By: Sebastian Mercado
When a disaster strikes, the names that tend to be remembered are the ones that appear in headlines. The rescuers who reached the most people. The officials who made the calls. The survivors whose stories were dramatic enough to be told repeatedly.
Thomas R. Fox spent months conducting interviews and documenting the flood that struck Kerr County on July 4, 2025, and he found himself most moved by people whose names had not appeared in many headlines at all.
The Kerrville Independent School District bus drivers.
The Call They Answered
When Camp Mystic and other locations in west Kerr County were stranded by the floodwaters and counselors, staff, and campers needed to be evacuated, someone had to drive into the aftermath to bring them out. The KISD bus drivers were asked to help. They answered.
Tom describes the courage required in that moment as immense. These were not first responders in the traditional sense. They were bus drivers who work in a school district, people whose ordinary professional lives involve transporting children to and from school. When the extraordinary arrived and the call went out, they showed up.
He calls the chapter about their contribution the finest example in the entire book of ordinary people in extraordinary moments. Not because it is the most dramatic sequence in a book full of dramatic sequences, but because it illustrates something essential about what communities are made of when everything is going wrong at once. The people who answer the call when the call comes are not always the people anyone predicted would be there.
A Story Told Through Those Who Lived It
The bus driver chapter is one of many in Deluge Before Dawn that draws its power from the voices of people who were present rather than from Tom’s own narration as a witness. He made a deliberate decision early in the writing process to tell this story through the perspectives of those who experienced it firsthand, because he understood that a single narrator, even one who was there, cannot capture how widely and differently an event like this lands across a community.
That approach required difficult conversations. Any interview that came to loss of life was hard. The tears were present in many of those rooms, and in the writing that followed. Tom does not shy away from that in describing the experience of creating the book. This was the most emotional writing project of his career, a career that has produced multiple books on risk management, compliance, and institutional leadership. Nothing previously had demanded of him what this project demanded.
First Responders Carry More Than the Public Sees
Beyond the bus drivers, the book documents the work of first responders throughout the disaster and in the days that followed. Tom’s admiration for them only increased through his research. He wants the public to understand something specific about what first responders carry long after the floodwaters recede: they are among the unknown heroes of this tragedy, and the weight of what they witnessed and participated in does not simply dissolve when the emergency ends.
The conversations he had with first responders for this book changed how he thinks about how communities support the people who run toward disaster rather than away from it. That shift in understanding is one of the things the book passes on to readers, not as an argument or a policy recommendation, but as a human recognition of what those roles actually cost.
The stories of the people who answered the call on July 4, 2025. Deluge Before Dawn by Thomas R. Fox is available now on Amazon.
