Kurt_Loup
06-11-2010, 04:46 PM
Wow. I've fly fished at Albert Pike:
Flash floods swamped campgrounds along a pair of southwestern Arkansas rivers early Friday, killing 20, Gov. Mike Beebe said. Dozens more people were missing.
Up to 40 people were unaccounted for after the Caddo and Little Missouri rivers rose quickly overnight — at times faster than 8 feet per hour, said Gary Fox, a retired emergency medical technician coordinating with families to determine who was dead and who had yet to be found.
The Albert Pike Recreation Area, a 54-unit campground in the Ouachita National Forest, was packed with vacationing families, many of them from Louisiana and Texas, Fox said. Two dozen people were hospitalized and another 60 were rescued from the steep Ouachita Mountains valley.
Marc and Stacy McNeil of Marshall, Texas, survived the flooding by pulling their pickup truck between two trees and standing in the bed in waist-deep water.
"It was just like a boat tied to a tree," Marc McNeil said, describing how the truck bobbed up and down.
They were on their first night of camping with a group of seven, staying in tents. The rain kept falling and the water kept rising throughout the night, at one point topping the tool box in the back of the truck.
Flash floods swamped campgrounds along a pair of southwestern Arkansas rivers early Friday, killing 20, Gov. Mike Beebe said. Dozens more people were missing.
Up to 40 people were unaccounted for after the Caddo and Little Missouri rivers rose quickly overnight — at times faster than 8 feet per hour, said Gary Fox, a retired emergency medical technician coordinating with families to determine who was dead and who had yet to be found.
The Albert Pike Recreation Area, a 54-unit campground in the Ouachita National Forest, was packed with vacationing families, many of them from Louisiana and Texas, Fox said. Two dozen people were hospitalized and another 60 were rescued from the steep Ouachita Mountains valley.
Marc and Stacy McNeil of Marshall, Texas, survived the flooding by pulling their pickup truck between two trees and standing in the bed in waist-deep water.
"It was just like a boat tied to a tree," Marc McNeil said, describing how the truck bobbed up and down.
They were on their first night of camping with a group of seven, staying in tents. The rain kept falling and the water kept rising throughout the night, at one point topping the tool box in the back of the truck.