Water work in Van Buren, from the bottoms to Main Street

Water on a Van Buren floor has three usual sources: the Arkansas River pushing over its north bank, Lee Creek backing up on the west side of town, or a supply line letting go inside the house. Fire is not covered here at all, because Crawford County is bought for water only. What follows is the city's water, its ground and its buildings.

A city on the north bank

Van Buren began as Phillips Landing in the 1820s and incorporated on January 4, 1845. It holds 23,218 residents across 16.10 square miles, 15.42 of them land, at an elevation of 650 feet, with the Oklahoma state line about two miles west. Fort Smith sits directly across the Arkansas River, historically reached by the Van Buren-Fort Smith Free Bridge. Lee Creek comes down the western side of the city and empties into the river there.

Being the county seat puts the Crawford County Courthouse, the King Opera House and the rest of downtown within a few blocks of the water. Baptist Health is among the city's larger employers, and a Tyson Foods poultry plant that had been part of the local economy announced its closure in 2023. A commercial water loss here can just as easily be a hundred-year-old storefront as a warehouse on a slab. One ZIP, 72956, carries both, along with the Vista Ridge subdivision and the Yoestown Bottoms behind the levee, which is why an address tells a crew more than a ZIP does about what is likely to be wet.

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.

June 1, 2019

The Arkansas River near Van Buren crested that day at 40.79 feet. Flood stage is 22 feet, so the river ran 18.79 feet over it, and the previous record of 38.1 feet had stood since 1945. National Weather Service storm data calls what happened near catastrophic flooding, with residential subdivisions and businesses flooded on both sides of the river.

Lee Creek did its own damage on the same schedule. It crested at 416.40 feet on May 28 and again at 416.90 feet on June 1, the second-highest reading in its record. Three days before that second crest, an 80-foot-wide, 12-foot-high section of levee in the Yoestown Bottoms slumped against the rising river with roughly 250 people in 152 residences behind it. It held. A lot of Van Buren spent that week not knowing whether it would.

The creek keeps its own calendar

West-side addresses do not wait for the Arkansas to break records. Lee Creek's all-time crest came in a different flood entirely: 417.5 feet on December 28, 2015, which put water through homes along Rena Road, closed the road and inundated the recreational campground there. Two days later the river crested at 34.63 feet and pushed backwater into mobile home parks near the creek. The historic 296-foot Lee Creek Bridge near W. Rena Road, closed to traffic since 1995, sits in the middle of that ground.

For anyone west of downtown, the practical reading is that there are two clocks. The creek responds to rain in the Boston Mountains upstream in hours. The river responds to a whole basin over days, and when it is already high the creek cannot drain into it. The worst outcomes come from both clocks running at once, which is exactly what June 1, 2019 was.

Wind first, water after

Van Buren sits on the eastern edge of the region called Tornado Alley, and it has the record to show for it. On April 21, 1996 an F3 with winds near 200 mph touched down at 11:12 p.m. near the Garrison Street Bridge in Fort Smith, crossed the river into Van Buren about six minutes later, and ran roughly seven more miles before dissipating east of US-59. It damaged the Vista Ridge subdivision, Morrison Elementary School, Coleman Junior High School and a newly built fire station. Two children were killed in Fort Smith, 40 to 50 people were hurt across the two cities, and about 1,800 homes were destroyed or badly damaged along a nearly ten-mile, half-mile-wide path, with losses above $500 million.

Storms like that generate water calls for weeks afterward. A roof stripped at midnight takes rain into the attic, the insulation loads up, and the ceiling below it gives way days later when nobody is watching. Tarps buy time; they do not dry anything.

Brick and plaster that let go of water slowly

The Van Buren Historic District runs eight blocks, about 20 acres, along Main Street between Cane Hill Street and the Arkansas River, and most of its commercial buildings predate 1920 in Victorian, Italianate, Queen Anne and Chicago School styles. Those walls are mass masonry with plaster over them, not stud cavities with drywall. They absorb a great deal of water and give it back over days rather than hours, which is why drying one properly involves meters, patience and a lot of dehumidification rather than a quick tear-out.

Newer subdivision construction on the same street of floodwater behaves in the opposite way. Particleboard swells and does not recover, carpet pad turns into a sponge that has to leave, and wet fiberglass batts in a floor system stop insulating and start holding. Crawford County's housing stock is 75.5 percent owner-occupied with a median owner-occupied value of $182,800, so most of these decisions are being made by the person who lives there.

Distances and the rest of the Van Buren pages

Alma is about 9 miles east on I-40, Cedarville 11 miles north on AR-59, and Mulberry 18 miles east on I-40. Ozark, across the county line in Franklin County, is about 33 miles east. Van Buren Municipal Utilities has run the city's water, sewer and residential sanitation since 1893, and its sewer side matters as much as its water side when the river is high.

This site carries a Van Buren water damage page and narrower pages beneath it for river flood cleanup, storm and tornado water damage, sewer backup cleanup and crawl space drying. There is no Van Buren fire page, and there will not be one while the county is water-only on this line.

Questions people actually ask

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