A devastating Texas flood reopened old wounds. The community’s kindness, and resilience, is helping them heal again

A Devastating Texas Flood Reopened Old Wounds

Activelifezero.com – A devastating Texas flood reopened old wounds for John Melendrez just months after he moved to Kerrville. Standing in a neighborhood deli with a sandwich he couldn’t afford, his credit card was declined. As he apologized to owner Chong Chin, embarrassment washed over him. The two men had never met before that moment.

But as Melendrez turned to leave empty-handed, Chin looked up from behind the counter, smiled, and waved him back. “Don’t worry about it,” Melendrez remembers Chin saying. “We need you to eat.” It was a small act of grace, but one that lingered long after the meal.

Community Resilience After the Waters Rise

Six years later, their roles have reversed. After sweeping floodwater swallowed Greengrocers – Chin’s gourmet grocery store – Melendrez is now helping his neighbor, cutting drywall and gathering volunteers to haul trash bags stuffed with mud-caked debris, ruined furniture and waterlogged memories. For the second year in a row, this quiet Hill Country town is digging itself out of a catastrophe that has mercilessly taken a community trying to heal and set them back on the path of mourning.

About a year’s worth of rain fell in parts of southern Texas last week and authorities said “a large and deadly flood wave” moved down the Guadalupe River, before it crested at nearly 38 feet in Center Point Thursday morning. A river gauge downstream from there in Comfort rose 25 feet in a single hour. A year ago, historic flooding in Hill Country killed more than 130 people, including 25 young girls attending summer camp and two camp counselors.

Their deaths shattered families across Texas and far beyond. This year, two people were killed. The heartbreak was just as devastating.

Jennie Steward was away visiting family when the flood struck. For a few agonizing hours, first responders desperately searched for her husband, John Mark Steward. Their home had been ripped from its foundation and swept into floodwaters with him still inside.

“Wherever you are, my love, I am going to search high and low for you,” she wrote on Facebook, pleading for anyone who might have seen her husband, known affectionately as Mark to nearly everyone in Kerrville. “My best friend, my confidant. I love you like crazy.”

But hours later, she confirmed he had been found dead. Their third wedding anniversary was just one day earlier. “Mark was such a loving soul to everyone around him. He made you feel seen and loved, no matter who you were,” Steward told CNN.

“He completed me and I completed him.” Mark, a stepfather to her children, had recently embraced a new title: grandfather. “Our Ellie had his heart wrapped around her finger, literally and figuratively,” she told CNN. “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 only the loss of her husband, but also the loss of the home they built together. Friends, neighbors and her church have rallied around her, raising money and helping her navigate the unimaginable. Their support, she says, is the one steady thing left to hold onto.

“Our garden, our memories, everything material is gone but we have our friends, our church and our community,” she said. “I could not be in a better place for this to have happened.” Across Hill Country, the floodwaters carved different paths of destruction. In Uvalde — where the scars of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting remain impossible to ignore — one person was killed and dozens of homes were destroyed, compounding years of the community’s collective grief.

Elsewhere, the water destroyed houses that had only recently been rebuilt after last year’s disaster. Homes that had survived 2025 were swept away this time. Businesses that had never flooded before were suddenly underwater.

“In the beginning, it was just devastating,” Chin, the Greengrocers owner, told CNN, standing inside his wrecked store as neighbors shoveled mud and hauled debris beside him. “Right now, I’m kind of relieved because I got so many members of the community coming to help us.” His friends say accepting help did not come easily. When Melendrez found Chin after the flood, he was alone, kneeling on soaked carpet and cutting it into strips.

Chin looked up and saw him, he smiled — the same quiet smile that greeted a stranger who couldn’t afford lunch — and opened the door. Without flood insurance, Chin had already convinced himself he could somehow clean everything up and reopen within days. He worried others needed the help more than he did and prepared to shoulder the burden alone.

But in true Texas fashion, his community had other plans. Melendrez spread the word. He launched a GoFundMe for Chin and his wife, Kim, and called friends.

Within hours, over 30 people showed up to help, armed with gloves, shovels and wheelbarrows. Stories about Chin traveled through Kerrville as quickly as the floodwaters. Neighbors came from all directions, drawn by the call to action. What began as a personal tragedy became a collective healing process, proving once again that a devastating Texas flood reopened not just wounds, but also the bonds that hold communities together through their darkest hours.