Have you ever seen data visualization bring a story to life? That’s exactly what happened when I stumbled upon a stunning animation showing the July 4 flash flood on the upper Guadalupe River. The animation is both mesmerizing and heartbreaking, as it depicts the devastating event that killed 119 people in Kerr County, including 25 girls and two teenage counselors at Camp Mystic.
The animation itself is a masterclass in data visualization. It shows water levels on the upper Guadalupe River from midnight July 4, 2025, to 6 p.m. July 5 (local time). But what makes it truly remarkable is the attention to detail and the sheer amount of work that went into creating it.
The creator, u/willkoeppen, used raw stream gauge data from the USGS, normalized it to the average July water level at each station, and then created a basemap using data from Natural Earth, the National Hydrography Dataset, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER database. The result is an interactive visualization that’s both informative and hauntingly beautiful.
What struck me most about this animation is how it puts the flood into perspective. We often hear about natural disasters in the news, but it’s easy to lose sight of the human impact. This visualization humanizes the tragedy, making it impossible to ignore.
If you’re interested in exploring the interactive version, you can check it out [here](https://www.willkoeppen.com/datavis/guadalupe-floods/).
Data visualization has the power to tell stories in a way that numbers alone cannot. It’s a reminder that, behind every dataset, there are people, places, and stories waiting to be uncovered.
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*Further reading: [Data Visualization: A Handbook for Data Driven Design](https://www.datacamp.com/books/data-visualization-handbook)*