Texas summer camps are closing or scaling back operations as new state safety regulations adopted after the 2025 Camp Mystic flood take effect. Orr Family Ministries, which operated Camp Oak Haven on a 12-acre tree-filled campground in Colorado County, has sold its property and will not reopen this summer.
Regulators began imposing stricter emergency-planning, staffing, and infrastructure requirements on the youth camp industry after a flood at Camp Mystic in the Texas Hill Country killed multiple people in 2025. Texas lawmakers and state agencies have since moved to tighten oversight of camps statewide, requiring new emergency communications systems, updated staff training, and site-specific flood safety plans. The Texas Tribune reported that the state later lifted a requirement that camps install fiber-optic internet service — a rule that many small, rural camps said was prohibitively expensive — but the reprieve came too late for operations that had already closed.
Camp Oak Haven had served about 100 children from surrounding low-income and rural communities for nearly 20 years, bouncing between campgrounds before settling on the hilltop site in 2022. Children swam in the pool, worshipped by the fire pit, and learned Bible stories while watching the sunset.
Cynthia Royal, Orr Family Ministries board president, said the ministry sold the land after determining it could not meet the regulatory requirements.
“We are sad. It’s terrible,” Royal told the Texas Tribune. “We had church groups coming, and we had to give back deposits, and I don’t know where those kids will go.”
Royal said the impact is concentrated in communities where parents cannot afford the large commercial camps farther away.
“The dent is in these rural communities where kids or parents don’t have huge incomes to send them to a huge mega camp miles away,” Royal said.
Other camps across the state have similarly announced closures or reduced capacity for the 2026 season rather than invest in compliance with the new rules. Operators say the cost of upgrades — including storm shelters, communication systems, and certified emergency-staffing levels — is simply out of reach for small, faith-based, and community-run programs that have historically operated on thin budgets.
State officials have said the regulations are necessary to prevent the kind of tragedy that occurred at Camp Mystic, where an overnight flash flood swept through the property before counselors could evacuate campers. Investigators later found that Camp Mystic counselors had no emergency training and that the camp failed to report the deaths to state agencies in a timely manner.
Lara Anton, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the agency is working with camps to help them come into compliance but must enforce the rules as written. The Texas Tribune reported that state health officials have declined to provide a specific count of how many camps have closed statewide since the regulations took effect.