SAND SPRINGS, Okla. — Storm-weary residents in Oklahoma were gutting waterlogged homes Sunday as the Arkansas River continued its slow crest rolling hundreds of miles downstream, even as many kept a cautious eye on this week’s weather forecasts showing more rain.
In the Tulsa suburb of Sand Springs — among the first communities inundated when the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers started releasing more water from a dam upriver to control more severe flooding elsewhere — soggy couches and recliners and dumpsters full of carpet, drywall and insulation lined residential streets covered in silt deposited by floodwaters.
Jamie Casto was helping clean up the house where her 65-year-old uncle has lived for 14 years.
Though Casto, 35, said her uncle didn’t have flood insurance because he was told he lived in a 500-year floodplain, a rust-colored line 4 feet from the concrete floor of the garage clearly marked how high water had gotten before they were able to get into the house Friday.
Casto is trying to help her uncle fill out paperwork to apply for emergency loans to help get the house back in order.
She gave Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke a tour of the home while he was in historically red Oklahoma to see damage firsthand. The former Texas congressman said that if he is elected, his plan would include federal grants to invest in communities before disasters strike because the planet is warming and fires, storms and floods are expected to get worse.
“We know there’s going to be more of this — more severe, more devastating,” O’Rourke said. “We need to invest in communities now.”
Cleanup won’t be fast or easy. The Tulsa Area Emergency Management Agency put out a call for volunteers last week, with caveats that volunteers must bring their own gloves and boots. The Tulsa Health Department also gave free tetanus vaccinations to volunteers. The National Weather Service said that in Tulsa, the river was at just over 13 feet Sunday morning, 10 feet lower than its high point on Wednesday.