors’ personal things, still finding them, restoring them and working to reunite them with their owners.
And, so, Elida harbored a sense of peace and hope that maybe one day she’d yet find the rest of what the flood stole.
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