3 months ago
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Just outside of Newport the White River is once again out of its banks and on to road ways.
Between there and Oil Trough flooding is not an unusual occurrence. People living here are used to the inconvenience.
"Well if you want to count that back in 2008, it got in there three times that year," says Danny Nunemaker.
Nunemaker lives on Highway 14. The water started rising Monday morning and came up all around his house. But this time it stopped only inches from the threshold of his door.
Nunemaker recalls, "It come up pretty quick. By the time I went down here to get a backhoe, my neighbors come down here and helped me out and cut this berm behind my house to help relieve the water. Because if they hadn't have done that it would have filled up like a bowl and it would have got in our house."
Near Oil Trough and Newport the danger may already be over. Residents there say the river started falling Tuesday morning.
But that is not the case at Augusta. The White River is not expected to crest there until much later this week. And that will put most of the trailers and homes near the river in danger.
In fact, most of the residents living there have already left.
And further downstream in near Des Arc, the crest is not expected until Saturday or Sunday. Farmers there are paying the big price. Five-hundred acres of Doyle Burnett's soybeans are already underwater.
THV's Mike Duncan asked Burnett, "What are you going to do with that? Just let it go I guess", Burnett replied. "It will be gone. I don't see any chance of the river coming back down anytime soon. So I think they're totally gone."
Doyle Burnett says his losses will total in the ten of thousand of dollars. He says this is the first time flooding has hit him this hard since 1984.
