PHOTOS: Sandbags airdropped on levee gap in central Arkansas

Guard helicopter used to halt flooding in Lonoke County

A resident drives through floodwaters Friday near a home in Humnoke, where a levee failure has inundated about 100 homes.
A resident drives through floodwaters Friday near a home in Humnoke, where a levee failure has inundated about 100 homes.

An Arkansas National Guard helicopter was used Friday to lower 4,000-pound sandbags to stem water flowing through a breached levee near Humnoke in Lonoke County.

The Big Ditch Levee, located a couple miles of northwest of Humnoke, broke Monday night because of recent heavy rainfall, according to Doug Erwin, the county judge of Lonoke County. The rush of water caused a smaller levee that surrounds the town to flood, Erwin said.

Humnoke, a town of fewer than 300 people, sits at the intersection of Arkansas 13 and U.S. 165 in the southeast corner of the county and has a lower elevation than the communities around it, Erwin said.

About 100 homes flooded and have water between 6 inches and 2 feet deep, Erwin said. People in severe situations were told to evacuate but were not forced to do so, the county judge said.

Erwin said he asked the state for assistance Wednesday morning.

The National Guard set up operations Friday on farmland off Isbell Road, about a mile and a half away from the breach, agency spokesman Maj. Will Phillips said.

Crews used a backhoe to fill sandbags, which resemble reusable grocery bags but are much bigger, Phillips said. Each bag is white, about 4.5 feet wide and 5 to 6 feet in length, weighs 4,000 pounds and has handles, he said.

The handles were attached to a clamp at the end of a long steel cable controlled by a Black Hawk helicopter, Phillips said. The pilot maneuvered each bag through a small opening in a thicket of trees, then lowered it onto the 75-foot-wide levee breach, which took considerable skill, Phillips said.

"It was a tiny hole and it was a windy day today," he said.

The Guard planned to drop between 20 to 22 sandbags by Friday night, Phillips said. As of Friday afternoon, 15 sandbags -- or 60,000 pounds of sand -- had been dropped.

The surrounding fields were flooded "as far as the eyes could see," according to Phillips, who surveyed the operation from a another helicopter.

The Guard and state officials will continue to monitor the situation. More rain is predicted to fall in the area this weekend.

The Vicksburg, Miss., district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provided assistance Friday, a spokesman said. The levee is in the federal agency's zone of operations but "it's not ours," district spokesman Greg Raimondo said.

The levee does not show up in the federal levee database, Raimondo said. Nor does it belong to Lonoke County, Erwin said.

"We don't have anything to do with it," the county judge said.

The state emergency management agency does not oversee levees, according to spokesman Dan Noble. The levee in question appears to be on private property, he added.

Last month appears to be the wettest February in Arkansas since at least 1939 and potentially the wettest February since state averages began being tabulated in 1895, according to the National Weather Service in North Little Rock.

The Stuttgart airport, about 12 miles east of Humnoke, received more than 14.28 inches in February, which broke the previous record 0f 8.67 inches set in 2001.

Information for this article was contributed by reporters Rachel Herzog of Arkansas Online; and by Bill Bowden of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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Workers load sand into bags Friday to be airlifted to a levee that broke north of Humnoke in Lonoke County.

Metro on 03/10/2018

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