What a river flood actually leaves behind down here

Being straight about this matters more than filling a page: the Arkansas River does not flood the town of Charleston. It floods the ground between here and Ozark, closes the crossings, and leaves the southern district on its own for a couple of weeks. The cleanup work that follows is real, and it is mostly not in town.

The 2019 version, in order

The river near Ozark crested at 374.99 feet on May 30, 2019, its second-highest reading, and held above the 357-foot flood stage from May 22 until June 13. Thousands of acres of farmland and gas fields went under. In the county's own accounting the building damage was light: sandbagged homes, water beneath some structures rather than inside them, and one flooded business that was pumped out. A verbal local disaster declaration was the extent of it, though Franklin County was still among the seventeen counties in the federal declaration.

What Charleston got was isolation. AR-22 closed west of town near Fort Chaffee, the AR-23 bridge closed in southern Ozark, and the two together cut the county in half. An extra EMS ambulance was stationed here, with others at Cecil and Webb City, because the north side could no longer reach the south. County Judge Rickey Bowman said the county could not get someone from the south side of Ozark to the hospital in Ozark.

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.

Where the flood cleanup actually happens

On the low ground between the town and the river, and on the outbuildings, equipment sheds, pump houses and farm structures that sit on it. On properties in the northern part of the southern district closer to the river than the town is. And on the crossings themselves, which is a public works problem rather than a restoration one but shapes when anybody can get to a property at all.

In town the same rain shows up differently, as sheet flow across flat farmed ground and as washed-out low crossings. One December 2015 rain took out a bridge northwest of here at Jetton and Kiene roads with about $100,000 in damage. That water is just as dirty as river water and just as capable of getting under a building; it simply comes from a different direction and leaves faster.

How the cleanup runs on a flooded structure

Standing water is pumped out, then the mud, and the mud is the part that separates flood work from other water losses. Silt settles into carpet backing, into floor seams, into the bottom of wall cavities and into the base of stored contents, and it has to be shoveled, scraped and washed out rather than dried in place. Dried silt is just dust carrying everything the water was carrying.

Porous materials that absorbed the water leave the building. Carpet and pad, wet fiberglass batts, particleboard cabinet bases and the lower band of paper-faced drywall, cut high enough to reach material that meters dry, since gypsum wicks well above the visible line. Framing, concrete, tile and solid wood stay, get cleaned mechanically and then disinfected, in that order, because disinfectant over mud accomplishes very little.

Then the structure is dried under air movement and dehumidification, with readings on the framing and subfloor rather than on the room air. In an outbuilding or a farm structure the envelope leaks badly, so the building has to be closed up while the equipment runs or the machines are simply dehumidifying the outdoors.

• Pump the water, then remove the silt physically
• Porous material out; framing, concrete and solid wood stay
• Drywall cut above the wick line, verified with a meter
• Clean first, disinfect second
• Buildings closed while drying equipment runs
• Contents lifted and photographed before they are moved

Planning around the crossings

The timing lesson from 2019 is that the roads recover on their own schedule and the buildings do not wait. If a property can be reached, the useful work is extraction, silt removal, cleaning and drying, all of which can proceed while the river is still up. What should wait is reconstruction, because closing a wall back up before the readings are right just books the same job twice.

It is also worth photographing everything early. Nobody is going to reconstruct depths and dates two weeks later from memory, and an ambulance stationed in town is a sign that ordinary services are stretched, not that documentation has become optional.

Questions and answers

The sooner a dehumidifier is running, the shorter the list of things that have to come out.