Historic flooding on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma and Arkansas – “This is the culmination of a flood that is now in its fourth week”
By Dr. Jeff Masters
28 May 2019
(Weather Underground) – Torrential rains in Oklahoma over the past two weeks have brought the Arkansas River in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma to its highest water level ever recorded. Near the Oklahoma border at Fort Smith, Arkansas (population 300,000), the river rose to two feet above its previous all-time high on Tuesday morning, and was predicted to rise at least another two feet before cresting on Wednesday. The river also hit a record high on Friday at Ponca City, Oklahoma, about 70 miles upriver from Tulsa. Between those two locations, at Muskogee, Oklahoma, the river crested on Sunday at its second highest level on record. All-time record crests are predicted over the next week along a 100-mile stretch of the river extending from Fort Smith to just upstream from Little Rock, Arkansas. At Little Rock, the crest is predicted to be the sixth highest on record, and the highest since 1990. On Tuesday afternoon, two levees along the Arkansas River in Arkansas were overtopped, flooding farmlands, according to katv.com.
Arkansas River flooding has already triggered the evacuation of hundreds of people in Oklahoma, including areas just west of Tulsa. More people are expected to be flooded as water is released from the Keystone Dam in Tulsa, the Tulsa World reported. Engineers are trying to prevent catastrophic flooding that could come if the lake overflows its floodgates. The flood’s longevity has also triggered concerns about Tulsa County’s 70-year-old levee system, which is undergoing far more prolonged stress than it did during the record-setting floods of 1986.
“This is the culmination of a flood that is now in its fourth week,” David Williams, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Tulsa District chief of hydrology and hydraulics engineering, told the newspaper. “I know that it seems like only a weeklong event or so, but we’ve had excessive rainfall in the basin for a month now.” [more]
Historic Flooding on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma and Arkansas
