Water damage help across Crawford County

Crawford County is bought on this line for water work only. There is no fire coverage here, so a kitchen or wiring fire in Van Buren, Alma, Cedarville or Mulberry is not a call this number can place. Everything below is about water: where it comes from in this county, what it ruins, and how long it takes to dry out.

One county, two kinds of ground

The Arkansas River forms the county's entire southern border, separating Van Buren from Fort Smith across the water. North of that line the ground climbs into the Boston Mountains, a twenty-to-thirty-five-mile band of sandstone-capped plateaus over shale slopes with the greatest relief of any formation between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The county profile puts it simply: soil of almost every type is represented here, river bottom, creek valley and mountain soil.

That split decides the job. Riverbottom ground around Van Buren, Alma and Mulberry sits low, holds clay eroded from shale, and gives water up slowly. Thin mountain soil over sandstone around Cedarville, Chester, Natural Dam and Mountainburg sheds a hard rain almost immediately and sends it downhill to somebody else. A house in the bottoms takes on water that stays. A house on the slope takes on water that arrives fast and leaves fast, and the damage is in what it carried.

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 flood everything here is measured against

On June 1, 2019 the Arkansas River near Van Buren crested at 40.79 feet. Flood stage is 22 feet, and the old record, set in 1945, was 38.1 feet. The USGS assessed the event as roughly a one-in-200-year flood with peak flow near 570,000 cubic feet per second. National Weather Service storm data describes near catastrophic flooding, with residential subdivisions and businesses under water in both Fort Smith and Van Buren and about 25 homes damaged in the Crawford County area. River traffic halted and the port at Van Buren closed.

It did not arrive all at once, and that matters more than the headline number. Lee Creek near Van Buren went over its 401-foot flood stage on May 23, crested at 416.40 feet on May 28, crested again at 416.90 feet on June 1, then rose a third time to 407.20 feet on June 23. The Arkansas itself came back up to 27.06 feet between June 23 and 27 with extensive lowland flooding. Each rise put water into the same houses. Drying that had already started was undone.

On May 28 an 80-foot-wide, 12-foot-high section of levee slumped in the Yoestown Bottoms against the rising river, with about 250 people in 152 residences behind it. The levee held and no breach occurred. That near miss is part of why a Crawford County flood file usually reads as mud, silt and standing water rather than structural collapse. The county was named a primary county for physical damage and economic injury disaster loans in the federal declaration that followed, and was among the seventeen Arkansas counties eventually declared federal disaster areas.

Older water, and where it went

None of this is new. Floodwater put four to six feet into Van Buren businesses in 1898. The 1927 flood destroyed levees and brought six feet to the same business district. May 1943 flooding wiped out several thousand acres of farmland along the river, with Camp Jesse Turner taking in evacuees. In May 1957 the levee on Howard's Fork gave way under high water and flooded Chester in the north end of the county. In 1999 the river went over stage on June 30 and crested at 24.6 feet on July 1, a small event by local standards and still enough to be logged.

Late December 2015 was the rehearsal for 2019. The Arkansas near Van Buren crested at 34.63 feet on December 30 and pushed backwater into mobile home parks near Lee Creek. The creek itself crested at a record 417.5 feet on December 28, taking Rena Road, the homes along it and the recreational campground there. Backwater is the pattern to understand in this county: the main channel rises, the tributaries and ditches cannot drain into it, and water climbs into ground the river never physically reaches.

The smaller places, drainage by drainage

Frog Bayou is one line of water with two of the county's smaller places strung along it. At the top sits Lake Fort Smith, held by a 190-foot dam finished in 2006 behind about 1,400 surface acres of water that belongs, oddly enough, to a city in the next county. Mountainburg, 72946, is roughly eight miles south of the state park there, 528 residents in the Boston Mountains whose commercial life thinned after the interstate now numbered I-49 was built west of the town rather than through it. Further down the bayou, Rudy, 72952, is a town of 130 about five miles northwest of Van Buren on Highways 282 and 348, a shipping point since the railroad arrived in 1882 and the site of the USGS gauge posted as Frog Bayou at Rudy. That gauge is worth knowing by name if you own a building down there, because when it climbs, the rain that fell on the mountains above Mountainburg is already past Rudy and looking for the Arkansas.

North of Cedarville the road is Arkansas 59 and the water is Lee Creek. Natural Dam, 72948, sits about six miles north-northwest of Cedarville and takes its name from the rock ledge the creek runs over there. Uniontown, 72955, is 4.5 miles west-northwest of Cedarville on Highway 220, near enough to the Oklahoma line to matter and small enough that its 112 residents in 2020 were its first count as a designated place. Both sit upstream of the gauge that read 416.90 feet on June 1, 2019 and a record 417.5 feet in December 2015, and neither of them sees those numbers, because that gauge stands at Van Buren where the Arkansas backs into the creek. Up here the same rain is flash flow off thin soil over sandstone. Cedarville is eleven road miles from Van Buren on Arkansas 59, and both of these places sit another four to six miles past it, which is the part an owner should work out before the water arrives rather than after. Chester, 72934, is further north again, 144 residents on Howard's Fork near I-49, and it holds the county's other levee story: the Howard's Fork levee gave way under high water in May 1957 and flooded the town.

Dyer, 72935, belongs to the other half of the county entirely. Its 772 residents are on US-64 between Alma and Mulberry, with I-40 clipping the northern edge of town, on valley-bottom ground that began as an 1840s stagecoach stop on the East-West Military Road. Down there the streams flow gently through broad bottomlands and carry clay eroded off shale, and that soil gives water up slowly. Put the same six inches into a house at Dyer and a house at Natural Dam and you get two different jobs: one that has to be dried patiently over days with the equipment left running, and one that has to be stripped and washed because of what came through the door with it.

Utilities, and what the callback asks about

Van Buren Municipal Utilities has provided the city's water, sewer and residential sanitation since 1893, run as a division of the city under a City Council-appointed commission. Mulberry operates its own water and sewer utility and has broken ground on a $12.2 million water treatment plant expansion, 68 percent grant-funded, to serve new commercial and residential development. Lake Fort Smith, dammed on Frog Bayou near Mountainburg, lies inside Crawford County but supplies drinking water to Fort Smith in Sebastian County; the 190-foot dam finished in 2006 stands 101 feet taller than the 1930s WPA original and backs up about 1,390 to 1,400 surface acres.

Arkansas Valley Electric Cooperative, organized in 1937 by residents of Crawford, Logan and Johnson counties, keeps a district office in Van Buren and now runs more than 8,100 miles of distribution line. Ozarks Electric Cooperative serves parts of the county from Fayetteville, and OG&E's Arkansas customer guide uses a sample bill addressed in Alma. Any of the three may be the utility that has to clear a line before a crew can safely pump out a wet building.

The first real question on a callback is where the water came from. Supply-side water from a broken line starts clean. Sewer-side water never is, and it is handled differently from the first minute. River and creek water carries whatever the fields, roads and yards upstream were holding. Same wet carpet, three different answers about what can be saved and what has to go to the curb.

Housing stock and what dries slowly

Crawford County held an estimated 25,950 housing units as of July 2025, 75.5 percent owner-occupied, with a median owner-occupied value of $182,800. Van Buren's Main Street Historic District covers eight blocks, about 20 acres, between the former train depot and the river, and most of its commercial buildings went up before 1920 in Victorian, Italianate, Queen Anne and Chicago School styles. Mass masonry and plaster of that age release moisture far more slowly than drywall and are usually worth keeping, so those buildings get meters and patience instead of a demolition hammer. A 1990s house in the same flood is often a faster, more destructive job, because its materials fail rather than soak.

Smaller places covered here

These are on the coverage list and calls from them route, but they are too small to carry a page that says anything a page about the county does not already say.

What people ask before calling

Call while the damage is still doing whatever it is doing. It gets easier, not harder, to fix early.