Clinging to a tree, and praying: how a family survived the Texas flash floods

KERR COUNTY, Texas — The flickering lights woke up Taylor Bergmann. But it was the screaming that made him leap out of bed.

“It’s flooding! It’s flooding! It’s flooding!” Bergmann remembers Erin Burgess, 42, shouting early in the morning on July 4.

Burgess had taken Bergmann, a friend of her daughter’s, into her home when he was a teenager. Now 19, Bergmann considers her to be his mother.

Still sleepy, as Burgess was yelling “it’s flooding,” it didn’t occur to Bergmann that she was referring to the Guadalupe River just across the street.

“A flash flood warning is so common for (this area),” he says, referring to a forecast he had seen before going to bed.

But now that the river had broken through the glass doors at the back of the house, Bergmann was standing in the middle of rising water.

“We had a really big kitchen island with granite countertops,” he says. “It flipped upside down.”

The water moved all of the appliances like “Jenga pieces.” The refrigerator blocked the door of the bedroom that Burgess and her boyfriend shared, trapping her inside.

“She just sat there screaming for help but we couldn’t do anything because the water was so high,” he says.

Eventually Bergmann and the boyfriend were able to push the refrigerator out of the way.

Then a decision had to be made. Bergmann thought the best plan was to get everyone in the house to the roof. But he did not think Burgess could make it, and he was not going to leave her behind.

Before he could act, the river’s current carried the three of them and their dog across the backyard, and pushed them into a nearby tree. (The family cat managed to climb onto a floating mattress.)

“That’s where she was bear-hugging the tree,” Bergmann says.

“I was just standing up with my broad shoulders trying to make sure that nothing swept her away because she was as tall as the flood water.”

Despite holding on, the strong current of the Guadalupe River eventually swept Burgess’ boyfriend as well as the family dog away. He believed they were likely dead.

Bergmann and Burgess clung to the tree.

“I thought my mom was going to die in front of me,” Bergmann says.

It was pitch black. Bergmann couldn’t see much.

“We could hear our neighbor and his kids and his mom screaming for help,” he recalls.

Bergmann says he and Burgess prayed. After about an hour, the water receded. It was now daylight. Burgess’ boyfriend and the dog had landed on a roof about four or five houses away, and were safe. All were accounted for, even the cat.

“Nobody realized how many cuts we had on us until the next day,” he says. “We were sore. I realized I had so many microcuts all over my foot.”

Burgess had bruises all over her body. But they had all survived.

“None of this sits right with me,” says Bergmann. “None of this sits right with anybody who lives here at all.”