Months after shifting to Kerrville, Texas, John Melendrez stood in a neighborhood deli with a sandwich he simply realized he couldn’t pay for. His solely bank card was declined, and as he apologized to the proprietor, Chong Chin, embarrassment washed over him.
The two males had by no means met. But as Melendrez turned to depart empty-handed, Chin regarded up from behind the counter, smiled, and waved him again. “Don’t worry about it,” Melendrez remembers Chin saying. “We need you to eat.”
It was a small act of grace, however one which lingered lengthy after the meal.
Six years later, their roles have reversed.
After sweeping floodwater swallowed Greengrocers – Chin’s connoisseur grocery story – Melendrez is now helping his neighbor, chopping drywall and gathering volunteers to haul trash luggage full of mud-caked particles, ruined furnishings and waterlogged recollections.
For the second yr in a row, this quiet Hill Country city is digging itself out of a disaster that has mercilessly taken a group making an attempt to heal and set them again on the trail of mourning.
About a year’s worth of rain fell in elements of southern Texas final week and authorities mentioned “a large and deadly flood wave” moved down the Guadalupe River, earlier than it crested at practically 38 ft in Center Point Thursday morning. A river gauge downstream from there in Comfort rose 25 ft in a single hour.
A yr in the past, historic flooding in Hill Country killed more than 130 people, together with 25 young girls attending summer camp and two camp counselors. Their deaths shattered households throughout Texas and far past.
This yr, two individuals have been killed. The heartbreak was simply as devastating.
Jennie Steward was away visiting household when the flood struck. For a number of agonizing hours, first responders desperately looked for her husband, John Mark Steward. Their house had been ripped from its basis and swept into floodwaters with him nonetheless inside.
“Wherever you are, my love, I am going to search high and low for you,” she wrote on Facebook, pleading for anybody who might need seen her husband, recognized affectionately as Mark to just about everybody in Kerrville. “My best friend, my confidant. I love you like crazy.”
But hours later, she confirmed he had been discovered useless. Their third marriage ceremony anniversary was simply at some point earlier.
“Mark was such a loving soul to everyone around him. He made you feel seen and loved, no matter who you were,” Steward instructed NCS. “He completed me and I completed him.”
Mark, a stepfather to her kids, had lately embraced a brand new title: grandfather.
“Our Ellie had his heart wrapped around her finger, literally and figuratively,” she instructed NCS. “She was his whole world. We got to spend Father’s Day together this year and it was the most beautiful day.”
Now Steward is grieving not solely the lack of her husband, but additionally the lack of the house they constructed collectively. Friends, neighbors and her church have rallied round her, raising money and helping her navigate the unimaginable. Their help, she says, is the one regular factor left to carry onto.
“Our garden, our memories, everything material is gone but we have our friends, our church and our community,” she mentioned. “I could not be in a better place for this to have happened.”
Across Hill Country, the floodwaters carved completely different paths of destruction.
In Uvalde — the place the scars of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting stay inconceivable to disregard — one individual was killed and dozens of houses have been destroyed, compounding years of the community’s collective grief.
Elsewhere, the water destroyed homes that had solely lately been rebuilt after final yr’s catastrophe. Homes that had survived 2025 have been swept away this time. Businesses that had by no means flooded earlier than have been all of a sudden underwater.
“In the beginning, it was just devastating,” Chin, the Greengrocers proprietor, instructed NCS, standing inside his wrecked retailer as neighbors shoveled mud and hauled particles beside him. “Right now, I’m kind of relieved because I got so many members of the community coming to help us.”
His pals say accepting assist didn’t come simply.
When Melendrez discovered Chin after the flood, he was alone, kneeling on soaked carpet and chopping it into strips. Chin regarded up and noticed him, he smiled — the identical quiet smile that greeted a stranger who couldn’t afford lunch — and opened the door.
Without flood insurance coverage, Chin had already satisfied himself he might by some means clear all the pieces up and reopen inside days. He fearful others wanted the assistance greater than he did and ready to shoulder the burden alone.
But in true Texas vogue, his group had different plans. Melendrez unfold the phrase. He launched a GoFundMe for Chin and his spouse, Kim, and referred to as pals. Within hours, over 30 individuals confirmed as much as assist, armed with gloves, shovels and wheelbarrows.
Stories about Chin traveled by way of Kerrville as rapidly because the floodwaters. Neighbors described a person who is at all times smiling and by no means hesitates to assist – even now, when he’s misplaced all the pieces.
“He’s handing out casseroles and cookies to the kids that are coming in, and he’s still just trying to serve the community, even though his business has been devastated,” Brandie Melendrez, John Melendrez’ spouse, instructed NCS.
When praised, Chin smiles shyly, shaking his head. He’s simply making an attempt to be individual, he says. He and his spouse are nonetheless staying of their house on the property, which suffered even worse injury than the shop. Friends found that they had spent days sleeping on mud-caked mattresses.
Neighbors fear in regards to the mildew creeping by way of his house and the dangers of staying there. Chin, who immigrated from Malaysia to the US in 1981 and has been in Texas for over three many years, is overwhelmed.
“I’m really not sure about anything,” he admits, flustered. “I’m really depending on all the people around me to help to guide me through all these things because this is my first devastation.”
His pals are helping him by way of the paperwork, the cleanup, the forms, and maybe hardest of all, studying to simply accept the identical generosity he has spent years making a gift of.
“No words,” he says, clutching at his coronary heart, “can describe the feeling that I have with all the help that I am being given.”
Christie Burgess is nonetheless in shock.
A week after shedding her house in Hunt, Texas, and practically shedding her life, she says the expertise stays a blur, her recollections returning solely in scattered fragments.
Driving house from work, Burgess was caught by the floodwaters. Her car was swept away, and for practically 10 terrifying hours, by way of darkness and pounding rain, she fought to outlive and discover her manner house.
“Until the sun came up, I just moved from spot to spot, trying to get out of the way,” she instructed NCS. “It’s pitch black outside, and it is raining so hard. The water’s up to the doors at one point. The road was washing out from underneath me, it just comes back to me in snippets. I really don’t remember how I got out of that situation. ”
When daylight lastly got here, she reached what was left of her home.
“I get to my home and it’s almost on its side and everything is just everywhere,” she mentioned.
After final yr’s catastrophic flood destroyed her sister’s house, Burgess returned to Hunt to assist her rebuild from the bottom up.
“It’s such a flip of the coin,” Burgess mentioned. “Last year I was the one that was like, ‘hey, everything’s gonna be okay, we’re gonna get rid of the debris, we’re going to tear your house apart, rebuild it.’”
“Now it’s the exact opposite,” she mentioned.
Like so many flood survivors, Burgess has been carried by the individuals round her. Her sister started a fundraiser. The bar the place she works has rallied behind her. Across the Hill Country, that very same intuition has turn into its personal form of lifeline.
Every day, Cord Shiflet drives 200 miles spherical journey from Austin, helping survivors inform their tales, connecting them with assets and elevating greater than $50,000 for affected households through Facebook. He sits with individuals for hours, listening as they attempt to make sense of lives upended in a single day and making an attempt to revive their hope.
“Growing up, if we learned of someone needing help, my dad was always the first to open his checkbook and my mom was the first to roll up her sleeves,” Shiflet instructed NCS. “No one ever told us we had to help people but as 7th generation Texans I think it’s simply in our DNA.”
“If I can use my voice to bring people together and remind someone they’re not facing their hardest day alone, then that’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Others, like Shim’s Be Blessed Catering & Food Trailer, have proven up with meals, making a gift of over 1,000 sandwiches to flood survivors.
For many volunteer rescue staff, together with Ryan Logue, a United Cajun Navy volunteer, the work has been ongoing for over a yr, and regardless of the exhaustion and emotional trauma, they don’t need to gradual their efforts down.
He has little question that his hometown will be capable to rebuild again, however therapeutic will likely be completely different. The floods drew consideration to nonetheless unhealed wounds — and lingering regrets.
When Logue cleans the river, he nonetheless thinks about Cecilia “Cile” Steward, a younger woman who was swept away in final yr’s flood. Steward’s physique hasn’t been recovered but.
A yr later, he nonetheless seems to be for her within the river.
“It’s a weird guilt that I live with,” he says, choking up. “I feel like I just didn’t do enough for that family.”
‘Sticks and stones’
In the intense, deceptively quiet days after the floodwaters receded, 77-year-old L.A. Cude sits exterior together with his canine, Shadow, and finds peaceable acceptance in his actuality. Around him, all the pieces he spent the previous yr rebuilding has been destroyed again.
For the second straight yr, his house in Center Point has been claimed by the Guadalupe River. Yet by some means, even amid one other catastrophe, he is nonetheless the one making everybody else chortle.
“Can you guess what L.A. stands for?” he says, guffawing. “It stands for ‘lazy ass.’”
Life has not often returned his kindness with the identical generosity. A yr after shedding his spouse — the love of his life for practically six many years — the historic flood of 2025 took his house, too. While rebuilding, he lived in an RV donated by a stranger, piecing his life again along with assist from Habitat for Humanity and FEMA.
Three weeks in the past, that journey lastly appeared over. His rebuilt home was completed. Then the rains returned, and the house was destroyed again, worse than earlier than. Even the RV that after sheltered him is flooded.
For many individuals, it will be the form of loss that crushes no matter hope remained.
Not Cude.
“Nothing else matters except me and my companion dog,” he instructed NCS, whereas Shadow sat faithfully behind him. “Me and the dog are fine. Sticks and stones break your bones, but the high water in the head is the only thing you really got to fight with,” he provides, alluding to the psychological well being struggles that comes with shedding all the pieces.
He is aware of that battle is solely starting for many individuals in Kerr County. The second flood has left behind greater than wrecked houses, reopening trauma wounds for a lot of survivors.
Cude doesn’t fake in any other case. He jokes by way of the dialog, laughing and teasing usually, at the same time as he confesses he is working exhausting to maintain the tears from breaking by way of.
Speaking about his spouse is the one time he permits himself to cry.
“Linda,” he begins, earlier than stopping to say it’s getting tougher within the dialog to withstand tears. “I was glad that she was not here to see the devastation, because I know that it would have broken her heart.”
His spouse was an clever lady, and they couldn’t have been extra completely different. Somehow, these variations turned the muse of a wedding that lasted 60 years. The secret, he says, was by no means going to mattress indignant, by no means making an attempt to alter one another and trusting one another to make the correct determination throughout powerful occasions. “We were so opposite it shouldn’t have stuck, but it did.”
He by no means imagined she would die earlier than him. Years in the past, he constructed a coffin for himself, anticipating that at some point he could be the primary to go. Instead, he buried Linda in it.
Now, contained in the flooded shell of his empty house, sits one other coffin, the one he later constructed for himself.
Last yr, practically 20 inches of floodwater swallowed his house. This yr, it was 30.
“I sat on the road outside of the house and watched the water, and after the water reached its peak, I sat there,” Cude mentioned.
“For about five minutes I felt sorry for myself, and I looked at the dog that was behind me in the car, which is normal for her being my Shadow, and just said ‘it’s sticks and stones, and nothing else matters,’” he mentioned.
But Cude is solely getting older, and he has different issues in life to fret about in addition to determining the best way to rebuild his house again.
“I’m not looking forward to, and it’s the wrong word, wasting another year. That may sound terrible,” he admitted.
Then, nearly as if reminding himself the best way to hold shifting, he provides: “I’ll put my boots on in the morning, pull them up by the bootstraps, and I’ll get through the day.”
Born and raised in Houston, Cude spent 4 many years in Tennessee working as a roofing contractor. Every yr, by way of his church, he donated a few of his earnings and his time to individuals whose lives had fallen aside, helping rebuild houses with out anticipating something in return.
“I’ve been on that end of the stick and didn’t understand what ‘thank you’ meant until last year,” he mentioned. “People would walk up to me and say thank you, and I would accept it, but I didn’t really understand what they were going through to say ‘thank you.’”
“I understand it now.”