Nirupama Chandrasekhar

@niruchandra.bsky.social

233 Followers 198 Following

UCSB PhD student, studying Okinawan tourism, colonialism, indigeneity, and public memory.

[Screenshot from the article linked below reads]: The notion that fear was an inappropriate response to a flash flood that killed more than 130 people, that to respond by avoiding return to a camp where 27 girls had recently drowned would be to “live locked in bubble wrap,” appeared to be widespread amid former campers, as was the idea that one could “grieve with” the parents while maintaining one’s place on Mystic’s waiting list. “My heart is broken for them,” the father of three girls who had been at Mystic said of the parents of the dead, but also he would be sending his girls back; it was “different for each family.” The sky, proponents of the “no wrongdoings” theory would argue, dropped 100 billion gallons of water on Kerr County that day. That the camp regularly flooded did not strike the camp’s defenders as an argument for the families but for the lack of urgency with which the Eastlands had proceeded; floods were normal events, “fun,” multiple former campers told me, because you got to have breakfast in bed. Only two days prior to the beginning of the disastrous camp session, Mystic had passed with no issues an inspection by Texas’s Department of State Health Services. Many alums said that because the Cypress Lake campus was nominally distinct from the Guadalupe campus, it should be allowed to open. The ten campers who died in 1987 were in the process of evacuating by bus when they were swept away; evacuating carried its own risks.