Albert Pike campground is one of the victims of ‘flash floods’ in Arkansas. The flooding just swept away a numbers of campers. The flash flood occurred at midnight and did not give any time to the sleeping campers and swept them away.
The Albert Pike Campground incident is not an incident which is rare or unprecedented; rather there have been a number of such incidents in the area.
There has been very heavy rain fall this year and there is no such precedent in the recent history of Arkansas. In 1972, one such flood killed 237 people in Rapid City, South Dakota and this is remembered as a great catastrophe due to rain. A flash flood which arose out of a collapsed dam in 1889 killed more than 2,000 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
As far as the term ‘flash flood’ is concerned (like the one which brought destruction to Albert Pike Campground), it is a rapid and unpredictable raising of water level in the rivers due to heavy rain fall.
The heavy rain fall fills the rivers and provides a vicious force that suddenly changes its course towards some area.
It happens so due to the fact that such a heavy rain fall comes during night when most of the people are asleep on the camping ground. The water level in the rivers is raised in a very short time and the camping ground is flooded with water with in no time.
This is what happened at Albert Pike Campground. Although the area is favorite for mountain rangers who are not strangers to flooding of this area but they were not expecting a ‘midnight flash flood’. Floods kill almost one hundred people and displace almost 75,000 people every year.