'Walls of water' hit with little warning in Arkansas

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

Perilous Times and Climate Change

'Walls of water' hit with little warning in Arkansas

Officials search near the edge of the Little Missouri River near Langley, Ark., on Saturday after a flash flood swept through a popular campground.     


By Larry Copeland and William M. Welch, USA TODAY

LANGLEY, Ark. — The death toll in a flash flood at a popular rural campground rose to 20 Monday when authorities discovered another body in the Little Missouri River.

Capt. Mike Fletcher of the Arkansas State Police said the search would continue for several more days.

Seven or more inches of rain after midnight Friday caused the river to rise more than 20 feet in barely four hours, sending walls of water through the Albert Pike Recreation Area, where up to 300 people were staying in tents, campers and cabins. The flood left the campground in ruins.

Fletcher said authorities don't know whether the body found Monday is the final victim.

Mike Quesinberry, an incident commander for the National Forest Service said searchers are concentrating on an area south of the recreation area and that's where they found the body this morning. The search will continue "until we're satisfied there's no one remaining," Quesinberry said.

The search is focusing on huge debris piles left by the flood, including one that is 150 feet long, 15 feet high and 30 feet wide. More than 100 people and 12 dogs were searching Monday.

No other people have been confirmed missing, he said.

"We're assuming there's no one else," Quesinberry said.

Normally, there's time to warn people about approaching weather that could prove dangerous.

Even in rugged, remote rural areas like this hilly section of southwestern Arkansas, law enforcement and forest rangers can get the word out to campers, anglers and hunters. What happened early Friday morning, however, was anything but normal. Seven inches of rain in just a few hours rushed into narrow streams and turned them into raging torrents.

With no flood warning sirens available, the speed and ferocity of the rushing waters overwhelmed efforts to alert campers after the National Weather Service issued a flood-warning bulletin just before 2 a.m., says U.S. Forest Service geologist John Nichols.

"This was such a huge, huge fast-moving event," Nichols says. "I talked to somebody who lived here all their life. They never heard of anything like this."

The deadly wall of water roared through a valley in the Ouachita National Forest, destroying cabins, trailers and tents as vacationing families slept at what until then had been a tranquil fishing canyon. The force of the water flung automobiles like toys and ripped up cement foundations. It uprooted trees, stripped the bark from some and splintered others into kindling.

It was far from the deadliest flash flood in U.S. history. The Big Thompson Canyon flood in Colorado in 1976, for example, killed 144. Another, in Rapid City, S.D., in 1972, killed more than 235.

Friday's disaster here at first was feared to be much worse. Authorities at one point said dozens of people were missing, in addition to the dead, but by the end of the weekend, virtually all of them had been accounted for.

A call for warning sirens

The flooding was triggered by intense rainfall from thunderstorms that began after dark in an area of steep hillsides and cliffs.

The water height in the normally shallow Little Missouri River was only 3.8 feet at 2 a.m. CT Friday, just a few inches above normal, according to U.S. Geological Survey river gauge logs. It surged to almost 10 feet one hour later and peaked at 23.4 feet at 5:30 a.m. It receded almost as quickly and was back to 8 feet by noon.

The river reached the highest level since recordkeeping began there in 1988 and exceeded the previous record by 10 feet, according to USGS.


Nichols says it would have been impossible to warn of the flooding because of the rapid nature of the event, spotty cellular phone service and the lack of warning sirens.

In less severe conditions, "law enforcement officers and Forest Service folks go out in those areas where we know people are congregated and get warnings out," Nichols says. "If we know the event is coming up, we've closed areas of the forest."

Raymond Slade, a Texas-based hydrologist retired from the U.S. Geological Survey and expert in floods in the region, says warning sirens can provide a vital role in cases of rapidly rising water and have been installed along some streams and rivers in Texas and Arkansas.

"I understand there's not one in that area," he says. "I'll bet there will be one in the near future."

Slade says the amount of rainfall that fell could have been as great as 7 inches in an hour, an exceedingly rare event, even rarer than what scientists call a "100-year rainfall" — meaning there is 1% or less chance of it occurring in any year.

"This was much greater than a 100-year rainfall," he says. "That flood that occurred was much bigger than a 100-year flood, where those people were camped."

The remote area is prone to flooding because of the hilly topography that creates a bowl effect, draining rainfall from surrounding areas into small streams, says Bob Oravec, lead forecaster at the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center of the National Weather Service at Camp Springs, Md.

"It's often a product of topography," Oravec says of flash floods. Big rivers spread out extra water while small streams rise quickly, particularly when the riverbeds are steep, as here, he says.

He said radar estimates put the rainfall at 6 to 8 inches. The closest measuring station was 5 miles away, where 7.2 inches fell, according to the National Weather Service in Little Rock.

Such heavy rains generally arrive with intense, slow-moving storms that can dump a lot of water into one relatively small area for a prolonged period.

"It rained very quickly. The rivers rose very quickly," Oravec says. "The middle of the night is a harder time to get the warnings out."

Floods and heavy rains are no stranger to Arkansas and the region, Slade says. A region from the Texas Hill Country' around Austin and reaching to the northeast past Dallas toward Arkansas is often called "flash flood alley," he says.

The reason, he says, is substantial moisture in the air from the Gulf of Mexico that meets colder air descending from the North and rises, cooling further, when it hits higher elevations. The rains can be intense and stall, creating particularly dangerous flooding in steep areas.

"When the duration of rain is short but intense, combined with steep slopes, that's what causes the walls of water," he says.

'Everything's destroyed'

At Pilgrim Rest Landmark Missionary Baptist Church in Lodi near here, relatives of the dead and missing have been given shelter since the flooding.

"They're struggling to try to even grasp what's happened to them," says Graig Cowart, the church's pastor. "We're trying to help them with their grieving, to deal with the mental and emotional shock they're experiencing. They were living at the campsite ... enjoying their families. And then in a few hours, everything's destroyed."

Cowart visited the campsite with about 25 family members: "They received a little solace. To me, it looked like a tornado that just kind of hung around for a while."

Earlier in the weekend, about 100 people had gathered at Cowart's church, where the American Red Cross was providing assistance.

"They're just in shock, running on adrenaline," says spokeswoman Brigette Williams. "There are a couple of mothers. They haven't stopped crying since they got here. One of them lost a child. The other's child was missing."

Working in the steamy heat Sunday, searchers used chain saws and search dogs as they tried to dig through huge driftwood piles, says Tracy Farley, spokeswoman for Ouachita National Forest. By midafternoon, flatbed trucks had begun removing automobiles — battered, twisted and barely recognizable.

Sixteen of the people confirmed killed in the flood have been publicly identified. Five of the 16 victims identified, including three young children, were from a single Louisiana town, Gloster. Three other victims also were from Louisiana, and seven were from Texas. Funerals were scheduled for Tuesday for three victims in Texarkana, Texas.

The only Arkansas victim identified was Leslie Jez, a 23-year-old mother and wife from Foreman whose husband, Adam Jez, was listed among the flood's survivors.

Chad Banks and Lorraine Smith of Texarkana, Ark., told The Sentinel-Record newspaper of Hot Springs, Ark., that they and two others survived by tying themselves to a tree with a small strand of rope and linking arms together.

"You're hanging on for dear life," Smith says. "You know that if you let go of the person next to you, that might be the last time you ever see them or the last time they see you. That, and hearing the stuff in the dark coming at you, was the scariest part."

Marc and Stacy McNeil of Marshall, Texas, survived by pulling their pickup between two trees and standing in the bed in waist-deep water. Marc McNeil says the truck bobbed up and down "like a boat tied to a tree." They were on their first night of camping with a group of seven, staying in tents. At one point, the rising waters tipped the toolbox in the back of the truck.

"We huddled together, and prayed like we'd never prayed before," Stacy McNeil says. They were able to walk to safety once the rain stopped.

Fate may have spared one family. Rebecca Arnold, 57, of Bearden, Ark., says her family wasn't at the cabin they've owned in the private section of the campground only because one of her sons had to work Saturday. "We have been here the previous two weekends," she says.

She says families with cabins in Lowery's Camp Albert Pike, the private section of the campground, came for the "relaxed, calm" nature of the place.

"There was something spiritual there," she says. "It was very serene. It was our paradise. Now, it's hell."

Welch reported from Los Angeles. Contributing: Oren Dorell and Doyle Rice in McLean, Va.; the Associated Press.