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The past three days have been pretty wet ones in the Ozarks. We received rain for three days and nights totaling only about 5 inches here. There are a lot of roads closed due to flooding and/or being washed out by the water. On Tuesday night, I had to take back roads to the back road that Motherhubbard lives on because we couldn’t cross the low water bridge on the normal route we take. The local football field and tennis courts were flooded as well as the parking lot and park. These are located beside the creek that runs through our downtown area. In the Northwestern section of Arkansas flooding was a minor problem. Interstate 44 that runs through Missouri has sections closed due to flooding. This is a major route of travel across the country. In Branson, Mo, where I work, we received only 6 inches. That’s enough to cause evacuations of the low lying areas around the lakes. Only 20 miles north of Branson they received that much rain in about three hours. (You may have seen reports from Ozark, Mo on the national news.) Now that the rain has stopped, flooding becomes even a greater problem for the Southeastern part of Missouri and the Northeastern and Eastern parts of Arkansas. You might have seen reports of the flooding from Popular Bluff, Mo today. The parts of the states known as the Bootheel are in the Delta and all the rain that was received by the hills has to go somewhere. Within 50 miles of where I live there are five or six man made lakes that are filled right now. To keep them from flooding, the Army Corp of Engineers will open the flood gates and allow water to run into the rivers. They try to do this without causing more flooding downstream, but it almost never works. Every river heading toward the Mississippi (East, Southeast from us) will be flooded in the next few days and we are likely to see some major flooding in these areas. We’ve seen this happen several times since we’ve lived in the Ozarks and I remember the flood warnings when I was growing up in the Delta region. This time of the year isn’t so bad, but during the spring and summer, when crops are in the ground, this much rain can be devastating for the farmers. The land is very flat over there so every river, small or large, has a high levy on both sides. In the flat lands water flows pretty slowly so it takes a lot longer there than it does here to run downstream. I think that in the next week or so, we’ll hear about flood conditions further south, along the Mississippi and down toward New Orleans.

In my town there hasn’t been a major flood since 1961 when the downtown area was flooded from Crooked Creek overflowing the banks. Here is a link to the history of that flood: http://www.bchrs.org/collections/1961flood/index.html