By Eli Stokes
I sat in the back of a BMW sedan as we slowly drove through a neighborhood, with my camera at the ready. I had heard of the damage and watched dozens of videos, both in the aftermath of the tornado and in preparation for this story. I knew my hometown had been ripped apart, and I knew the neighborhoods not even 15 minutes away from my childhood home, the home where my parents still live, had been decimated. But I hadn’t seen much of it with my own eyes.
The first time that I drove through Walnut Valley, one of the neighborhoods that got destroyed, I immediately compared it to a war zone. Most houses had their roofs ripped off, and some had been completely leveled. I watched volunteers scurry throughout the neighborhood, trying to slowly remedy the destruction, even if it was a seemingly impossible task.
On March 31, an EF3 tornado ripped through Little Rock, Ark. killing five and injuring dozens. According to The National Weather Service the tornado had wind speeds of 165 mph and traveled over 20 miles. The twister damaged over 2,600 buildings, blowing out windows in some and mincing others. The tornado was part of a larger storm system that affected seven states, all of which experienced large tornadoes similar to the one that touched down in Little Rock.
Meteorologists use the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF Scale) to measure the severity of tornadoes based on their wind speed. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) an EF3 tornado is classified as severe, and an EF4 devastating. The wind speed of the tornado that ripped through Little Rock was 1 mph under being classified as an EF4.
I was following a woman named Layla Hadidi on my journey through the city. Hadidi is a private flight attendant that lives in Huntington Beach, Cali. She’s a Little Rock native, and her father owns a rug store on the west side of town. While she was on a flight that Friday, she got a text from her brother that her dad’s shop had been damaged by a tornado. She did not believe him at first.
“I thought he was kidding, honestly,” she said. “Things like this, it’s like they always happen to someone else far away, not at home.”
While it was still standing and had a roof, the front windows were shattered and debris cluttered the floor. When I arrived at the shop, her father and some of their family and staff were working to clear debris off of the ground.
Despite the damage to her father’s store, she was not back in Little Rock to help him. In the week between the tornado and Hadidi’s arrival, she had raised $5,250 via Instagram. Donations from friends, family, and her small following poured in. Her goal was to distribute the money in five separate payments of just over $1000 by directly handing out cash to residents in the affected areas.
We drove down a two-lane road surrounded by trees and suburbia. All of them were seemingly untouched, completely unaffected by the severe weather event that happened not even a mile down the road. But as we drove over a hill, the damage became visible. Trees had been ripped out of the ground, cars had been turned on their side, and the apartment complex we turned into was missing its roof.
The first neighborhood we visited was adjacent to the apartment complex off Reservoir Road. Massive trees had been uprooted and still lay on top of people’s houses. Books, toys, and family photos were still strewn out on the ground around hundreds of houses. Roofs had been ripped off of homes and walls had been torn down, providing a window into people’s lives. But they were not there. As Layla searched for a resident, the only people that were in the destroyed neighborhood were volunteers and city workers.
Since there were no residents to give the money to, we left to try our luck in another neighborhood.
Dr. Timothy Eichler is an atmospheric scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center. He explained that Arkansas resides in what is known as Dixie Alley, which is the southern sibling of Tornado Alley in the Great Plains. The tornadoes that plague the South are often part of storm systems that mix with the moist, tropic air from the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, tornadoes in the South are often accompanied, or even shrouded, by rain. This makes them harder to see than the tornadoes formed by the dry air in the plains.
Another trait that differentiates tornadoes in the South from the ones in the plains is how they jump. In the plains, the ground is primarily flat. But in the rolling hills of the South, strong winds are disturbed by the rough terrain and the tornadoes can lift off the ground. The tornado that hit Little Rock did just that on several occasions during its time on the ground.
Hadidi and I followed one of the jumps, moving from one neighborhood that was completely destroyed to the next. The two were separated by neighborhoods that were completely unharmed, graciously left alone by the wind.
Emily and Jeff Hood moved their family into Walnut Valley two years ago. The house is a five minute walk to the neighborhood park and pool, which makes it an ideal location for them and their five young children. They hoped to build a life in this neighborhood.
As the storm approached and the tornado warning sirens blared, Jeff raced to pick up their children from school and his wife from work. They planned to weather the storm together in their home. As the wind and noise roared outside of their car, they realized they needed to seek refuge in a nearby fire station, which later temporarily closed for damage itself.
After the storm they were forced to walk home because of the trees that were covering the road. They arrived to their home completely destroyed.
“We don’t really know what’s next,” Emily Hood said. “If we could rebuild we would love to, even if the neighborhood is never going to be the same.”
The Hood family’s house is being covered by insurance, and they currently have a bright green convertible Mustang for a rental car and are living in a hotel. They were one of the first people that Hadidi gave money to.
When I arrived in Little Rock, it had been nine days since the tornado had happened. The first neighborhood we visited was adjacent to the apartment complex where I saw the damage with my own eyes for the first time. While the trees had been moved off of roads by workers, the neighborhoods were still ravaged. Massive trees had been uprooted and still lay on top of people’s houses. Roofs had been ripped off of homes and walls had been torn down, providing a window into people’s lives. But they were not there. The only people that were in the destroyed neighborhood were volunteers and city workers.
The volunteers were working with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that provides relief across the world after war, natural disasters, or any of the other afflictions that people face. Hadidi and I spoke to some of the volunteers that were at the site of the disaster to help clean up the debris. The group of five or so volunteers in this neighborhood had poured in from Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, and Oregon. Some planned to stay for only a few days, others for weeks.
Walnut Valley was even worse than Reservoir. It was the same kind of destruction, just more of it. From the hill above it, it used to be impossible to see more than a couple of streets because of the trees that surrounded it. Now those trees were lying across houses, yards, or cut up into piles, and you could see every bit of the now destroyed neighborhood. Many of the houses had been completely destroyed, and the ones that were still standing were missing walls–many of them no longer safe to enter. The homes that still stood had walls ripped down, exposing the possessions and memories of their inhabitants to the outside elements.
There were children’s toys, books, televisions, DVD’s, dishware, and any other household item you could think of scattered on the street, in people’s yards, and littering the floors of the destroyed homes.
Hadidi had a strong personal connection to the area. City employees and relief workers had set up shop in the pool Hadidi worked as a lifeguard at in high school. Across the street from that was the home of one of her childhood friends, which had been completely destroyed.
Those old friends of Hadidi’s were cooking lunch when the tornado came through. They heard what sounded like a train rumbling down tracks, which is the distinct sound tornadoes make. Before they could even process what had happened they were buried under rubble, unable to even hear each other scream for help or to see if their friends were still alive. Eventually, all three of them dug their way out, somehow emerging with nothing but small scratches. However, every tornado cloud has a silver lining, and theirs was the rice that they had been cooking. They ate it amidst the wreckage of what used to be their home.
A few blocks down from the Hood’s house was a collection of volunteers, some from Samaritan’s Purse, some from local churches, and some who lived in the neighborhood or nearby and wanted to lend a helping hand. Volunteers were moving debris, cutting fallen trees apart, and handing out water. According to one of the volunteers, one woman who lived in the neighborhood and had her house destroyed had been picking through the rubble of her own home in an effort to find summer clothes to hand to the volunteers to ward off the heat.
Down the road, an elderly couple who live in the neighborhood, who requested not to be named, declined the money that Hadidi offered, even after admitting to needing it. Despite some of their roof being gone and trees toppled over in their yard, they insisted one of their neighbors needed the money more than they did. When she offered to just give them a part of the original sum, they still refused it.
“I couldn’t even walk back (to the house) because the trees were all over,” the wife said. “Not little trees and brush, but big, old-growth trees were lying in the roads.” The woman, who appeared to be in her late sixties, described climbing over and crawling under trees on the way back to her home.
The last neighborhood we visited was the same as all of the others. While the majority of homes in this neighborhood weren’t completely destroyed, many were missing roofs or walls. There, we met a few men who were aged between their teenage years and their 40s. They were splitting wood from a fallen tree in a backyard.
The homeowner, Ryan Scott, said that his back wall and roof were ripped off of the house by the tornado. His insurance had already covered the damage and the wall had been fixed. “We (him and his wife) have some survivor’s guilt, honestly,” Scott said. “You’re in the same boat as them but it’s quite a bit different,” he said, gesturing to the house across the street that had been completely destroyed.
“We all have losses, but we have different levels of loss. You want to feel loss but you look across the street and see something totally different.”
On the day that I was with her, Hadidi only handed out one of the five envelopes of cash. She found some connections that did lead to people that needed the money later in the week. While literally handing out free money was harder than she expected, she did eventually get every dollar she raised into the hands of a few people who needed it.
The city of Little Rock has a long road of recovery ahead. FEMA has already donated over $4 million according to KARK.com, and almost 6,000 people had already applied for assistance on April 13. Mayor Frank Scott Jr. conducted bi-weekly press conferences following the natural disaster. On April 14 he announced that $341,000 had been donated to the city through the Little Rock Cares Emergency Relief Fund, an initiative started by the city. The Red Cross, the Arkansas Department of Human Services, and the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management are all working together to provide temporary housing to the over 500 people that were displaced by the storm.
The state’s capitol resembles London during World War II. The splotches of destruction are something like the patches of destruction that were produced by German bombing runs. But just like the citizens of Britain during the war, the residents of Little Rock stand strong and continue to help each other.
After almost six months of recovery, the city is still early in the recovery process. Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said in a press conference in May that the overall recovery may take up to two years. Despite this, the city remains hopeful. The city raised $400,000 to help those impacted and Heart of Arkansas United Way has been put in charge of distributing those funds to those who need it most. According to an article published by THV 11, the organization hopes to provide relief and funding to citizens of Little Rock by the end of the year.