Families evacuated in Oklahoma flooding

Chad Wagner barely had a chance to use the solid walnut king-size bed he had bought before his head filled with visions of the 800-pound piece of furniture floating in the water.
Wagner’s new bed was a casualty of flooding in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area Tuesday, but the El Reno resident’s family made it out safely — with the help of a boat rescue by area firefighters.
Wagner said he’d bought the new bed, along with some other items that hadn’t been delivered yet, two days ago and, luckily, he bought the furniture protection plan too. Still, he wasn’t too happy that at least eight inches of water filled his house.
“It is a crushing blow, like a punch to the back of the head,” Wagner said Tuesday after his wife, two children and German shepherd dog were evacuated from their home.
Another family of five — a mother, two children and two grandparents — were pulled from a home in northwest Oklahoma City where they could have been swept away by fast-moving waters if they had tried to leave.
Other than that, a few days of constant rainfall seemed to cause the most havoc on area roads.
More than a dozen roads had been closed because of impassable water and there were at least two instances in which vehicles had to be pulled out of high water, but no large-scale evacuations had been ordered after several inches of rain fell in the area in recent days.
Wagner and his family are used to watching the creek near their house rise in a certain pattern, and usually it doesn’t threaten their home. But he thinks some construction on a nearby bridge might have exacerbated the flooding this time.
“It forced the current straight back up into my house. Normally, you can watch and have plenty of time to get out,” said Wagner, who was at his job as a respiratory therapist at El Reno’s Parkview Hospital when the waters started to threaten his home. “This morning we had no time to get out.”
Rescuers pulled out Wagner’s wife and two children on their first trip, and made a second trip to fetch the family’s dog, city public information officer Terry Floyd said.
“He was a big German shepherd. He probably could have swam it just fine,” Floyd said.
Wagner said the home also flooded exactly a year earlier, when remnants of Tropical Storm Erin passed through the state.
The Oklahoma Mesonet recorded 4.7 inches of rainfall in El Reno, west of Oklahoma City in Canadian County, in a 24-hour period and nearly 6 1/2 inches at Minco in neighboring Grady County. Rainfall in Oklahoma City ranged from 1 1/2 inches to nearly 4 inches in that time frame.
“We could have used a little, but we didn’t need a gullywasher,” said Jerry Smith, emergency management director for Canadian County, where El Reno is located.
The National Weather Service was calling for more rain across the state on Tuesday night, with the potential for several inches of rain in some areas. Flood warnings were issued for urban areas and small streams in Canadian, Kingfisher, Logan and Oklahoma counties in central Oklahoma.
“We’re in a lull. We could get anywhere from a half-inch to an inch more, but overnight we could receive more heavy downpours. If it does that, we’re looking at this all over again with the floodwaters,” Smith said.
“If this doesn’t recede, it’s just going to be more of a problem.”
Heavy rain also was falling in other parts of the state. In the last three days, Walters, in Cotton County in southwestern Oklahoma, has received 7.96 inches of rain, and Waurika, in neighboring Jefferson County, has received 9.65 inches.
The flooding occurred exactly one year after the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin brought heavy rains and flooding to Oklahoma, causing at least seven deaths.

State Emergency Management Department spokeswoman Michelann Ooten said the Emergency Operations Center had not received any requests for state assistance but was keeping track of flood reports. Four presidential disaster declarations were issued for flooding in Oklahoma last year, Ooten said.
Smith said emergency officials were monitoring a cluster of about 50 homes near the El Reno rescue in case more evacuations were necessary.
“If the water keeps rising in this area, it could potentially get into some other homes,” Smith said. “Right now, we’ve only got one family that’s evacuated and probably a couple of others that might be minorly affected by it.
“The potential is there for the water to rise, and if it does that, then we’re looking at a more serious problem with getting maybe 10 or 15 more families out of there if it keeps up.”
Smith said some homes in the area known as Banner along State Highway 66, the former U.S. Highway 66, were on higher ground. Some residents opted to stay in their homes because they owned boats, Floyd said.
“There’s others that are probably affected, but at this point they don’t want to leave,” Smith said. “We’re kind of watching the weather and seeing what it’s going to do. We’re expecting some more torrential rain overnight, and if that happens we might have to take some measures to evacuate more families outside the area.”
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Associated Press writer Murray Evans contributed to this report from Oklahoma City.