“Comfort, Six Months Later: Where We Are”

Town remembers, recovers 6 months after disaster

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part one of the two-part “Comfort, Six Months Later: Where We Are” series, a look at how the city has recovered and resumed life along the Guadalupe River.

COMFORT — To the naked eye, few things in town have changed over the six months since the Guadalupe River stormed out of its banks on July Fourth and ripped through settlements in Kerr, Kendall and Comal counties.

But conversations with residents, leaders and responders paints a different picture: Comfort remembers and Comfort reflects on how the town has bounced back from the disaster that claimed more than 130 lives across the Hill Country and Central Texas.

Comfort Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Charlie Hueber said his organization’s mission and directive took a 180-degree turn within hours of storm waters tearing through the town, inundating otherwise-dry Cypress Creek and overtaking Water Street and Broadway.

The town is not incorporated with the usual government services found in a municipal setting.

“We just weren’t set up for it like we should have been. We were very slow, since we don’t have a set infrastructure” and Comfort lacks a City Council, Police Department or mayor’s office, Hueber said.

“We would come together and sit and talk about things.”

— Charlie Hueber, Comfort Chamber of Commerce “But volunteering, we focused on that immediately.”

Hueber said he fielded a call from the Salvation Army, asking if there was a facility or site available to turn into a supply distribution center.

“We gathered at the (city park) pavilion” for mass distribution of cleaning and cleanup supplies, he said. “But it also became a ‘county headquarters,’ of sorts, launching a center for information for our residents.”

Kendall County Fire Marshal Brady Constantine remains impressed by the response of residents, especially in the Comfort area.

While no Kendall County denizens died in the flood, Comfort residents understood the waters flowing just yards from their homes and businesses caused millions of dollars of damage and washed bodies downstream.

“The community won’t ever be the same,” Constantine said. “None of the victims were from Comfort or Kendall County ... However, the Comfort community was affected, as if they were their own family members.”

While a majority of Constantine’s time was spent working out of the emergency command center set up in Boerne, he remembers closely working with residents, especially in Comfort.

“Every (Comfort) meeting or town hall I’ve gone to, it’s, ‘What else do we need to do as a community?’ and you’ve gotta like that,” he said.

The phrase “every cloud has a silver lining” described the Chamber’s efforts in the months that followed the mid-summer catastrophe, officials said.

“We met weekly, holding community meetings,” Hueber said. “All our local churches, the Boys and Girls Club, Salvation Army, the Chamber, we would come together and sit and talk about things.

“That’s not common,” he said, “but we knew we needed something. We needed something like that, to make sure we were on the same page, sharing vital information. That was a huge help.”

The flooding claimed 117 lives in Kerr County. Three more perished in Williamson County as the San Gabriel River overflowed its banks following the torrential rains. In addition, nine people died in Travis County and five in Burnet County.

According to meteorologists, the holiday disaster was the country’s deadliest inland flooding episode since the 1976 Big Thompson River flood in Colorado, surpassing storm waters from Hurricane Helene in 2024.

NEXT SUNDAY: Comfort’s business community had to overcome the loss of a large portion of summer income, and its residents proceeded to “take care of their own.”