The May 2019 Arkansas River Flood: What Homeowners Learned

What actually happened on the Arkansas River in May 2019?

A long stretch of heavy spring rain filled the reservoirs upstream, and managers at Keystone Dam had to pass the water through. Releases rose from 160,000 cubic feet per second on May 21 to 275,000 on May 27, and the river downstream through Tulsa County ran high for days rather than hours.

A river flood on a managed system is a slow arithmetic problem, not a surprise. Rain falls across a basin that reaches far beyond Tulsa County, the reservoirs behind the dams absorb what they can, and when the pool approaches the limit the only remaining option is to let more water out of the bottom. The figures from that week describe a release almost doubling over six days. Nothing about the weather in Broken Arrow on May 27 explained how high the river was: the explanation was upstream and days old.

That shape of event ran through everything homeowners dealt with. The water did not arrive, crest and leave in an afternoon. It stayed up, soaked into ground that had nowhere left to drain, backed into the tributaries that normally empty into the river, and kept crawling at the edges while the sun was out. For anyone a few hundred feet from the bank, the damaging part was duration, not depth.

• Releases from Keystone Dam: 160,000 cubic feet per second on May 21, rising to 275,000 on May 27.
• Travel time from the release to south Tulsa and Bixby: about eight to ten hours.
• The river reached Bixby's high school and damaged several homes.
• Jenks ended its school year early.
• A leaking levee near West 36th Street and South Elwood was rebuilt overnight.

How much warning did homeowners really get?

Roughly eight to ten hours between a change at the dam and the effect in south Tulsa and Bixby. That is a working day of lead time, and it is the single biggest practical difference between a river flood here and the flash flooding that follows a spring thunderstorm over a local creek.

Eight hours is long enough to move a car, lift a water heater pan's worth of stored boxes off a garage floor, empty a bottom kitchen drawer, photograph every room, and get the pets, the medication and the paperwork out. It is not long enough to find a mover, drain a water line or build anything. Households who used the time well were the ones who had already decided, before the news, what the first twenty things out of the house would be.

The warning also arrived in an awkward form. The number that mattered was a release figure at a dam most people never think about, and translating it into a decision about a particular street required somebody else to do the work. That is what the city's emergency declaration and the voluntary evacuation advisory were for: they converted a hydrology figure into a line on a map that a resident could act on.

Which parts of Broken Arrow were told to leave?

Broken Arrow urged voluntary evacuation inside the 100-year floodplain, mainly south of 131st Street, and separately warned that Haikey Creek and Elm Creek could flood. The advisory was voluntary rather than mandatory, which left the final call with each household.

South of 131st Street is where the city's ground sits closest to the river corridor, and that is why the line fell there rather than along a subdivision boundary. The creek warnings covered a different mechanism. When the river runs high it slows and then backs up the smaller channels draining into it, so a creek can rise with no local rain at all, which is deeply counter-intuitive if you are standing in your yard under a clear sky.

A voluntary advisory is still information worth acting on. It tells you the authority watching the gauges thinks your block is inside the plausible range. Our flood water damage restoration crews are dispatched around the clock once water is inside, but the hours before that is the only window in which a homeowner can still choose what gets wet.

How is a river release different from creek flash flooding?

A dam release is slow, long and predictable within hours; creek flash flooding is fast, local and short. They damage a house differently, so the response differs too. River water tends to saturate from the ground up over days, while creek water arrives in a single surge and drops away.

The table below sets the two side by side as homeowners here encounter them. Both are real in this part of Tulsa County: the May 2019 event was the river, while the September 2018 rain that closed roads around Haikey Creek and the November 2024 storms that had police watching the Haikey and Adams Creek watersheds were the creek pattern.

Reading which one you are in changes the first decision. With a release, time exists and should be spent moving property upward and outward. With a creek surge, the only safe move is away from the water, because a channel that closes South 273rd East Avenue at Adams Creek is not something to drive through or wade into for a box of photographs.

What did homeowners say they would do differently?

The common answers after 2019 were practical and cheap: know the shutoff, keep the insurance paperwork somewhere portable, photograph the house while it is dry, and decide in advance what moves upstairs. None of it needs equipment, and all of it has to be done before a river is high.

A dry-house photo set is the most undervalued item on that list. After water, every conversation about what was damaged becomes a conversation about what the room looked like before, and memory is a poor witness. A walk through each room with a phone camera, including inside cabinets, the garage, the attic hatch and the exterior elevations, takes fifteen minutes and is worth having stored somewhere that is not in the house.

The second common lesson was about utilities and mechanical equipment. Furnaces, water heaters and electrical panels placed low are the parts that turn a wet floor into an unsafe room, and homeowners who had never looked at where theirs sat learned the answer at the worst time. If yours is low and you are near a mapped floodplain, that is a question worth putting to a licensed trade now rather than during an advisory.

• Find and label the main water shutoff, and check that it actually turns.
• Photograph every room, cabinet interior and elevation while the house is dry.
• Keep policy numbers and the insurer's claim line in a form you can read without power.
• Decide now which items go up first, and where upstairs or offsite they go.
• Know whether your furnace, heater and panel sit low enough to be at risk.

How do I find out whether my own address is exposed?

Check the current effective flood map for your address at FEMA's Map Service Center, and ask the city about local floodplain information. Preliminary panels are drafts and do not settle the question, and nobody should state a flood zone for a specific property from a drawing on a website.

FEMA's 2014 preliminary panels for Tulsa County label the East and Middle Branches of Haikey Creek and mark Zone AE along parts of Haikey Creek and the Arkansas River in south Broken Arrow. That tells you these corridors are mapped and studied. It does not tell you what applies to your lot, because preliminary maps can change before they become effective and because the boundary of a mapped zone does not follow a property line.

So the answer is a search you run yourself on the official map tool, by address, looking for the current effective panel. If the result matters financially, for a loan or for a policy decision, an elevation certificate prepared by a surveyor is the document that settles it. We write about the corridors on our Haikey Creek and Adams Creek flooding guide, and in neither place will you find us putting a zone on an address.

What does river water do to a house that clean water does not?

Floodwater from a river or creek carries soil, fuel residue, lawn chemicals and sewage that has overflowed somewhere upstream, so it is treated as contaminated. That changes what can be dried and kept, and it means porous materials that soaked it up are usually removed rather than saved.

A burst supply line releases clean water, and a lot of what it wets can be dried in place. Floodwater is at the other end of the scale. Carpet pad, fibrous insulation, particle-board cabinet bases and the bottom of drywall act as sponges for both the water and whatever came with it, and no amount of air movement makes a contaminated sponge clean. The honest sequence is extraction, removal of the materials that cannot be cleaned, then cleaning and drying what remains.

Mud is its own problem. Fine river sediment settles into every crack of a slab, under baseboards and inside wall cavities, and it stays damp long after the surface looks dry. Crews doing emergency water extraction after a flood spend as much effort on sediment and on opening cavities as on the water itself, because a cavity full of damp silt will keep a wall wet for weeks.

What should you do in the first hours after water gets in?

Stay out of standing water near electrical equipment, stop using anything that drains into a backed-up system, photograph everything before it moves, and get extraction started. Wet gypsum, framing and sediment do not recover on their own, and the clock on mold growth starts the moment materials are wet.

Documentation comes first because it is the only step that becomes impossible later. Photograph the water line on the walls, the standing depth against something with a known size, the affected contents and the exterior, and write down when you first saw water. Drying decisions and claim decisions are both made from the hours materials stayed wet, so that timestamp is genuinely useful.

Then get the water out. Phones at Broken Arrow Water Damage Restoration are answered 24 hours a day, and a crew is dispatched as fast as one becomes available. Between the call and the arrival, the useful work is lifting what can be lifted, getting furniture off wet carpet, and leaving the deeper decisions about what to cut and what to keep until somebody can read moisture rather than guess at it.