Ashlee Willis's donated RV sits thirty feet from Big Sandy Creek, closer to the water than the manufactured home the creek destroyed on July 4, 2025.
When it rains, her stepfather Gregg Gerstner pulls up the security cameras trained on the creek. Willis has described the sound of wind and rain against the RV walls as a continuing source of fear. In mid-June 2026, flooding washed out part of the water crossing that Willis and other Sandy Creek residents use to reach their properties. That was weeks before July storms hit the Hill Country again.
The July 4, 2025 flood sent walls of water down creeks and rivers across the Texas Hill Country, from Sandy Creek in Travis County to the Guadalupe River in Kerr County. Willis's 1,500-square-foot manufactured home on Big Sandy Creek and Juliet and Scott Welden's house on the Upper Guadalupe River were among those destroyed. Thirteen months later, the Weldens are watching their replacement house go up, elevated eight feet, expecting to move in by October. Willis is still in the RV, paying $4,000 a year for construction insurance on a project that hasn't broken ground.
Willis's family has filed applications, attended meetings, co-founded a recovery organization, and spent $15,000 on design, engineering, and land surveys for their planned rebuild. What separates the two recoveries is what each family could reach, and whether the things they reached held together.
What Willis is working with
Her documented personal aid, as of Grist's July 2026 reporting, amounts to $1,000 from a church and $5,000 from Samaritan's Purse. About 3 percent of her losses.
The family carries federal flood insurance, and the policy paid something. Willis believes the insurer still owes roughly $200,000. The dispute is over the amount, not over whether the flood happened or whether the policy covers it. The insurer's name, the sum already paid, and the competing damage estimates haven't been made public, and neither has the stage the dispute has reached. Meanwhile the construction-insurance premium comes due on a house that doesn't exist yet.
Then there's FEMA. Willis told reporters her family hasn't received FEMA disaster assistance. Two days later, a separate report said "the Gerstners" had received some money from FEMA and a county fund, without naming the claimant or the amount. The discrepancy probably comes down to how the property is held. Willis owned her manufactured home but isn't on the deed to the land, which belongs to her parents. Grist reported that this arrangement led some organizations to treat her application as a duplicate claim, or to question whether she owned the home at all.
FEMA did come to Sandy Creek. The agency ran a Disaster Outreach Center at Round Mountain Baptist Church for ten days in July 2025, where survivors could apply for aid and sit down with FEMA and Small Business Administration representatives. The trouble came when a multigenerational household tried to fit itself into application categories built around a simpler picture of who lives where and who owns what. Separate structures, separate families, shared land, one deed: that's a common way of living on rural Texas ground, and it isn't what the forms are asking about.
Because the original homes were substantially damaged, Travis County's floodplain rules require replacement structures to be elevated about twelve feet and equipped with a lift — compliance that can add more than $100,000 to construction costs.
The family's plan is two houses joined by a breezeway, designed so Willis can help her parents as they age. Estimated cost: roughly $1 million.
What the Weldens could reach
About seventy miles northwest, the Weldens' recovery drew on a network that organized fast and at scale.
The Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country opened its flood fund while the July 4 water was still rising. By June 2026, the foundation had committed $50 million to housing and reported granting or provisionally awarding $35 million to 17 nonprofits. Its housing program pays for temporary housing for up to twelve months, with rent covered and a $350 monthly utility stipend, so a family isn't spending down its savings on shelter while it waits to rebuild. Repair and reconstruction run through Habitat for Humanity Kerr County and All Hands and Hearts. There are donated materials and down-payment assistance. There's a fund built specifically to cover what insurance, FEMA, savings, and other grants don't — the leftover distance between the money a household has assembled and what a house actually costs.
Holding that sequence together is a case manager: a coordinator who tracks a family's applications across agencies and organizations and hands them to the right partner at the right stage. That work rarely shows up in photographs of finished houses.
An earlier piece in this section described a completed house in Altadena after the Eaton Fire as a record of how many separate things had to line up for one family to get home — insurance, two incomes, loans, donations, donated plans, a builder. The Weldens' recovery, from what's publicly visible, looks similar in shape: federal disaster assistance, churches, foundations, and community organizations each carrying a portion. Juliet Welden has said that churches and private groups often provided the most immediate help. The specific programs, amounts, and timeline of their rebuild haven't been publicly detailed.
Federal aid didn't flow freely in Kerr County either. The Texas Tribune reported that slightly more than a fifth of several thousand FEMA applications there had been approved. But when the first route stalled, there was a second and a third, backed by capital deep enough to close what the denials left open. The result is a house going up on the Upper Guadalupe, eight feet in the air, with an October move-in date.
What reached Willis
Sandy Creek built its own recovery infrastructure, later and with far less money behind it.
Willis's mother Brandy Gerstner co-founded the Travis County Recovery Alliance, which partnered with 17 organizations including Austin Habitat for Humanity, the Central Texas Food Bank, and the American Red Cross. Residents formed the Sandy Creek Alliance, whose meetings drew 120 people and whose communications ran through Signal chats, bilingual materials, and roadside signs. Round Mountain School became the place people gathered. Travis County waived permit fees and sent out a mobile permitting office.
Rebuild Sandy Creek chose Willis from about 17 applicants for its rebuilding program. By July, the organization had struggled to raise the construction funds it had promised. Being selected turned out to be its own kind of waiting: she had been picked for help that hadn't been raised yet. A county donation fund distributed $7.85 million to 264 families across the wider area. Willis's documented share of recovery aid from every source is $6,000, against a million-dollar rebuild.
In Kerr County, a $50 million foundation with case managers could close the distance between a family's scattered resources and a finished structure. In Sandy Creek, the neighbors organized, the organizations showed up, the applications went in. What no one there had was the capital or the coordinating staff to take a disputed insurance claim, an uncertain FEMA status, a rebuilding program without funds, and floodplain rules that add six figures to a build, and turn that into a house.
What the water does next
On July 16, 2026, flash-flood emergencies hit central Kerr County again. Roads and utilities were damaged. Evacuations were ordered. No reporting through mid-August names either family among those directly affected.
Willis's RV sits thirty feet from a creek that has flooded twice in thirteen months. Travis County wants her replacement house twelve feet up, which is the county's own reading of what the water can do on that ground. The Weldens are building eight feet above a river that also re-flooded in July. Both families are rebuilding where the water found them, at heights set by codes based on historical flood data.
The Weldens will likely be in the new house by fall. Willis will likely still be in the RV, paying $4,000 a year to insure a project that exists on paper, watching the creek on cameras when the sky darkens. The $15,000 in design and engineering, the applications, the organization her mother co-founded — all of it points at a house that no one has yet found the money to start.