Flood Damage

Jo and I originally intended to head home from South Texas last Wednesday, but after having a look at the severe weather and heavy rain forecast for East Texas and most of Arkansas, we decided to postpone our departure until Thursday. That proved to be a wise choice. Central Arkansas was hit by a series of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. Up here in the Ozarks, extremely heavy rain just about shut Searcy County down for a day. Several buildings in Marshall (the county seat) flooded. These included the high school and grocery store. Both of these structures are on relatively level ground and neither is in a particularly low area. The flooding occurred because such a large amount of rain fell so quickly onto already saturated ground it simply couldn't drain away fast enough.

Ironically, Marshall also lost its supply of drinking water when the inlet pipes to the water treatment plant were washed away. Down the road a ways, the waste water treatment plant in Leslie suffered the same fate to its outlet piping.

Out closer to home, one end of this concrete bridge over Bear Creek was undermined and collapsed. The bridge is on a county road just off the state highway.



So much debris in the flooding creek piled up against the bridge that it became a dam, forcing the flood waters to go around the bridge and washing away the approaches. On the near end where the bridge section collapsed, the water eroded away about fifty feet of creek bank.

This shot shows the upstream side of the bridge -- not that you can actually see the bridge through all the debris.

It's now a mighty long jump from bank to bridge.

While not as dramatic looking, this mud slide in the same general area had the state highway completely blocked for most of a day. Had we been trying to get home, we could not have gotten past this obstruction. I would have been very hesitant to try using back roads to detour around it.

(This mudslide has been a recurring problem ever since the landowner bulldozed the trees off a steep hillside above the highway. I wonder how many thousands of dollars Arkansas taxpayers have paid to have the highway department keep cleaning up the mess created by one man who wanted a couple of more acres of pasture for his cows?)

We faired much better up on the ridge above Bear Creek Valley. There was no damage to our house or Jo's studio. Water seeped into my basement shop, but it always does whenever we get a heavy rain on saturated ground. The road into our place has some very rough sections again, but the recently cleaned out water cutouts worked well enough to keep any really deep ruts from being cut into the roadway.

Flood Damage

Soggy But Okay

The little creek out back isn't back to normal, but quite a bit less water is moving through than this time yesterday. Actually, the water level fluctuated considerably during the day, depending upon how hard it was raining at the time. That little wet-weather creek drains a relatively small area so there isn't any danger of a wall of water roaring down the hillside. However, the area it drains is steep, so it responds quickly to changes in rainfall amounts. (I reckon all the leaves I complained about in an earlier post have gotten flushed out of the creek bed.)

Since this rainfall event began Monday evening, we've received a total of 10.4" (26 cm) of rain. More rain is in the forecast for today, but sunshine is promised for Thursday. The cold front that triggered all this rainfall has finally move through. Yesterday it was 58º (14ºC) and today it's only 38º (3ºC). Despite all the rain we received, the storms that brought the rain were relatively mild. There was little severe weather and only a couple of tornado warning in the state Monday evening.

Jo and I live up in the hills near the top of a ridge so there really isn't much chance of flooding. It's the towns down in the valleys -- often built along streams and rivers -- where rising water can be a problem. The only problem up here is flash flooding if you're out and trying to drive around. There are few bridges on the county roads and almost all creeks and streams are forded via low-water crossings. People anxious to get home (or someplace) forget you cannot drive through high, rushing water. It doesn't matter how many drive wheels you have. And, it's very difficult to judge exactly how high the water is until you drive off into it.

I hope all the folks to our north and east who received this weather system after it passed through our area are fairing as well as Jo and I. Right now, I just want the rain to stop so I can get outside and walk. I especially want to check out our road out. Hopefully, we won't need to have bulldozer work done before we can leave again.

(Note: Our telephone service survived all of Wednesday's rainfall, but our ISP drowned sometime during the day. They didn't get their servers bailed out until this morning.)

Soggy But Okay

Rain and More Rain

Surprise! Surprise! I was able to sneak online. With any luck, I'll even be able to get a blog post made.

Thunderstorms moved into our area Monday evening. Abundant lightning forced us to shut down and unplug the computer. By midnight two or three squall lines had passed through and all was quiet. However, the rain drowned out our telephone again. The telephone outages are effecting several of our neighbors too. Obviously, there's a problem with something getting wet that should stay dry, and it isn't being permanently repaired. (Grumble, grumble at the telephone company.) The phone started working again mid-morning.

Overnight we received a total of 1.8" or rain. Jo was able to take the dogs on their regular morning walk during a lull between storms. Mid-morning brought another thundershower. There wasn't much lightning or strong winds, but it really rained. We picked up another 2.25" before noon. These photos were taken during that downpour.

The photo above shows the little winter creek at the back of our yard.

Where the creek comes under the fence is normally about a foot wide.

The front yard normally doesn't have a creek running through it. I hope it doesn't wash away my firewood.

After another lull it is raining heavily again. I hear thunder moving in too and need to get off the computer. With any luck I'll get this posted.

Rain and More Rain