Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
State’s levees hold up, but system’s fragility laid bare
Historic flooding along the Arkansas River put pressure on dozens of levees, creating scares for some communities and prompting Gov. Asa Hutchinson to call for a review of the state’s patchwork levee system.
Repairs and cleanup will depend on where the levee is and whether it was being cared for before the water rose. Years, sometimes decades, of neglect of levees across Arkansas will make nearly two dozen along the Arkansas River ineligible for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers funding to rebuild, regardless of the damage.
Along the river, local leaders are surveying their levees and hoping to rebuild.
“It’ll take quite an undertaking to fix it,” Mark Thone, Yell County’s county judge, said of the Dardanelle Levee, the only levee to fully breach during the latest
round of flooding.
Thone isn’t sure how the Dardanelle Drainage District will proceed. The district had not been actively maintaining the increasingly decrepit levee, and it’s not eligible for Corps money.
Many of the state’s levees are built to heights that were designed to protect against the historic flooding of 1927. Some may be in bad shape but could hold up anyway if waters didn’t overtop them, a Corps official told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2017.
Despite being in poor condition, many of the levees along the Arkansas River did just that. Hutchinson, weather experts and others praised the levees’ performance.
While many of the levees held for the most part, they received damage.
The Dardanelle Levee is “a perfect example” of the shortcomings of the state’s levee system, Hutchinson said. Many levee boards are inactive or dysfunctional, and “it’s important to reinvigorate” them, he said.
Hutchinson isn’t ready to divulge the work he’s already done to review the levee system, but he outlined the first two steps the state needs to take to improve levee conditions.
“One, we have to do immediate repairs, which will cost some money, which we will be looking at,” he said. “And secondly, we need to have a better system for maintenance of our levees to make sure they aren’t falling below standards and that they are being properly maintained.”
Local leaders also have suggested taking a closer look at the condition and management of the levees.
The middling conditions and hodgepodge oversight of U.S. levees have long been discussed in the wake of disaster. Scientists predict severe weather is likely to become more common because of climate change. However, it’s impossible to tell whether such flooding will occur again along the Arkansas River, said Dennis Cavanaugh, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.
For years, government leaders and reports have stressed the need for increased funding, oversight, improvements and maintenance for Arkansas’ levees. No regulatory action has been taken in recent years other than a bill, sponsored by Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, in 2016, that required county clerks to send levee districts’ annual reports to state authorities and for county judges to appoint levee district board members.
Despite the law, many of the levee districts still were not on the state’s radar or actively maintaining their levees this spring.
If the levees were meeting U.S. Army Corps of Engineers standards and had active boards participating in the Corps Rehabilitation and Inspection Program, the Corps would provide technical and financial assistance to rebuild the levees to the condition they were in before the flooding. The Corps would cover 100% of the costs for levees originally built by the Corps and placed under local control and 80% of the costs for levees originally constructed by a private entity.
Most levees known to the Corps were built by the Corps. Six of the 42 levees along the river were privately constructed and are relatively small.
Levees that were not installed by the Corps are eligible for help with restoration from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Emergency Watershed Protection program. A private levee in Y City was restored using $300,000 of federal and local money after flooding in the spring of 2013. Such levee districts must come up with 25% of the cost, and the money cannot be used to improve the levee beyond restoration to pre-flood condition or for operation or maintenance.
Because Faulkner County Levee District No. 1 meets those requirements, leaders are already planning to make temporary repairs in the next few weeks. District leaders also are coming up with ideas to improve levee performance and mitigate damage for the future.
The Corps won’t be able to help Thone’s levee, which was found “unacceptable” in 2010 for infrastructure encroachments, depressions, uncontrolled vegetation and grazing, and eroding and broken internal drainage infrastructure, among other things.
The Dardanelle Drainage District doesn’t have a millage to fund levee maintenance or improvements, and Thone isn’t sure if levee district leaders will want to start one or improve the levee to the point of meeting Corps standards for the Rehabilitation and Inspection Program.
“We’ll just move forward and see where we can go from here,” Thone said.
Homes behind Perry County Levee District No. 1’s south levee in Toad Suck and Bigelow were badly damaged — worse than in the floods of 2015 and 2016, said Kevin Bradke, secretary of the levee district.
In 2015 and 2016, the district board wasn’t active and the privately built levee’s inspection at that time was “unacceptable,” according to the Corps, so the area couldn’t get federal assistance to rebuild it.
The levee was rebuilt in 2017 with state money after years of neglect during which the levee lost height and and its interior drainage system was broken.
Bradke credits the influence of Rapert, a neighboring politician, with making his levee district a model for a total turnaround — going from having an abandoned oversight board for a failing levee into an active group that helped mitigate damage from this year’s flood.
“I can tell you flat out the reason we were able to get it done is because of the constant attention and pressure Sen. Rapert was helping us with,” Bradke said.
Rapert knew who to talk to and how to “shake the trees until he gets the right person involved,” Bradke said.
The levee district got nearly a half-million dollars in state funding rarely given to levee districts — it’s mostly used for water and sewer system projects — and used it to build the levee to its original condition.
That money wasn’t enough to make the south end of the levee taller, which the board wanted to do, Bradke said. The north end of the levee is taller and the board wanted to equalize them, but that would cost a few million dollars and the levee district’s millage raises only about $2,500 annually.
Still, the improvement was enough to give residents more time to prepare as flood projections grew worse, Bradke said. Bradke was able to help move the furniture out of his dad’s house in time.
Residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed can apply for federal disaster assistance. Requests aren’t always granted, and most of the money comes in the form of a loan, according to the Corps handbook, So, You Live Behind a Levee!
Along the Arkansas River, 20 levees are considered by the Corps to be in poor condition.
The Dardanelle Levee in Yell County has an active board, Thone said. Members will meet soon to discuss how to repair a wide, 30- to 40-foot-deep gap in the levee.
But the levee hasn’t been in good condition in years, and Thone said the levee board hadn’t done any work in recent years to fix the problems the Corps identified.
“They hadn’t had any money,” he said.
Thone said the part of the levee that ruptured along Arkansas 155 was in better condition than anywhere else.
The Dardanelle Drainage District doesn’t assess a millage to maintain or improve it.
Millages are the primary revenue sources for levees, which are not funded by the federal government, the state or municipalities unless one of those entities owns it.
In Pulaski County, water leaking through the Woodson Levee, rated “unacceptable” by the Corps, prompted calls to evacuate. The levee’s flapper valve, also known as a flap gate, malfunctioned, causing the leak, officials said.
The Woodson Levee District has been inactive since about 1950, Pulaski County officials said, but it’s been “primarily maintained” since then by the Department of Correction.
In 2010, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspected the levee and reported numerous deficiencies to then-Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines. The Corps sent the report to Villines because of the levee’s lack of a sponsor, the Corps wrote in a letter to the county judge.
The Corps reported, among other problems, that the levee’s flap gates were damaged and needed maintenance.
A flap gate allows rainwater to flow into the river when it’s low and automatically closes when the river reaches a certain height to prevent back-flow
Department of Correction spokesman Solomon Graves said the department has done some maintenance on the levee but would not be assessing damage. Graves wrote in an email, “the Corp [sic] of Engineers and the local Levee Board will be conducting any damage assessment.”
Laurie Driver, a spokesman with the Corps of Engineers, said the Corps had no plans to assess the levee. If the levee district intended to participate in the Corps’ Rehabilitation and Inspection Program, an inspection would be a part of the process, she said.
Pulaski County spokesman Cozetta Jones said the county is researching whether the levee falls under a 1905 law that would require a petition to the county court to create a new board. A second step to improve the levee would be to annex it into the Fourche Island Drainage District No. 2.
The district operates a “minimally acceptable” levee just north of the Woodson Levee.
Other levees that faced scares were in fine condition the last time the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspected them. That includes the Faulkner County Levee District No. 1 structure near Lollie Bottoms, which has an active board and will receive help from the Corps as a result.
Several Jefferson County levees are considered “unacceptable” by Corps standards.
Gerald Robinson, county judge of Jefferson County, said last week that the flood has shown what the county and the state have done right and what needs to be addressed.
“This whole thing has made us take a look at our levee system and to realize that they have been neglected in some areas,” Robinson said in June 8 article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “It’s really making us take a look at some of these levee boards and things that we need to do to create a stronger board, to strengthen those levees and to maintain them.”