In a New York Times feature on flooding in the Shreveport area, Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator says the recent rise of the Red River quickly went from “interesting to very serious,” adding that on Friday night last week he gave up hope of saving his own house near Twelve Mile Bayou.
“We cleared out everything we could. Antiques, furniture, we put everything on 16-inch cinder blocks,” he says.
The Mighty Red, as the river has been called, has engulfed Prator’s property and home, which was built in 1952. For more than a week, he’s been trying to do his job while recovering what he can from his house daily. It would not be so devastating if he could still reach it by foot or by car, but for now he has to travel by boat.
His house has 25 inches of water and nearly nothing left but damaged antique furniture and displaced memories of the last 12 years. His home does, however, have new residents: snakes, turtles, alligators, armadillos and skunks, mostly dead.
Sheriff Prator is also the local homeland security director and his wife, Carolyn, is the president of the Caddo Parish Levee Board. Officials do not yet know how many people have been hurt or how many houses have been affected by the worst flooding of the Red River here since 1945.
The flooding is a result of weeks of heavy rainfall across the South with billions of gallons of water still heading downstream. On its way to the Mississippi River, the Red flows through the Shreveport area, and the runoff from recent flooding in Texas and Oklahoma is now causing major flooding here and to the southeast in Bossier City.
In Shreveport, an area with a population of 450,000 people, the river level should remain above major flood stage—33 feet—through this weekend, says Chris Dolce, a meteorologist at Weather.com.
The river peaked on Monday at more than 37 feet and just a foot below a historic peak in 1945.
