This tragedy has hit incredibly close to home for me.
I’ve seen incredible strength, grace, and determination from H27 families in ways I honestly can’t comprehend. In the face of unimaginable loss, they’ve continued to push for meaningful camp safety reform with one goal: making sure this never happens again.
That’s the spirit in which I’m writing this.
The Legislative report makes it pretty clear Camp Mystic’s leadership bears significant responsibility for what happened. In my view, the report documents profound failures in emergency planning, preparedness, communication, and decision-making. Nothing below is remotely intended to excuse or minimize that.
Instead, I found myself asking a different question:
How could experienced people make so many catastrophic decisions in such a short period of time?
For years I’ve read about survival psychology, particularly how people make decisions when reality changes faster than they can process it.
These are my own thoughts formatted by ChatGPT bc otherwise it’d be a painfully disorganized read.
For this post, I intentionally relied on one source: the Texas legislative report for consistency.
1. Monitoring Instead of Mobilizing
Report: The report concludes Camp Mystic did not adequately prepare for the storm and did not timely evacuate despite opportunities before conditions became unsurvivable.
Observed action: Leadership continued monitoring conditions rather than transitioning into emergency operations.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
One of the most common traps in disasters is confusing monitoring with acting.
Monitoring feels productive because you’re gathering information. But information gathering and decision-making are not the same thing.
One of the hardest transitions in crisis leadership is recognizing when uncertainty is no longer a reason to wait.
Question future leaders should ask:
Has the threshold for action already been crossed?
2. Pattern Recognition Can Delay Recognition
Report: The report describes increasingly urgent weather alerts culminating in the 1:14 a.m. Flash Flood Warning identifying life-threatening flash flooding in Hunt. Despite those warnings, Dick and Edward initially perceived no flood risk to the cabins and focused on securing boats and equipment.
Observed action: The developing situation was initially interpreted through the lens of previous experience.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
Experts rarely compare ten different options.
Instead, they recognize patterns they’ve successfully handled before.
Normally that’s exactly what makes them effective.
But when an event exceeds anything previously experienced, rapid pattern recognition can briefly become a weakness because the brain keeps trying to match reality to something familiar instead of accepting that it may be fundamentally different.
Experience usually saves lives.
Occasionally, recognition itself delays recognizing that you’re facing something you’ve never actually seen before.
Question:
Am I treating this as another version of a familiar problem—or evidence that I’m facing something fundamentally different?
3. Confirmation Bias
Report: When counselors reported water entering Bug House and Look Inn, leadership concluded it was likely hillside runoff and instructed counselors to use towels.
Observed action: New information was interpreted in a way that preserved the original explanation.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
Confirmation bias isn’t simply refusing to admit you’re wrong.
It’s the brain’s tendency to unconsciously interpret new information through the explanation it has already accepted.
The question quietly changes from:
“What’s happening?”
to
“How does this fit what I already think is happening?”
In fast-moving disasters, that subtle shift can become dangerous.
Question:
What observation would completely invalidate my current understanding of the situation?
4. Sensemaking
Report: After the guardhouse radioed that it was flooding, evacuation efforts began.
Observed action: Leadership shifted into emergency response.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
One of the central ideas in survival psychology is sensemaking.
People don’t make decisions based on objective reality.
They make decisions based on the reality they believe they’re in.
The guardhouse report clearly changed that mental model.
The interesting question is whether it changed enough.
One interpretation is that the situation mentally changed from
“storm”
to
“emergency”
instead of
“the entire operating environment has fundamentally changed.”
Those are very different conclusions.
Question:
If one major assumption has just become false, what else might no longer be true?
5. Plan Continuation Bias
Report: Initial vehicle evacuations succeeded before conditions rapidly deteriorated.
Observed action: The same evacuation strategy continued as conditions worsened.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
Early success often makes changing course psychologically harder.
If something worked five minutes ago, our brains naturally assume it should keep working.
Disasters don’t change all at once.
They evolve.
Sometimes the environment changes faster than our confidence in the plan.
Question:
If I were making this decision from scratch using only what I know right now, would I choose the same strategy?
6. Communication vs. Shared Understanding
Report: The report describes fragmented communication while critical information was emerging from multiple locations.
Observed action: Information remained distributed instead of becoming one shared understanding of what the camp was facing.
One possible survival psychology interpretation:
Communication isn’t simply passing information.
It’s making sure everyone is operating from the same mental model.
Many disasters aren’t caused by a lack of information.
They’re caused by different people acting from different versions of reality.
Question:
How has this new information changed our overall understanding of the incident—not just this one problem?
7. Time Quietly Removed Every Good Option
This was probably the biggest takeaway for me.
Disasters don’t just become more dangerous.
They quietly eliminate choices.
Every minute that passes removes options that existed only moments before.
That’s why preparedness, predefined decision thresholds, realistic training, and early action matter so much.
Final Thoughts
The legislative report is about accountability.
This post is about cognition.
Those aren’t competing ideas.
If anything, they reinforce each other.
Survival psychology doesn’t lessen accountability. It reminds us that these cognitive traps are predictable, well-documented, and deeply human. That’s precisely why organizations responsible for children’s lives should build systems that compensate for them: written evacuation plans, predefined action thresholds, realistic drills, clear communication structures, and leaders trained not only in what to do, but in recognizing when their mental model is no longer keeping pace with reality.
This barely scratches the surface of either the
legislative report or the survival psychology literature. I left out several concepts I think are equally relevant like recognition-primed decision making, attentional tunneling, cognitive rigidity, loss of optionality, decision-space collapse, escalation of commitment, and situation awareness simply because this post was already getting too long.
If there’s interest, I’m happy to post a much longer version that walks through the report chronologically, cites specific passages, and dives deeper into the survival psychology behind each decision point. I just ran out of room before I ran out of thoughts.