Girl’s body found, believed the last

LANGLEY — Search teams found the body of a young girl Monday near the Albert Pike Recreation Area, raising the death toll to 20 from Friday morning’s flash flooding.

Arkansas State Police Capt. Mike Fletcher said he was “pretty confident” that the body of the young girl - found underneath a car near the banks of the Little Missouri River - would be the last of those missing.

He said search teams would continue to go through piles of debris for the next couple of days to make sure there are no other unknown victims of the flood. However, by Monday afternoon, many volunteer searchers were leaving the recreation area in the Ouachita National Forestin southwest Montgomery County.

Meanwhile, the last of the families of the missing who were taking shelter at the Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church in nearby Lodi left Monday about noon, about two hours after the girl’s body was discovered.

Fletcher said the girl’s name would be released after her identity is confirmed through DNA testing.

Church pastor Graig Cowart said family members believe that the girl found was Jayden Basinger, 8. Cowart said she was the daughter of Shane Basinger, 34, of Gloster, La., and the sister of Kinsley Basinger, 6, both of whom died in the flooding.

Cowart opened his church’s activity center to flood survivors and the families of missing people immediately after getting a call Friday morning to help set up shelter at an area fire station.

He said he decided to open his church after realizing how many people were at the Albert Pike Recreation Area, noting that the fire station wasn’t big enough and didn’t have air conditioning.

He said survivors came in Friday morning, many of them covered in blankets because their clothes had been ripped off by the fast-moving river.

“Right away, they felt vulnerable and insecure,” Cowart said.

“The more people who came in, the more we immersed ourselves in helping them. I said to myself, these people have got to have someone to relieve the stress and pressure they’re under.”

He said family members of 18 victims stayed at his church’s activity center, which had been closed off to the media until Monday afternoon to respect the families’ privacy.

Tables lined the center’s outside walls and bore dozens of boxes of clothes, shoes, first-aid gear, toiletries and medicine.

Cowart said he heard many stories of those who made it out of the campground alive.

One woman swept away in the raging waters with her 4-year-old was able to wrap her arms around her child and a tree, fighting off the force of rushing water for hours to survive, he said.

Another woman reluctantly handed off her young child to a group of men for protection while she braved the flash flood herself. She and her child survived, Cowart said.

Cowart said the people who came in Friday were in such shock that in some cases they didn’t even know how they got to the church.

By Saturday, the shock had worn off and stress took over, Cowart said.

When rescuers found each body, they would take a photograph to the church, download the images on a computer and try to decide what family to bring in to identify the person.

“Every time a state police officer came in with a [photo storage card], you could see the tension on the families’ faces,” Cowart said.

“One grandfather, who lost three grandchildren and a son-in-law, I thought he was going to have a heart attack. The stress he endured was unbelievable.”

Cowart said the experience “will change my life forever.”

“In a moment of destruction and devastation, you become vulnerable, and everybody needs somebody,” he said.

“We tried to step up to the plate to let these people know they weren’t alone in this crisis.”

Also Monday, Gov. Mike Beebe’s office corrected information about the hometown listed for flooding victim Sheri Wade, 46, of Ashdown. Wade had previously been listed as living in New Boston, Texas.

Wade was the mother of Randall Wade, 16, who survived the flooding that claimed several of his family members. His brother-in-law, Adam Jez, 26, also survived.

Heavy rains inundated the Albert Pike campground and places upstream Thursday night and early Friday, causing what U.S. forestry officials described as the worst natural disaster in the Ouachita National Forest.

Camp support poles sat mangled like twisted paper clips in the camping area, and heavy slabs of concrete were split over dogwood trees. Furniture, bottles, underwear, books and clothes were scattered about and hanging on trees.

In contrast, the Little Missouri River flowed carelessly downstream Monday, mixing gentle water sounds with the those of birds and showing no signs of its Friday morning rage.

Glenwood police officer Shona Jordan, who was among the volunteers searching area in the heat, said crews saw lots of logs, brush, snakes and dead fish along the riverbank. Crews also found a German shepherd on Monday that had survived the flood.

At its peak Friday morning, the river rose at least 8 feet per hour inside the Albert Pike area, where at least 100 campers were thought to be sleeping when the flash flood occurred, said Robert Holmes, a national flood specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Holmes and Geological Survey teams were at the recreation area on Monday, flagging high-water marks at five feet more than 50 yards from the banks of the Little Missouri River.

He said at the height of the flood, the river gauge nine miles south of the campgrounds was flowing at more than 25,000 cubic feet per second.

“It was a whole lot of water,” Holmes said. “It scoured the ground down to the boulders and the cobbles.”

He said the water was flowing five times as fast as normal - and there was a lot more water flowing.

Heavy rains caused the river to raise from 3 feet to 23 feet within 5 1 /2 hours, carrying a powerful surge of water.

Holmes compared the Albert Pike flood to the 1972 Rapid City, S.D., flood, which killed more than 200 people in a matter of hours. Both floods occurred in the middle of the night and problems were exacerbated because of the mountainous terrain of both regions.

“Flooding is a natural phenomenon,” he said. “I’ve had people ask me, is this is a result of climate change? Could we have done this? Can we blame somebody?”

“Floods happen. The big message to the public is to be aware of your surroundings. You usually see these catastrophic flash floods in very hilly, steep terrain.”

Gwen Beavans, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, offered another description: “What happens in a mountain is you have all this rain water funneling down into one little ravine.”

Beavans said the Little Missouri River’s crest at 23 feet is the highest the river has been since at least 1988, when the National Weather Service began keeping records for the river.

The river flows 1,000 feet below mountainous terrain in some places, and heavy rainfall rushing down to the small stream causes the river to balloon rapidly.

“It’s like pouring a cup of water into a little tube,” Beavans said. “It would look really, really deep. If you pour that same water into a shallow pan it would only be maybe a half inch deep.”