Most of the focus on the Hill Country flooding has been centered on Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred.
Further north, one of three flooding deaths in Williamson County was a woman named Sherry Richardson, who worked for Hope House, a home for those with profound disabilities.
The main campus of Hope House is located outside of Liberty Hill near Little Creek. On the morning of July 5, floodwaters reached Richardson’s cabin and were making their way quickly to the house that held 13 children ages 5 and up and their caregivers.
Dave Gould, Hope House’s executive director, joined the Standard to share more about Richardson and how his community is doing now.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you tell me how things are with Hope House now that we’re a few days after this horrible flooding event?
Dave Gould: Well, we’ve really been touched by the incredible outpouring of love from our community. On Sunday we had a cleanup event that we expected about 15 to 20 people and over 200 people showed up.
Today we had another volunteer event that expected another 15 or 20 and 125 people showed up. Just the love is amazing, and it really helps buoy our spirits through this time.
Can you take me back to the morning of July 5 at your main campus there in Liberty Hill, your oldest house? What happened early in the morning?
So, I was at home, and I got a call at approximately 3:30 in the morning from Sherry – she was one of our employees who was living on campus in one of our cabins – and she said, “there’s water coming into the cabin.”
And I asked if she’d called 911 and she said, “yes, they’re actually on the other line,” and she clicked over. And I called back 15 minutes later and couldn’t get a response.
We really believe that in a very short period of time, things went from dry to the entire cabin being gone by floodwaters.
Could you tell me a little more about Sherry? She was a longtime volunteer and a staff member?
She was our office manager and was really, you know, kind of our office mom – really brought to the forefront that first off, we’re kind, and was able to indoctrinate that into our culture and make everybody feel at home as soon as they walked in the door.
David Gould, Hope House executive director, looks at the house foundation where Sherry Richardson had lived.
Patricia Lim / KUT News
You had a lot of other positive stories, rescues. Could you tell me about that?
Absolutely. We had 13 children in our main campus with their staff overnight and the water started coming in. We were monitoring that, and by about 7 o’clock in the morning it had gone from an inch to almost a foot and we had decided it was time to call in emergency services.
And at that time, we were able to really work with the fire and search and rescue and police departments to get our guys out of there. And they were just amazing. I had about half of our group airlifted out via Blackhawk and just seeing all the work that went into keeping our kids safe.
» ‘Another 45 minutes would have been too late’: One family’s flood survival story
Your staff is a 24-hour staff, and what that meant is that they weren’t sleeping, I understand. Do you credit their awareness and their thinking to not having more lives lost?
Absolutely. Our staff is amazing. It is our frontline caregivers that really are the most important link in this chain.
And because they were there, they were able to contact us, and we were able put a plan in motion that saved these kids. They’re just amazing. There’s no words for it.
That must have been a scary thing for these kids. Are they doing okay now?
Transition is hard. Our children are – I like to say that they’re really toddlers in big bodies. Their developmental age is somewhere between 18 and 24 months; very limited communication skills, and really need full care 24 hours a day.
And this is just such a disruption, and they don’t have the languaging to express the amount of trauma that they went through during this So they’re warm and they’re safe and well-fed and dry, and we’re continuing to work through the ongoing effects.
Bed frames are tilted up to dry off at Hope House on July 8, 2025.
Patricia Lim / KUT News
What do you need now? Texans all across the state are going to see this.
You’ve got lots of people out there with tools and equipment and assessing the damage. But you have a bigger mission, which is to serve these people who really do need 24-hour care. And you’re trying to do more to give them more private space of their own as well, I understand, and get them out of sort of a shared room situation and into something that is more of their own.
Could you talk about your bigger plan and your message for what Texans can do to support that?
Absolutely. Thank you for asking. Where we’re supported currently is through a combination of state and federal funding, and that covers about 75 to 80% of our costs of caring for these children.
We are dependent on the goodwill of the community to continue and really support the level of care that’s necessary to provide to the least of us.
» MORE: Complete coverage of deadly flooding in the Texas Hill Country
What we’re in the process right now is moving out of our 50-year-old now-flooded building and into two new facilities that are about 80% constructed currently. Our children there will be able to live in those homes for the next six to 10 years, and then at that point they’ll graduate into our adult program. And at that point, they’ll be able to move into a forever home where they’ll be on average 25 to 45 years.
Where this leads us is this is a throughput problem. We continually have a need for additional housing for our children that grow up in our family and then are able to stay in our community if we can continue to support them.
So we’re on a growth plan right now where we’re able to be able to support these children forever. We’re a forever home, and we mean it.
Anything else you want to add?
We have our ongoing needs listed on our website, as well as our social media. We’re 48 hours in and just figuring out at which level of our staff have lost homes that they’ve been flooded, the amount of help that we can pass on to them to make sure they’re able to take care of our angels.
Correction: The text of this story has been updated to reflect the fact that deadly flooding in Williamson County happened early in the morning July 5, 2025.
