Del Rio opens 1998 flood time capsule at civic center

A time capsule buried after Del Rio’s deadly 1998 flood was opened on the front lawn of the Del Rio Civic Center, 1915 Veterans Blvd., at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024. City officials invited the public to the ceremony, turning the unsealing of a sealed box into a public look back at one of the city’s most painful floods.

The opening began with Michael Diaz, director of the Whitehead Memorial Museum, talking about the flood and the period that followed it. The capsule had been buried a year after the disaster, linking the ceremony directly to a community effort to preserve what Del Rio wanted remembered about that moment and the years that came after.

The 1998 flood remains anchored in the record as part of Tropical Storm Charley’s slow-moving remnant circulation. NOAA’s National Hurricane Center says nine people drowned in Del Rio, in Val Verde County, along San Felipe Creek during the late night of Aug. 23, 1998, and its preliminary report says the flooding rains were most devastating in the Del Rio area on Aug. 23 and 24. A historical account in ArcGIS StoryMaps puts more than $40 million in damages in Val Verde County and says 13 people in Texas and seven in Mexico died over the four-day flood period.

Diaz’s role at the civic-center ceremony fit the Whitehead Memorial Museum’s broader mission. The museum describes itself as a community-centered nonprofit committed to preserving and sharing the early history of Del Rio and Val Verde County, and Diaz has also created an exhibit on the Del Rio Flood of 1998. On a lawn usually associated with city business, the capsule reopening connected that preservation work to the people who lived through the flood and to younger residents who have inherited its memory.