2019 Flood Revealed Levee Weaknesses; Governor Sanders Seeks Water Plan
It was only five years ago that Conway feared a major flood event with the potential to submerge the south and west part of town. The Arkansas River was flooding and eventually caused $3 billion in damages to the state after days of rain when Oklahoma released “a record amount” of stormwater upstream.
Communities and families up and down the River realized then that our many-years-old, poorly maintained levee system was not up to the task of preventing such widespread destruction after Conway’s Lollie Levee (#1) came very close to total collapse when the flooding on the Arkansas River destroyed a large section of the earthen barrier.
Thankfully a more serious disaster for Conway was averted in June 2019.
However, although that historic event pushed former Governor Asa Hutchinson to create the Arkansas Levee Task Force to address levee maintenance across the state, to date not very much has actually been accomplished to help change the situation, even after the Task Force released its Report in early 2020 along with 17 recommendations.
Infrastructure Problem Looms
Arkansas levees have historically been largely ignored and underfunded; this potential infrastructure problem looms over Faulkner County (and the state) now that we’ve directly experienced the very negative effects of ignoring the issue.
As ArkansasBusiness.com reports:
It’s unclear how many of the recommendations from the now-disbanded [2019 Levee] task force have been implemented.
Funding sources continue to remain a major issue for maintenance and repair.
There still is not a comprehensive map of all of the levees in the state or a clear picture of which ones may still need significant improvements.
“There are an unknown number of levees that we haven’t surveyed or even that the state may not be aware of,” said Jay Townsend, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Little Rock District. The Corps manages a federal program that provides funding for the repair of levees that meet qualifying criteria to participate.
While some defunct local levee boards have become active again, there’s no data on how many remain nonoperational nor how many submit annual reports about the infrastructure they maintain. New tax assessments of property near levees, a recommendation of the 2019 task force, have not been comprehensive. Those assessments could help levee boards collect more money for upkeep.
Oversight remains piecemeal with no one agency coordinating plans. Because of this, it’s hard to quantify what work remains. (…)
Maintaining levees is extremely expensive. Repairing them costs even more.
The burden of those costs falls mostly on levee boards, many of which are the caretakers of infrastructure in rural areas where tax revenues are barely enough to cover mowing grass off the huge mounds of dirt, much less thousands, even millions, of dollars in repairs or upgrades.
After initiating a new tax assessment of surrounding land and merging the Lollie Levee board with the nearby Tupelo Watershed district, about $20,000 comes in annually to manage the levee, which protects about $77.9 million of property, according to a [Army] Corps [of Engineers] levee database.
“The last time we mowed the levee, it was $7,000,” [Twig] Satterfield [chairman of the Tupelo Drainage and Levy District] said. A sluice gate fix costs $60,000. The 2019 flood damage repairs totaled nearly $1.5 million.
That funding came from the Corps of Engineers Public Law 84-99 program. That program provides federal money covering nearly all repair costs for levees that are damaged by natural disasters.
But levees have to meet certain standards to participate, standards that can be costly to implement and maintain.
Governor Initiates Water Plan Update
Now Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has initiated an update to the Arkansas Water Plan with an August 21 Executive Order that tasks the Natural Resources Commission with determining “future water demands, water supplies, issues and possible solutions….”
According to KARK.com, “The governor noted the state’s susceptibility to flooding and called for flood mitigation, such as through dams, levees and drainage improvements, in the proclamation.”
The two-stage project will first review “need and requirements which are anticipated to have changed” since the Water Plan was created (and apparently shelved) back in 2014.
Then,”updates will be made … reflecting current demands, forecasts, supply, availability, and quality of surface and groundwater and related issues including flood mitigation and water management solutions.”
The state’s new Water Plan is to be completed by Dec. 31, 2024.
Photo: L.J. Rhodes,
