In the leafy neighborhoods of Dallas, Houston and Austin, from where Camp Mystic in the Texas Hill Country draws many of its campers, parents have attended vigils at local churches and refreshed Facebook pages and news sites looking for updates after the flood.

Group texts have flown with rumors about girls who had been found, and girls still missing. They exchanged phone numbers, stories, and prayers.

And still, as of Saturday afternoon, a day and a half after the Guadalupe River surged over its banks in the predawn darkness of July 4, 27 girls from the Christian camp in Central Texas remained missing.

The wait has been agonizing for Camp Mystic’s unusually tight-knit community of parents and alumni, connected to a retreat where Texas Monthly once said three generations of descendants of Lyndon Johnson had gone, and where Laura Bush served as a counselor. Early reports of the flooding on Friday morning sparked a frantic response, with very little information to go on.

Parents whose daughters were at camp in the session that began last weekend raced toward Kerr County, with only a brief email from the camp: “We have sustained catastrophic level floods,” it read. “If your daughter is not accounted for you have been notified. If you have not been personally contacted then your daughter is accounted for.”

About 750 girls were at the camp this session, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas said at a news conference on Friday.

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