A Competence Deficit

The Camp Mystic disaster is a conspicuous example of how people in leadership positions have apparently forgotten how to think.

In recent years, Dr. McCullough and I have frequently marveled at what appears to be a competence deficit among people who occupy leadership positions. Scarcely a month passes without news of a catastrophe that could have been prevented if those in charge had possessed the competence to assess quickly an unusual or risky situation— or even a clear and present danger—and to take decisive action to avert disaster.

We saw this competence deficit on a grand scale in the medical profession during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the vast majority of doctors showed an astonishing lack of curiosity, imagination, and even open-mindedness when the question arose: Is there anything I can do to help prevent my patients from being hospitalized and possibly dying from this novel illness? Instead, most of the medical profession looked to Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, which was, at best, wrong about everything, and more likely corrupt and nihilistic.

In August 2023 the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui was totally incinerated by a wildfire in which every single institutional leader at the county, state, and federal level demonstrated spectacular incompetence. In what struck me as a national commemoration of this garish parade of stupidity, President Joe Biden flew out to Maui and gave a talk at the local community center in which he remarked that the ground was hot and that he’d once almost lost his cherished ‘67 ‘Vette Stingray in a home fire.

In July 2024, presidential candidate Donald Trump was almost assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania. The stunning lack of the most elementary security measures again demonstrated mind-boggling incompetence. A security guard equipped with a lawn chair, a box of donuts, and pistol could have secured the roof—150 yards from the stage—onto which the gunman crawled with his rifle.

Now comes the news from Texas that Dick Eastland—executive director of Camp Mystic—received an alert on his phone from the National Weather Service at 1:14 a.m. on July 4 about "life-threatening flash flooding.”

At that point, he “began evaluating whether to evacuate the young campers who were sleeping in their cabins without access to electronics,” according to Eastland family spokesperson Jeff Carr. He only began to evacuate 45 minutes later, after the flood was upon them.

This representation strikes me as unfathomably strange and expressive of incompetence of a mind-boggling scale.

Everyone who has spent some time in the Texas Hill Country understands the meaning of the expression “flash flood”—that is, a creek or a river that floods in a flash, leaving humans and animals who are in the flood plain unable to escape.

Dick Eastland had been at Camp Mystic since 1974 and was certainly aware that the camp and other habitations along the Guadalupe River had been been subjected to flash floods in the past that had swept away and drowned people.

In July 1987, ten children at a church camp in Comfort, Texas— about thirty-nine miles downstream from Mystic—were drowned by a flash flood.

Bus swept into Guadalupe River in the July 1987 flash flood.

Dick Eastland was a man in charge of protecting the lives of hundreds of young girls—girls sleeping in cabins on the bank of the Guadalupe River, in the flood plain. At 1:14 a.m. he received a warning from the National Weather Service of a “life threatening flash flood.” At that point, he had to have understood that a clear and present danger was upon the girls at Camp Mystic. The only rational course of action was to evacuate immediately to higher ground, above the flood plain.

To be sure, the girls would get soaked by the rain when they left their cabins to move to higher ground. However, the air temperature that night was warm, so the risk of hypothermia was negligible compared to the risk of drowning in a flash flood.

Confronted with an unusual and unusually dangerous situation, Dick Eastland apparently lacked the elementary competence to think and act quickly to fulfill his duty. One wonders how many men like him occupy positions of grave responsibility in the United States.

Dick Eastland was a skilled angler.