Jane Towler was up late in a small cabin along the Guadalupe River as thunder boomed through a thrashing rain. It was 4 a.m. and water was pooling on the floor. Suddenly, her phone rang. It was her friend from a nearby cabin.
“Jane, we’re f—ed!” Brian Keeper said frantically. “The water’s in my house! Get out!”
Towler’s grandfather bought the property in Texas Hill Country in the 1930s, and she’s lived through many floods in her 70 years, losing a canoe or chairs here and there. But last Friday was different.
The river would swell 26 feet (nearly 8 meters) in 45 minutes and lay waste to homes and buildings, sweep away cars and trucks, and claim the lives of more than 100 people, including many summer campers.
Towler didn’t know how bad things would get, but the fear in Keeper’s voice kicked her into flight mode.
Pulling shoes onto bare feet, she ran in her pajamas toward the nearby house where her son, Alden Towler, and family friend Shabd Simon-Alexander were sleeping, along with Simon-Alexander’s toddler daughter.
Towler, her son and Simon-Alexander chronicled their harrowing survival in several videos and hundreds of photos shared with The Associated Press.
Realizing the situation was worsening
When her son awoke to Simon-Alexander’s desperate screams, the water was already ankle deep.
“Who do we tell? We have to tell someone,” Simon-Alexander said in one of the videos.
“Everything in our yard has floated away,” Jane Towler said as her video captured the muddy water rising in the kitchen. Simon-Alexander’s daughter was quiet, strapped to her mother’s chest.
“Okay, I want us to be prepared to go up in the attic,” Jane Towler said.
Alden Towler got busy stacking belongings on a bed in another room to keep them dry. But Simon-Alexander pointed out the futility.
“When your mom got here, there was no water on the ground,” she said.
With the water now at his knees and him still in just underwear, Alden Towler shifted priorities and grabbed a bottle of water and peanuts.
“What if we go up hill?” he asked.
“We cant get out! The whole area is flooded! OK, do you want to go see? I don’t want you to get flash flooded away, Alden!” his mother said as she opened the hatch to the attic.
As the fridge toppled over with a splash, their narrowing options crystalized.
“What do we do to be safe? Go on the roof?” asked Jane Towler.
“I guess we go on the roof,” her son replied.
A climb into darkness
Simon-Alexander consoled her daughter. Five days earlier, they celebrated the girl’s first birthday with pancakes, balloons and a canoe ride.
Now, Simon-Alexander stood with her baby, the water up to her thighs. Looking back, she said at that point she was sure they would drown, either where they were or in the attic. But in the video, she calmed her daughter in a gentle voice, telling her, “Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot, baby.”
Then darkness.
“Oh my god!” said Shabdu.
“The electricity went out?” said Jane. “That’s good.” No electrocution.
At 4:16 a.m. and with the furniture floating, Jane Towler called 911 from atop the kitchen counter.
“You have to help us,” Simon-Alexander pleaded into the speaker-phone. “We are going to die.”
The dispatcher, calm and kind, couldn’t promise rescue anytime soon, but urged them to get as far away from the water as they could, and stay alive. They then pulled themselves into the attic.
Through the hatch, they watched water silently rise in the kitchen below. Then they heard the eerie clinking of plates and glasses as it swirled around the cabinets and neared the ceiling.
Glimpsing the destruction
Alden found a vent to the roof, punched it out, and they eventually climbed through. Water licked the roofline. Screams pierced the thunder as people called for each other across the valley. Car horns blared nonstop and vehicles floated past them, lit by lightning. The river smelled of sewage.
Huddled on the roof, Simon-Alexander sang to her daughter. It was a song from Mexico called “La Caña” that she’d sung through pregnancy.
There was a boom, and then a drawn out splintering noise that carried through the cacophony. The house quivered.
Their neighbor’s house, buoyed by the swollen river, appeared to have smashed into the cabin Jane Towler had been staying in and torn it from its foundation. It then slammed into the house they were huddled on and a tree between the two structures before coming to a stop.
Alden thought of loved ones — his ex-girlfriend of eight years, her father — like flipping through final prayers.
Simon-Alexander sang another tune.
They were preparing to spend days on the roof, conserving their water, peanuts and the flashlight’s battery, switching it on only every so often to check the river level.
It had dropped 4 inches (10 centimeters). Then later, a foot (30 centimeters).
Making it to safety
The sun began to rise at around 6:30 a.m., illuminating the transformed world around them. They shouted to cars that were driving on the road up the hill, and were eventually helped off the roof and driven to a church where others were gathering.
“That’s really where the real horror begins,” said Alden Towler, who is certified as a wilderness first responder.
With their medical training — Jane Towler is a retired labor and delivery nurse — they helped two doctors tend to the injured.
Alden Tower helped a 5-year-old boy whose shin was split open to the bone.
“We spent the night in a tree!” he recalls the boy saying.
The boy’s 3-year-old sister was still missing. So was his father, two of his grandparents and his aunt. The aunt arrived hours later, missing fingertips after a house crashed into the tree she was clinging to.
To the Towlers and Simon-Alexander, the scene was a mix of horror and generosity. A man asked Alden Towler if he had his wallet, which he didn’t, and the man handed him $300.
Five days later, Alden Towler’s voice still cracked with emotion when he described in the community the “unstoppable drive to help people.”
