Pick-up Truck Rebuilding

With flooding gone, cleanup, rebuilding begins in Arkansas; some move into ...

DES ARC, Ark. — Athen Fisher stood next to his pickup truck Thursday and looked at his one-story home with a pier that stretches into the White River. Most of the walls and furniture inside had been cleared out. The flowers in the front yard had started to wilt.

Flooding from the river swamped Fisher's home for two weeks. The 72-year-old retiree moved Thursday into a mobile home parked in his front yard, where he'll live for the next several months.

"Me and it's the only thing that got out," he said, gesturing to the truck.

Across Arkansas, residents are starting to rebuild after weeks of floods from the White River and other state waterways.

The flooding wrecked hundreds of homes and thousands of acres of farmland. Authorities have given out almost $19 million in disaster aid after the spring storms, said Tommy Jackson, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management. About $16 million has gone to residents needing housing assistance, he said.

Some farmland still is flooded is Chicot, Desha, Monroe and Phillips counties in eastern Arkansas, Jackson said. The Arkansas Farm Bureau has estimated crop losses at $500 million, with millions more in equipment and other damage. That number still could rise.

Mark McElroy, the Desha County judge, or chief administrative official, said some residents who had lost their homes along the Mississippi River were being forced to start over.

About 15 homes in the county used by permanent residents and about 60 weekend cabins were severely flooded, McElroy said.

"It's an eye-opening experience for the people who've been through it," he said. "You wouldn't think that water could destroy a home the way it does."

In other areas, the recovery was just beginning. Landline phone service in Georgetown resumed Wednesday, resident Elizabeth Hampton said. The White River in May hit a record-high crest, 33.95 feet, at the tiny east Arkansas town.

"My whole house was surrounded by water," Hampton said. "It got underneath, but not inside of it."

Fisher wasn't so lucky. More than five feet of water from the White River flooded the home where he's lived for four years after retiring from Tennessee.

Fisher's two adult sons, who took him in during the flooding, helped him pull out the soaked insulation and furnishings ruined by the storm. Polaroid pictures and old belongings were scattered in a back room. His eighth-grade yearbook — more than a half-century old — was left open, its pages bent and dried.

The Stryker: Super 8

In the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio, early 1979, a factory worker at the local steel mill changes the number of days since the last accident from 784 days to 1 day. Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a 13-year-old boy living in town, has lost his mother in the accident and holds his mother's locket which contains a picture of her holding him as an infant. Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard) comes to the funeral but Joe's father, Deputy Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler), puts Dainard in handcuffs. It is later revealed by Alice (Elle Fanning), Dainard's daughter, that her father, an alcoholic, had been drinking the morning of the accident. Since Joe's mother was a kind woman, she stayed to cover his shift that day. Unfortunately, doing so resulted in her being fatally crushed by a steel beam. Four months later, as summer break begins, Alice uses her father's car to take Joe and his friends Charles (Riley Griffiths), Preston (Zach Mills), Martin (Gabriel Basso), and Cary (Ryan Lee) to an old train depot. The group is shooting a scene there for Charles's low budget zombie movie on Super 8 film. During the shoot, Joe witnesses a pick-up truck drive onto the tracks towards an oncoming train, which causes a massive derailment. Recovering from the accident, the kids find the wreck littered with strange white cubes. The kids approach the truck and discover Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), their biology teacher, behind the wheel of the truck. He instructs them to never talk about what they saw; otherwise, they and their parents will be killed. Soon, the U.S. Air Force, led by Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich), arrives to secure the crash site while the kids flee. After days of strange phenomena (pets running away, kitchen appliances, car engines, and power lines disappearing; people being abducted), the Air Force deliberately starts a wildfire outside of town. This gives them a pretense to evacuate the entire town to the local Air Force base. At the base, Joe runs into Louis, who tells him that a creature abducted Alice. Joe, Charles, Cary, and Martin sneak back into town and head to their school, where they break into Woodward's stash of confiscated items, thinking he may have hidden in the stash documentations about the creature that might help them save Alice. In the papers, film, and audio recordings they find, they discover that the government imprisoned an extraterrestrial (Bruce Greenwood) that crashed on Earth in 1958.

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