High Waters Spell Road Troubles

Heavy rains wreak havoc on Muskogee County roads.  Two roads have taken heavy damage.  One was washed away completely.  The News On 6's Steve Berg reports county workers spend the day doing more than just road repairs.  Part of the work was more like road building.

It was rain versus roads and the rain won by a landslide.

"This is by far the worst," said Muskogee County Commissioner Gene Wallace.

County Commissioner Gene Wallace says there are dozens of small creeks in the hilly area.  He doesn't even know if one of the flooded creeks has a name.

"This creek for a large percentage of the year will be a dry bed creek.  There won't be water in this," said Gene Wallace.

For a creek that has no name, it made one heck of an impression on Friday morning.  Garbage along the fenceline indicates it was briefly a river 200 yards wide.

"We have individuals that have rain gauges that indicated they had 5 inches of rain is something like 45 minutes.  That is a tremendous amount of water, especially when you have topography that is straight up and straight down," said Gene Wallace.

Candy Walker was a captive audience to the morning's storm.

"Because the bridge down there was out.  That was down there was flooded so bad.  And then, if you go down here, there's a little dip, and it was flooded out," said Candy Walker.

Even a couple of the paved roads were nearly washed away.

"If you look off, it just kind of laid it over like it was just peeling it like an orange," said Gene Wallace.

Wallace says they were just getting caught up on road projects.  Now, they're piling up again.

"Day before yesterday, I had one of the residents called and said, ‘gosh I can't believe how good a condition the roads are in' and 24 hours, Mother Nature completely changes it," said Gene Wallace.

The creek that flooded eventually feeds into the Arkansas River, which is already extremely high, and Wallace say people downstream might be the next to have flooding problems.