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Owners said a Texas RV park was safe. Then flooding killed 37 people.

Proposing an upgrade in an area known as “Flash Flood Alley,” developers assured city officials that guests would have time to flee.

14 min
An image of an RV beside a fallen tree, and a community of tiny homes, next to some historic newspaper clippings about flooding on the Guadalupe River.
(Chelsea Conrad/The Washington Post; Scott Stephen Ball; Bushra Mehdi; Kerrville Mountain Sun)

INGRAM, Texas — In the fall of 2021, a real estate executive whose company was planning to upgrade an RV park along the Guadalupe River assured officials that guests would have time to flee in the event of a flood.

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People would stay “as close as we can get to the river,” Minh Tran, a partner at HTR Investors, the company that had recently bought the park, told Ingram’s City Council. “I love water,” he said. “A lot of RVers do.”