Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 14, 1990 TAG: 9005140305
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Highways reopened and flood victims began cleaning up in Oklahoma as National Guardsmen, inmates, farmers and volunteers filled sandbags and shored up levees in Louisiana and Arkansas.
"This is my home. If there was anything I could do, I was going to do it," said Rosie Blair, who worked alongside her husband and 14-year-old son in Texarkana, Ark.
Over the past three weeks, 13 deaths have been blamed on flooding: 12 in Texas and one in Oklahoma.
In Louisiana, heavy weekend rain compounded the flood threat as the Red River continued its rise from Shreveport to Alexandria. The river was expected to crest 5 feet above flood stage in Shreveport on Wednesday and had already overflowed in places.
About 60 families in the Shreveport area were evacuated Sunday as the river pushed into the bayous that usually feed it. "We expect upwards of about 100 more families to be evacuated over the next few days," said Chuck Mazziotti, civil defense director for Caddo and Bossier parishes.
Up to 600 square miles, including 200 square miles of farmland, will flood in the state this week and next, and up to 500 homes and camps between the levees and the river will be inundated, said U.S. Sen. J. Bennett Johnston.
"It will be a major agricultural disaster. It'll be a flood event such as we have not experienced since 1945," Johnston said after meeting with Army Corps of Engineers officials.
In Avoyelles Parish, National Guardsmen joined with about 50 Vick community members to finish a four-mile levee to protect recently planted corn, cotton and soybean fields.
In Texas, about 7,000 residents downstream of Lake Livingston Dam, 60 miles northeast of Houston, were told to evacuate their homes along the rain-swollen Trinity River. Officials said water was pouring over the reservoir's spillway at more than twice the normal rate.
"I'm going to get as far away as I can," said Tina Lapaglia, who spent Mother's Day with her husband and two children at a campground after abandoning their home in Camilla Twin Harbors. "Tomorrow I'll look for a new place for us to live."
by CNB