JOIN US20 killed as floods hit US campsites
As many as 300 people, including families with vehicles and off-road backpackers, may have been camping along the Caddo and Little Missouri Rivers as waters surged by 20 feet between midnight and dawn, according to Red Cross and state emergency officials.
Terrified families tried to outrace the churning, swiftly rising water, some fleeing up hillsides as tents vanished, recreational vehicles flipped over and rental cabins were demolished.
By afternoon, 20 bodies had been recovered and dozens more people were still missing, said Chad Stover, a public affairs officer of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.
Kayla Chriss, 22, and her family had been camping in the area since Monday. “Without warning everything started washing away,” she said.
Around 2:30 am, Chriss, her 3-year-old daughter, 4-year-old son and a family of four tried to make it for high ground in a camper, but were blocked by surging water. They briefly made it onto a nearby branch, and the other family’s father — “I only know his name is Jerry,” she said — grabbed her little girl and lifted her onto a tree.
The waters then pummelled Chriss and her son into the river. She said she started to black out when her hair got caught on a jutting limb, rousing her so she could pull herself and her son onto branches where they waited, wet and scared, until daylight.
“I was just singing to my son, telling him everything is going to be OK,” she said on Friday evening, shortly after being discharged from a hospital with only minor sprains; her son had a black eye.“I was just trying to find a way to keep him out of the water. If it wasn’t for him being there, I wouldn’t have made it. He kept me going.”
The National Weather Service issued a flood warning around 2 am, after the heaviest rains had started. By then, the disaster was already unfolding, and in any case, state officials said, the terrain and lack of cellphone service in the valleys made communications difficult.
As the rivers began to recede on Friday, National Guard helicopters and hundreds of state and local officials worked frantically to search for survivors in the rugged valleys.