Interstates, a bayou and a dam: water damage in Alma

Two interstates were deliberately routed to cross here, and that decision shapes the town's water as much as its economy. Acres of pavement and roof shed rain into a small bayou running through the middle of everything. Note before you read on: this line covers water damage in Alma and no fire work at all.

A town built at a crossing

Alma was established around 1872 and incorporated in 1874, and holds 5,825 residents across about 5.9 square miles, 5.73 of it land. Interstates 40 and 49 were built to intersect here, and US Routes 64 and 71 also run through the city, which makes highway commerce central to the local economy in a way that shows up in the building stock. Truck stops, motels, distribution buildings and drive-through retail sit on large slabs with big flat or low-slope roofs, and those two features drive most of the commercial water losses in town.

The city sits in the Arkansas River Valley at the southern edge of the Boston Mountains, with Rudy to the north and Dyer and Mulberry extending east. Van Buren is about 9 miles west on I-40, Mulberry 10 miles east, and Cedarville about 18 miles by AR-162 to AR-59 north. One ZIP, 72921, covers all of it, from the truck-stop slabs at the interchange to the older houses down along the bayou, so the ZIP a caller gives says nothing about which of those two situations they are in.

1. You callOne number per county. The dispatcher takes the address, the ZIP and a short description of what happened.
2. A local crew calls backAn independent restoration contractor already working that county rings you directly and sets a time.
3. They look, then scope itNothing is priced from a phone call. The crew walks the building, takes readings, and writes a scope you can hand to your adjuster.

Little Frog Bayou and the dam above town

Little Frog Bayou runs through Alma and is impounded by an earthen dam that forms the Lake Alma reservoir, with the Joe and Freda Hawkins Memorial Walkway alongside the bayou next to Alma Aquatic Park. It is a modest waterway most of the year and a different thing after a hard rain on the mountain front just north of town.

That is the shape of Alma's flood risk, and it is not the Arkansas River. The river is the county's southern border, and Alma is inland of it. What reaches houses here is water off the slopes above town collecting fast in a small channel, plus everything the pavement contributes on the way. Frog Bayou proper, the larger stream that drains the Boston Mountains north of Van Buren, is impounded well upstream near Mountainburg to form Lake Fort Smith. Little Frog Bayou is its own branch, and it is the one under the bridges in Alma.

What pavement does to a small channel

A parking lot does not absorb anything. Rain that would have soaked into pasture arrives at the nearest low point within minutes instead of over hours, and it arrives all at once. In a town organized around an interstate interchange, a large fraction of the ground within a mile of that interchange is asphalt, concrete or roof.

For a building owner the practical consequences are specific. Storm inlets and the swales around a lot fill faster than they were sized for. Water backs up against a slab and finds the sill, an overhead door track or a gap where a conduit passes through the wall. Low-slope roofs with internal drains pond when a drain plugs, and a flat roof holding several inches of water is carrying a serious load it was not meant to carry for long. Nearly every one of those is preventable with drain maintenance, which is cheaper than any restoration invoice.

Canning, gas and the older side of town

Allen Canning Company, headquartered here, was by 1987 canning more than half of all the spinach canned in the United States, roughly 60 million pounds a year, and that is where the town's identity as the Spinach Capital of the World comes from. Food processing is water-intensive work, and buildings of that kind carry process piping, floor drains and cold storage, all of which fail in ways ordinary commercial buildings do not.

Natural gas fields discovered in the early twentieth century underlie the area from Alma westward into Oklahoma, and gave the town a cheap early energy source. On the utility side, OG&E's Arkansas customer guide uses a sample bill addressed in Alma, and Ozarks Electric Cooperative lists Crawford County in its territory, so which company has to kill power to a wet building is worth establishing before a crew is standing in one.

Houses and how they take water here

Residential Alma is mostly ordinary post-war and later frame construction on slabs and crawl spaces, in a county where 75.5 percent of housing is owner-occupied and the median owner-occupied value is $182,800. Slab houses hide their damage under the flooring rather than in a basement, so the tell is a warm spot, a damp edge of carpet along one wall, or a water bill that climbed without explanation.

Winter is the other reliable source. Four to eight inches of snow fell across Crawford County on February 14 and 15, 2021 with wind chills of 20 to 25 below zero, and another two to four inches followed over the next two days. Pipe in an attic or an exterior wall does not survive that if the heat goes off, and the loss shows up as clean water in volume from somewhere above the ceiling.

Common questions

Photograph what you can, move what is loose, and call the county number.