Texas Camp Flood Victims Say State Botched Annual Safety Check

Parents of campers who drowned in a Texas flood last summer say state inspectors renewed the camp’s license every year even though it presented no flood evacuation plan.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, blames the deaths of 27 young girls in the early hours of July 4 on botched inspections from the state’s Department of State Health Services going back at least a decade. Rather than confirm the camp had plans to evacuate campers, as required annually by state law, officials accepted “some sort of emergency plan” that failed ...