Marble Falls Sitting in the KABF studio in Little Rock about 3 PM, I heard beeping on a colleague’s phone on the other side of the room. Seconds later, my phone went crazy as well. We were being warned about the possibilities of flash floods in the area. Earlier in the afternoon, there had been a downpour, and the rain was not as hard, but still steadily coming down. Our 100,000-watt radio station was not getting any signal that activated our emergency alert system to interrupt our broadcast. How serious was this, or was the federal system not attuned to local conditions or coordinated with local emergency response operations?
At the same time, I was getting calls and photos from my son, who was up in the Ozarks, near Harrison. He wasn’t getting any warnings. He was safe, but he was trapped. Water and mud had crossed the road in town. Outside, hard rain had filled up the creeks nearby that feed the Buffalo River. Water was moving fast and had overrun the bridges coming off the county roads nearby, blocking his path forward, despite being in a pickup.
Sometimes working with Arkansas Grassroots United and the Anthropocene Alliance, we feel like voices in the wilderness crying about flooding, but our monthly meeting was scheduled early in the evening in the middle of these deluges. Studies everywhere indicate that one of the effects of global warning and climate change will be more rain with more water coming in faster. We are not prepared.
So, an alert came on my cellphone of flash flooding. I was glad to get it, but it was easily ignored on the 2nd floor of our building near the central part of the city a long way from any watercourse. There was no way to know where the risk might be. For families in flood prone areas, often lower income, sometimes minority, maybe cellphones work, maybe they don’t. We have been fighting for warning sirens that would serve and impact these very communities and others, wherever they are. In many cases, there are existing systems, but they are only programmed for tornados, even though the adjustment to add flooding would be relatively trivial.
Meeting with some area emergency management people, some of them have been blasé and dismissive. One claimed people could not learn to identify more than one warning sound; a preposterous argument! To offset, these attitudes that are courting disasters and deaths, AGU has launched petition drives to help us prove citizen demand in cities and counties throughout central Arkansas. The lessons from the flash floods in Texas last year should demand that we be prepared, but some authorities are still pretending that “it can’t happen here.”
In the meeting, we learned from a representative of one of our member organizations that in Pulaski County at least, there might a way to set the tone and get this done. A large unallocated funding source for roads and bridges, might allow us to align target areas where improvements will be made to add multi-purpose sirens at the same time. In other jurisdictions here and around the country, this is whack-a-mole, going from one jurisdiction to another using the great maps predicting the likelihood of floods, organizing impacted communities, and assisting them in putting pressure on public authorities to be prepared.
In Newton County, public works showed up with a digger, opened a trench across the dirt and gravel county road and laid down a flexible drainage pipe to divert water from the creek to the other side of the road to create a ditch to take some of the overflow off. A dump truck showed up to cover the trench. Hours later, water was still roaring over the bridges, but they were passable. I’m not sure what produced this crew and this quick fix there, but this was more like a miracle than a plan.
In central Arkansas, the work has begun to get ahead of the water. At the meeting, petitions were distributed. Commitments were sought for mass petitioning at big events coming up on the calendar. Some organizations agreed to take petitions to meetings coming up.
The moral of this story is simple. Luck and hope are not a plan. When the big whoops won’t do right, the grassroots have to organize to demand that the job be done.