I kind of hate the feeling of estimating this since we have no idea what the situation on the ground was like that night. But looking at Google earth the bubble inn is 60 feet from a steep hill. The other close by cabins are closer to the hill. In a straight line the hill climbs 80 feet in 250 feet from the front door of the cabin.
It looks like there is a path of some sort that climbs that hill. Even with pretty generous switchbacking it climbs the hill in 0.2 of a mile.
I don’t know a damn thing about running a summer camp, and almost nothing about the Texas hill country, but it seems that if you’re going to have a camp in a designated floodway of one of the most flash flood prone areas in the world, you’d at least consider “if shit goes sideways, how much time do we need to get these kids up the hill?”
It sure as shit seems to me that the protocol should have been “if we hear the (nonexistent) siren, we need to get these girls to high ground in <X minutes.”
I have no clue what the situation on the ground was like that night. I don't know what time it started raining. I don’t know what the forecast was the day before.
But if flash floods are a risk, if you have children sleeping in a floodway, and there is any rain in the forecast, how is the plan not put in place with escalations planned out. At minimum, the girls have their rain coats and shoes at the ready. Someone or more keeping close watch on the radar / weather alerts / upstream river gauges. Then if x amounts of rain falls or river level increases by x amount, we wake the girls in the lowlands and get them to a central location. If the alarm sounds we have X minutes to get to x height.
There’s a good chance my math is wrong here, but if a flash flood wave is traveling at 9 ft/s, a warning gauge a mile and a half upstream would provide 15 minutes of warning that shit is about to absolutely hit the fan.