FAYETTEVILLE -- Two days of visiting levee sites along the Mississippi River provided a vivid reminder to researcher Michelle Bernhardt about the immense power of rushing water.
In some areas, the river's force carried driftwood the size of tree trunks up and over levee barriers, said Bern-hardt, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
"To actually be out in the field and see the power of the water is humbling," Bern-hardt said Wednesday, a day after returning to Fayetteville from a road trip visiting seven levee sites in Missouri and Illinois.
Floodwaters have been blamed for at least 25 deaths in those states after a rare winter deluge dumped more than 10 inches of rain over a three-day period last month, according to The Associated Press.
Arkansas, too, has been hit hard by the unseasonable, recent rains, with at least two deaths attributed to flooding. Forty-three of the state's 75 counties have been declared disaster areas by Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Bernhardt joined a group of researchers to participate in a Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance team. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, such teams travel to gather data in the aftermath of floods, hurricanes, earthquakes and other major events of nature.
The goal is to preserve information that may be helpful in developing strategies to mitigate damage from future disasters.
"We took a lot of photographs, took a lot of notes," said Bernhardt, who was joined by UA graduate student Behdad Mofarraj on the trip. Researchers from other universities, including Cassandra Rutherford, a University of Illinois assistant professor who helped lead the effort, took part and will share their expertise in various areas when the group writes its final report.
Bernhardt's engineering specialty concerns the geotechnical -- "a fancy word for anything related to dirt," she said. One of her main research interests focuses on modeling how small bits of soil react to certain types of loading forces.
A project she's working on involves finding a way to rapidly and inexpensively assess the condition of levees. Such earthen structures can make all the difference in averting widespread flooding, but a lack of funds prevents many sites from being regularly assessed, Bernhardt said.
Many levees in the United States are old and in need of repair, according to a 2013 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Among levees rated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, only about 8 percent were considered to be in acceptable condition, the report stated. Another 69 percent were considered "minimally acceptable," while 22 percent were labeled unacceptable.
"Public safety remains at risk from these aging structures, and the cost to repair or rehabilitate these levees is roughly estimated to be $100 billion by the National Committee on Levee Safety," the report stated.
Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported at least 11 levee failures from the recent flooding. Bernhardt said she saw two unrepaired levee breaches.
"In Arkansas, for the most part, the levees performed really well," Bernhardt said.
She said she visited some levee sites this week that added relief wells to help avoid breaches after a 2011 flooding event.
"On those levee systems, this was the first big flood since then," Bernhardt said, adding that she observed a few areas where relief wells seemed to do their job. The man-made relief wells provide outlets for water pressure, thus preserving sediment that is important to maintaining a levee's structural integrity.
However, each flooding event is unique given differences in the amount and location of rainfall. Bernhardt said it's difficult to directly compare how levee systems performed in separate flood events.
Past reports after extreme events have been made public, and Bernhardt said the same will be true after this most recent flooding.
"It'll just be overall lessons learned. So, we'll basically say, did we see anything that was an obvious aid in performance of these levee systems?" Bernhardt said.
Metro on 01/14/2016