People Drowned, Lawsuits To Follow

Twenty people were drowned or missing at that Arkansas campground when flash floods caused the river to rise 20 feet in minutes. All the news stories so far are on the really lamentable tragedy. But I also fear that within the next week or two we will also be hearing from the lawyers. It might even be a class action lawsuit, probably the state agency that built the campground for siting it so "dangerously close to the river." When people go camping, the lawsuit will say, they rely on the parks department for not putting a campground in an unsafe spot, next to a river that has been known to flood numerous time in the past 100 years."

I'm sure the river has flooded numerous times in the last century--five or six feet. I expect nobody ever heard of a placid little stream rising 20 feet in a matter of minutes though. Still it is obvious that some people suspected that this stream could go viral. Maybe they are old enough to remember past floods. Maybe they were warned. But at least some people built their cabins six or eight feet off the ground on stilts. Those cabins survived unscathed.

Even though no one is to blame it is a tragedy never the less. I can imagine the horror of a mother or father waking up in their sleeping bags inside their tent to discover their children being washed away in their sleeping bags in the dark. I read about one woman who had her child in her grasp but the current pulled her away. That mother will blame herself the rest of her life.

I just hope some attorney doesn't show up in her living room to tell her--wait a minute, it wasn't your fault. And don't let them fool you by telling you it was an act of God. God doesn't kill innocent children in their beds in the middle of the night. It was the state of Arkansas that did this. Many times over the years God warned them that this was a dangerous place to build a campsite by sending them small warning floods. And they paid no attention and now 20 people, many of them children, have paid the price for their arrogance and irresponsibility.