Employees said they felt a responsibility to reopen The Boat and provide a sense of normalcy for those reeling from the destruction.

Several Kerrville Independent School District teachers and staff members drove school buses full of hundreds of campers from Camp La Junta and Camp Mystic to reunification sites on July 4.

Before hundreds of first responders and volunteers from around the country came to help, it was the local residents of Texas Hill Country who faced down a deadly wall of water along the Gaudalope River and witnessed terrifying scenes.

With more than 170 still missing, communities must reconcile how to pick up the pieces around a waterway that remains both a wellspring and a looming menace.

Hill Country residents and volunteers on Tuesday continued picking up the pieces that the deadly waterway left behind days earlier.

Kerrville families are cleaning up the damage left behind by the devastating flooding over the holiday weekend.

NBC News' Morgan Chesky, grew up in Kerrville, Texas, where his mother and stepfather now reside. As flood waters rose along the Guadalupe River, his mother Karen and his stepfather Michael, woke up to emergency alerts at 4AM.

The RV park and restaurant owned by Lorena Guillen along the Guadalupe River in Kerrville suffered extensive damage from devastating floods, transforming the lively area into a debris-laden disaster zone.