At the height of a dayslong series of rain, Townsend Park appeared almost completely underwater last weekend.
The path from Townsend Drive to a heavily flooded Fluker Avenue wasn’t as clear as usual. It could still be taken, but not without the risk of being swept away by inches of rain.
Pine Bluff saw 8.35 inches of rainfall during the first week of April. The 3.67 inches that fell last Saturday was the most for any single day during that period.
If any silver lining came from the rainstorms that otherwise discouraged driving in the city, the next day provided good fishing behind Lake Saracen.
“Fishing has been pretty good around here,” said Pine Bluff resident Roderick Neal, catching some crappie with his son near the walkway over a spillway at the lake. “The water being up, that just brings the fish on out the river or whatever. You get a little more fresher fish because the fish are coming out the river with the water running in and out. I’ve been enjoying that.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Traveling to work in Stuttgart, however, has been a different story for Neal.
“(The rainfall) just made it pretty rough to travel, going back and forth,” he said. “I work from 2:30 in the evening to 12 midnight, so by that time it’s been flooded a lot. I’ve been having to stay in the middle of the road a lot.”
During the weather event triggered by a frontal system across Arkansas, Neal had to leave anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour early to make the 36-mile journey to work.
In Pine Bluff, many roads held excessive water one to two days after clouds finally cleared, bringing up questions about the city’s drainage system. Nearly six years after the flooding of the Arkansas River devastated lower-lying communities, city streets are still slow to drain amid steady rainfall.
“This past weekend has been a booger,” said Tiger Dockett, director of the Pine Bluff Street Department. “No one wholeheartedly expected the amount of rain we got was actually going to hit. It rained four days straight for the most part. It’s been a very long time since that happened.”
Vivian Flowers, Pine Bluff’s mayor since Jan. 1, said she’s picked up information about the system since it was announced that the city would receive $32 million in funding for watershed improvements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service in 2022. Funding for that, however, has been paused due to an executive order from President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 ordering a review of funding from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, both of which were signed by President Joe Biden.
Flowers said two dynamics — an “old and narrow” drainage infrastructure and “man-made issues” including allowing leaves, tree limbs and trash to clog up pipes and drains — have led to Pine Bluff’s drainage woes.
“In order to go in and accommodate the drainage we need to accommodate, we would need to go in and change all of that out, which is an extremely extensive project, ergo the $32 million we were going to get for some of our drainage system infrastructure,” Flowers said.
While some of the city’s plumbing needs to change, “it doesn’t have to be like this,” Flowers said.
“My sense is, modernizing our infrastructure — I don’t know if it’s half or 75% … or 35% of the issue,” she said. “It’s like one of those things where you want to be healthy and lose weight, and people think if they exercise like a beast every day, that’s half the battle. It’s really 30% of the battle. Seventy percent is what you put in your mouth and how much of it you put in there.”
How to rebuild an aging infrastructure is something on which Dockett said he is working with his assistant. The onus for immediate improvements to drainage, however, may fall on citizens.
“Just talking with him, both of us have the same conclusion — 90% of the issue with the drainage system is the citizens, the fact they are trashing the ditches, blowing their leaves and stuff in the ditches,” Dockett said. “Along with the leaves, you have branches. All nature has to do is run its course … but when you have residents blowing their leaves in the ditches or washing it down the drains, it piles up and cakes up inside there. … It makes it to where it’s mud and mush and just builds up.”
Almost every culvert Dockett’s team clears out leads to a discovery of leaves, sticks, mud and balls, by his account. Even the wheels and lids from trash cans have to be pulled out to clear the small tunnels.
Citizens can do their part to prevent such problems, Dockett said.
“It’s just got to the point where residents got complacent to the fact where previous directors would allow them to go ahead and blow the stuff into the streets, and you have sweepers come by and clean everything up,” he said. “But our manpower won’t allow us to do that, and it’s been that way for awhile now.”
The street department currently employs 22 workers for duties on the streets, not counting office or shop workers, Dockett said. His idea for more manpower includes a sweeper, grass cutter, patching crew and ditching crew for each of Pine Bluff’s four wards.
City code bans accumulation of trash outside receptacles, but the related statutes aren’t being enforced, Dockett said.
“Once they see the city is through playing with the dumping, littering and all this stuff here, because blowing that stuff in the streets is the same form of littering, once you’ve been ticketed or fined, people will get the word and they’ll stop it,” he explained.
Flowers suggested in the meantime the city could do a public information campaign and work with residents to address clogging issues. For now, a complete replacement of the drainage system may not be an affordable option for Pine Bluff.
“Truth be told, we cannot go, buy and replace every new pipe there is,” Dockett said. “What we can actually do is patch up the best we can, and when we get to a point where patching up (will not) suffice or is not a long-term solution and stuff, then we’ll go ahead and replace the whole thing.”
Whatever will help Pine Bluff the next time a major weather event happens just may keep the rain from accumulating and its citizens safe.
“Times are changing and we see these floods and stuff, so most definitely we’ve got to make sure it doesn’t creep up on us with all that height of the water,” Neal said. “I know we need those infrastructures for safety. I’ve seen a while back when it flooded, the water came close to the doorways, so we do need that.”
