Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Twin tornadoes in northeast Arkansas
Debris from destroyed homes and vehicles is scattered across a neighborhood in Harrisburg on Thursday, after a tornado Wednesday night. The tornado, which officials said damaged more than 30 homes and injured three people, was one of two reported in northeast Arkansas as the storm system swept through. Video at arkansasonline.com/410damage/.
(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe)
HARRISBURG — Stephanie Fatheree and her mother, Angie, rushed to get into the bathroom of their small home Wednesday night, just moments before a tornado cut a path through their neighborhood.
The lights went out, and they hurried to get into the bathtub as the violent winds tore apart their home.
“It’s like a freight train hit the house,” Stephanie Fatheree said.
The noise sounded like a bomb, she said, or someone throwing cinder blocks.
“We thought the house was going to come down on us,” she said Thursday morning.
The tornado that touched down in Poinsett County destroyed their home and damaged more than 30 others, according to officials.
Three people were injured, but no one was killed, Sheriff Kevin Molder said. One person’s injuries were minor. The other two suffered wounds that weren’t life-threatening, he said. Two people were transported to the hospital.
Meteorologist Phil Baker with the National Weather Service in Memphis, Tenn., said it appears rotation from the storm began Wednesday in Jackson County before moving into Poinsett County, a mostly rural area with a population of 23,528, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A large chunk of the county is farmland.
Damage also was reported in Craighead County.
A preliminary damage summary from the weather service in Memphis said two tornadoes touched down in the area. An EF0 tornado, with winds reaching 65-70 mph, touched down near Cash in Craighead County. An EF2 tornado touched down near Claypool Reservoir and traveled north of Harrisburg, with winds reaching 125 mph.
It was the second time in two weeks northeast Arkansas has been struck by a tornado. An EF3 twister touched down March 28 in Jonesboro. No fatalities were reported, but 22 people were injured. More than 240 homes received major damage or were destroyed, and another 390 received minor damage, officials said.
“It’s not normal to see two powerful, large tornadoes in the same area in a couple of weeks,” Baker said. “In a large scope of things it’s not unusual to see tornadoes in April, but two this close together in this short of time is unusual.”
Angie Fatheree, 53, was sitting on the curb smoking a cigarette Thursday morning as workers down the block cleared debris and neighbors picked through what remained of their homes and possessions.
“I’m still in shock,” she said. After the storm had passed, a first-responder — Angie and her daughter weren’t sure if he was a firefighter or someone else — carried Angie through the collapsed remnants of the house because she had difficulty walking. She and her daughter stayed with a neighbor Wednesday night, right around the corner from the house Angie had lived in since 1999, when it was built. Angie suffered a long, thin cut on her arm, but otherwise she and her daughter were unhurt.
Stephanie Fatheree, 27, said they will search the home for anything that can be salvaged and store their belongings at friends’ houses. Their cat escaped during the chaos, but they hadn’t found him as of Thursday morning.
They also were having trouble contacting their insurance provider because the office was closed amid the coronavirus outbreak, Angie said, and they couldn’t reach the insurer by telephone because they didn’t have service.
They weren’t sure where they will live for the long term. “We don’t want to inconvenience anybody,” Angie said. Molder, the county sheriff, said Thursday that 29 structures in the subdivision and two more in the county had been damaged. Ten of the homes were leveled, he said. Power hadn’t been restored to the residential area shortly after 11 a.m., said Roderick Moore, Harrisburg’s police chief. Because of damage to utility poles throughout the county, officials didn’t have a timeline for when it might be restored. Workers and volunteers in the area Thursday included utility workers, and American Red Cross and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers.
About five families who were displaced are staying in temporary shelters set up at Harrisburg High School and a local inn, according to Moore. The number of families in temporary housing might grow, Moore said, as some families who weren’t at home return to Harrisburg.
Mayor Justin Kimble said the city is lucky the storm’s punch was limited to structural damage.
“I’m just glad everybody’s OK,” he said.
Kimble said debris from the neighborhood had been found as far as a half-mile away.
“Right through here, this is the only neighborhood that was hit,” he said. “We’re just fortunate, completely fortunate.”
He said he believes it won’t take long for the neighborhood to rebuild, thanks to help from the community in northeast Arkansas.
“Everything’s running so smooth,” he said. “It’s great.”
Sheriff’s deputies monitoring the storm saw the tornado touch down and rise up a couple of times after it entered Poinsett County, Molder said.
“It traveled a long way where there was just farmland,” he said. “So we were lucky in that part.”
Daniel Coughlin, his wife, Marie, and their 13-year-old son, David, were at their house on the corner of
Mallard Drive and Country Lane, getting ready to go bed and watch television when the tornado siren went off.
They huddled in the bathroom for a few minutes and could hear the tornado ripping pieces away from their roof. They heard debris being sucked out through the roof, and Coughlin said it felt like the house was lifting into the air.
“We didn’t see it, we heard it,” Coughlin said.
The storm tore siding away from the top part of the home, exposing the beams inside, broke apart a shed and shattered windows on their truck. The first thing Coughlin saw when he opened the front door was the neighbor’s house across the street, which had been destroyed.
Raquel Stringfellow, a Harrisburg resident for nearly a year, also was at home when the tornado hit. Her house doesn’t have a bathtub, so the 32-yearold Stringfellow ran to a tiny closet in her bedroom, clutching her puppy while talking to her mom on the phone.
“I could feel wind on my back,” she said Thursday afternoon, standing in the gutted remains of her bedroom.
They stayed on the phone the entire time, she said. Stringfellow cried; her mom prayed.
When the tornado had passed, Stringfellow stepped out of the closet into a bedroom strewn with insulation and bits of glass. She looked up and saw that her roof had been torn away.
“I was just hollering,” Stringfellow said. “I was like, ‘I lost it all.’”
“On the phone she was telling me, ‘Mom, my house is gone. Everything I worked for is gone,’” Kim Carmichael said.
Carmichael was outside what was left of her daughter’s home Thursday waiting for Stringfellow to arrive with a truck for the cleanup effort.
“I’m so thankful she had battery [power] on this cellphone, because it just seemed like it was a lifesaver for the communication with us,” Carmichael said.
Stringfellow said she was grateful that her three daughters — ages 3, 5 and 10 — weren’t at home when the tornado struck.
She moved to Harrisburg to take a job after a divorce. Now she’s not sure where she’ll go, aside from reporting to work this morning. Stringfellow said she might stay at an empty house in Jonesboro owned by the father of a friend while she gets back on her feet.
“Everything in this house, I worked my butt off the last 10 months to get, you know?” she said. “Guess I’ll just start all over again.”