Upstream water: damage work in Cedarville

Eleven miles of Highway 59 separate this town from Van Buren, and about 210 feet of elevation. The creek that floods houses down there starts up here, and it behaves like a completely different waterway at this end of it. Water damage is all this line covers in Cedarville; fire work is not sold anywhere in Crawford County.

A small town in the Webber Valley

Cedarville lies in the Webber Valley of Lee's Creek in the Boston Mountains foothills, about 10 miles north of Van Buren and 5.5 miles east of the Oklahoma border, at the junction of Arkansas Highways 59, 162 and 220. Highway 59 runs 36 miles north from here to Lincoln and 10 miles south to Van Buren. The city covers 8.88 square miles at 860 feet of elevation, on the southern edge of the Ozark National Forest, and is counted as part of the Fort Smith metropolitan area.

Its census area is all land and no water, which is a fair description of how the place looks on an ordinary day and a poor one after four inches of rain. Natural Dam, an unincorporated community named for a natural rock dam on Lee Creek, sits about 6 miles north-northwest on Highway 59.

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.

The same creek, a different problem

Down at Van Buren, Lee Creek floods because it cannot drain into a swollen Arkansas River. Its record crest of 417.5 feet came on December 28, 2015, and it reached 416.90 feet again on June 1, 2019. That is backwater flooding: slow, deep, and largely a function of what the big river is doing.

None of that mechanism applies up here. In the Webber Valley the creek is fed by rain landing on the hills immediately around it, and it rises and falls on the same day as the storm. What damages property at this end is speed and force rather than depth and duration, and the material it carries is gravel, limbs and topsoil rather than river silt.

Thin soil over sandstone

The Boston Mountains here are sandstone-capped plateaus over shale slopes, and the mountain soils on them are thin. Rain does not have far to soak before it hits rock, so it runs. The county's own description of the range notes it has the greatest relief of any formation between the Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains, and relief is another word for how fast water gets moving.

For a property owner that produces a specific set of problems. Water sheets across a yard rather than soaking in and arrives at whichever side of the house sits lowest. Driveway culverts and roadside ditches sized for ordinary rain overtop and send the excess across the lot. A cut-and-fill building site with the hill on one side puts a wall of the house directly in the path of everything the slope collects. These are grading and drainage problems, and the honest fix is usually outdoors with a machine rather than indoors with equipment.

What the building stock is like

Cedarville is the fourth-largest municipality in Crawford County. It had 97 residents in 1880, fell to just 43 by 1950, and reached 1,424 in 2020, having been platted in March 1879, incorporated on July 5, 1881, and reincorporated on August 25, 1998. A town with that population history did most of its building recently, which means a lot of frame construction on slabs and crawl spaces rather than the pre-1920 masonry that dominates downtown Van Buren.

That changes the restoration picture. Modern materials fail rather than soak. Particleboard cabinet bases swell and never recover, laminate flooring delaminates, and wet fiberglass batts under a floor stop working long before they look ruined. What can be saved on a house like this is the framing and the subfloor, which is a good reason to dry aggressively and early rather than wait to see how it looks.

Getting a crew up here

Van Buren is 11 miles south on AR-59 from a 72932 address and Alma about 18 miles by AR-162 to AR-59 north, which are ordinary drives most of the year. During the storm itself they are not, because the same water that got into your house is standing across the low crossings between here and there. Nobody should be promising an arrival time while a creek is up.

Arkansas Valley Electric Cooperative, organized in 1937 by residents of Crawford, Logan and Johnson counties, and Ozarks Electric Cooperative both serve parts of Crawford County. Which one holds the meter is worth knowing in advance, because power has to be dealt with before anyone works in a wet building.

Questions people actually ask

Use the number above and the contractor will take it from there.