FORT WORTH, Texas — The sounds of thunder and rushing water woke up campers and residents as the swollen Guadalupe River ripped cabins, homes and office buildings out of the ground, catching hundreds people off guard.

One of them was Christian Fell of Fort Worth. Water had rushed in his family’s vacation home, and now he was trying to reach the roof to escape the surging river. He would wait hours, unaware of the catastrophic flooding that would kill 107 people.

Weeks after devastating July 4 floods in Central Texas, Fell shared his experience in Hunt, where his family’s home sits 150 yards from the convergence of the South and North forks of the Guadalupe River. The river is notorious for flooding. In 1989, 10 teenagers died after thunderstorms came through the area, raising the river 29 feet.

Fell, 25, was visiting from from his summer job in Houston. He was alone and asleep when the flooding began.

He went to sleep around midnight or 1 a.m., but remembers being woken by the sounds of thunder and going back to sleep. The storm woke him up again around 3 a.m., and when he got out of his inflatable bed, the water was already up to his ankles.

“That’s when I grabbed my phone, and I turned my flashlight on and I called my mom at the same time. I was like, there’s water in the house,” Fell said.

Christian said he and his mother, Andi Fell, thought that water had gotten in through the door because of the storm, so Christian walked around the house trying to find out where the water was coming from. Then he noticed the porch addition had been ripped out.

Phone calls in that area are spotty, even on a good day, they said, and again, Christian had to call back. This time, he tried his dad’s phone. Curtis Fell told his son to get his car keys and try to get to his aunt’s house down the road and farther up the hill.

“We were up a little bit farther from the river but still didn’t have an idea of what was going on, that there was catastrophe unfolding,” Curtis Fell said.

Rapid rise in floodwater

By the time he walked back through the house to get his keys, the water was starting to rise in quickly. When he reached the door, Christian said he couldn’t see anything. It was pitch black outside.

“I didn’t realize that the water level outside the house was actually higher than it was inside,” Fell said. “And so when I opened the door, the door just flung open, and all this water just started rushing in at me.”

When the water hit him in the chest, he tried to close the door, but the force of the water wouldn’t let him. He waded back through the house to the bedroom he had been sleeping in, but the bed was now floating. At the same time, he was on the phone with 911 and was told to try to get on top of the furniture and, if possible, to reach the roof.

“That’s when I noticed that the window was broken. I thought about it, and kind of realized that was like a one-way trip,” Fell said. “I wasn’t able to come back into the house if I went through the window.”

At this point, he said the water was already to his chin. His only choice was to get out of the house through that window.

As he climbed out, he grabbed a metal pole that led to a meter box.

“Then I climbed on top of the meter box, and I tried to get onto the roof from there, but the gutter was literally right over my head when I was standing on top of the meter box,” Fell said “And so I tried to climb onto that, but when I pulled on it, it bent, and then all this water just started rushing over me. And so I just decided to stand on that meter box.”

He stood on the meter box for hours in the dark, listening to the water rushing all around him. Then a transformer blew.

“I get a good view of everything for about a second,” Fell said. “It was just like everything was destroyed. It was so much water. It was hard to believe that there’s that much water there. I never expected to see a flood like that before.”

Propane tanks and cars with their hazards flashing floated by him. He could hear houses getting torn apart.

Finally, a relief as water recedes

He said he stood there like that for about three hours until he saw a police officer with a flashlight walking through the street. Because of his flashlight, he could see that the water had receded enough for him to climb down from the meter box.

Fell asked the officer for his phone to try to call his parents.

“It was about three hours later, I was, frankly, expecting the worst. I wasn’t hearing from him,” Curtis Fell said.

His father said that when he received the call from Christian, it was the biggest relief imaginable.

As the police officer scanned the area with his flashlight, Fell said that he started following the officer, realizing that he hadn’t been alone out there. He could hear the officer calling out to people. As he was walking, he heard someone calling out to him for help.

Initially, Fell said he couldn’t see who was calling for him as he scanned the area around him, but the voice kept calling for him.

It was a child in a tree about 20 to 30 feet up, wearing only his underwear, holding on to a tree.

“I was talking to him, just trying to keep him company, and he told me he came from a house that got washed away farther up the river,” Fell said. “He was with a buddy, and they got separated. And so, I stood there with him for about 30 minutes.”

Fell said that the police officer came back and took him to his aunt’s house. The boy was still up in the tree, but he would soon be rescued.

“Even then, we still didn’t understand,” Curtis Fell said. “Even after we got that phone call that he was safe, and he was going up to his aunt’s place, we still didn’t understand the scope of what had happened.”

Later, Christian reunited with his family at his grandparents’ house, which had become a makeshift camp for neighbors who had to leave their homes.

Fell said that he is glad to be alive, and everything else can be replaced. Emotionally, he said he was doing all right and was glad he was able to help with the cleanup.

Curtis Fell said that when they were finally able to make it into town to survey the damage at the roadhouse (where Christian was staying), the post office was gone, the small office next to it was gone, and half the Hunt Store was gone.

“It was amazing that the roadhouse was still standing, but it’s an old rock building built back in the ‘30s or ‘40s. It was still standing. It was amazing,” Curtis Fell said.

In the days after the flood, Curtis Fell said volunteers and relief organizations arrived to help with the cleanup.

“In general, just the outreach from people in that area, from actually all over Texas, it was just absolutely amazing,” Curtis Fell said. “Just all these private organizations, lots of church groups, the Samaritan’s Purse people, the sheriff’s department, police departments from all over the state, just volunteers. It was incredible.”

Christian said that he is working on getting back to Houston to work and trying to figure out transportation since his truck was totaled in the flood.

Curtis Fell said that he had never prayed so hard in his life for his son.

“I don’t even know what to say. There’s no words, Curtis Fell said. “I have no words for the people that lost, mothers, fathers, children, whole families wiped away.”

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