Arkansas continues recovery from tornado, braces for more bad weather

If Saturday was a day to measure the breadth of the damage wrought by an EF-3 tornado on Friday afternoon, then Sunday was a day to gauge the depth of the recovery required.

Organizations offering food, shelter and supplies in Little Rock, North Little Rock and other affected communities did brisk business Sunday — both from people needing and people donating — while local officials began the work of deciding how to proceed.

"We're on day three of many, many days ahead of us," said North Little Rock Police Chief Mike Davis.

Also Sunday, the National Weather Service offices in North Little Rock and Memphis continued to survey the storm's damage and uncover other areas where the tornado hit, all while keeping their eyes on another storm front expected to hit the state by Tuesday.

Colby Pope, a meteorologist with the service's North Little Rock office, said all hazards — high winds, large hail and strong tornadoes — are possible with the system.

“I’d say that’s going to be a possibility for whole state,” Pope said. “Right now, that’s what I’m looking at here.”

Donation centers buzzing

Volunteers with North Little Rock’s First Assembly stood outside one wing of the building Sunday afternoon passing out tarps, food, water, cleaning supplies, toys for kids and more.

“We’re the designated spot for drop-offs in the city of NLR,” one volunteer said. “About every other car is a drop-off and about every other car is a pick-up. We’ve gone through two 18-wheeler trucks of food and supplies in the last 24 hours. We’re not asking for any information. If you’re asking for it, we’re giving it.”

According to another volunteer with the church, donations from community members had wrapped around the building by Saturday afternoon. A truck from Amazon’s disaster relief was scheduled to drop off a new load of supplies Sunday evening.

“The biggest need right now is tarps, boxes and containers for people to put their stuff in,” the volunteer added. “Since we’re the city-designated we have 18-wheelers come and unload supplies here and then city services and trailers head out into communities like Levy because they can’t get big trucks in.”

The church — which is located at 4501 Burrow Drive, just west of U.S. 67/167 in North Little Rock, about 1 1/2 miles north of the Interstate 40 interchange — is operating from around 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day of the week.

On Murray Street in Little Rock, members of the Little Rock Fire Academy are working alongside Goodwill to collect and distribute supplies to community members.

Residents dropped off non-perishables, toiletries, water and more from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.

“Yesterday we transported about 70 palettes of goods,” Little Rock’s Communications Director Aaron Sadler said. “I think we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of cars come through.”

Beginning Monday, the city of Little Rock will open a Family Assistance Center at 315 N. Shackleford Roiad, Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said Sunday. The Family Assistance Center is a partnership with Engage Arkansas, Arkansas Baptist Disaster Relief, the Salvation Army, Wolfe Street Foundation, Center for Youth and Families, Immanuel Baptist Church, Goodwill Industries, and the United Way.

“We are united in our commitment to serve those who were impacted by this storm as we move forward together to rebuild," Scott said. "I’m humbled by the outpouring of support from not just this community, but from around the world.

The center will provide water, food, and supplies, and people may also request volunteer chainsaw crews through the center who will assist residents with tree removal and tarp placement. FEMA representatives will be onsite for residents who need federal assistance.

NLR schools off to assess damage, needs

North Little Rock School District Superintendent Greg Pilewski said all schools will be closed for students on Monday, though staff and faculty are to report to their schools. The day will be used to further learn about faculty’s needs during this time, the plan for bus routes in impacted areas and ensuring that power is back to all of the schools.

The district’s tentative plan is to have students and staff back in school Tuesday, he said.

“We think tomorrow is going to be a big transition day and we’re going to learn a lot,” Pilewski said.

North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick said North Little Rock has hired an Alabama company to help facilitate the cleanup. Crowdergulf LLC works with communities needing assistance with disaster recovery, debris removal and coastal restoration services.

Sherwood Mayor Jo Heye-Townsell said her city will also contract with Crowdergulf to assist in clean-up efforts in their city.

Davis said even with the contractor, the city will still need help during the upcoming weeks as everyone “goes back to work.”

“If you haven’t done anything up until now, don’t think ‘hey, it’s over, I don’t have to worry about it now,’" he said. "We need more in the next few weeks.”

Little Rock efforts

At a Sunday morning press conference at the heavily damaged Colony West shopping center off North Rodney Parham Road, where the sound of chainsaws and heavy equipment nearly drowned out the speakers, Scott the city is working toward recovery.

“We’re going to try and get operations back to as smooth as possible,” Scott said. “It’s going to probably take months for a lot of these residential communities, as well as our commercial activity, to get back to normal. It’s our first priority to do all we can to rebuild and recover for the residents of Little Rock and Central Arkansas.”

City staff and community members have spent the days following the Friday storm coming together to clear roadways, provide free meals to those in need and offering their services where they can, the mayor said.

Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives highlighted that their assistance can be used in many ways by those affected by the storm.

Speakers with the federal organization reminded people that not every person’s impact story will look the same or require the same assistance. Those seeking help from the agency will discuss what services are needed and will be directed to the necessary resources and help, they said.

Pamela Smith, spokesperson for the Little Rock School District, said school will open districtwide as normal on Monday morning after assessments over the weekend determined that no school district property was damaged. Smith said there are some remaining problems with communications, particularly internet service, due to widespread damage to utility poles.

“We have crews working to get that repaired because that impacts our communications district-wide,” Smith said. “We have different sites that feed into different schools in clusters and some of the lines are in the air and as a result of the storm damage, it caused a fiber issue at some of our sites.”

Smith said over the weekend efforts were made to ensure that bus routes would be unimpeded.

Power-packed storm

The National Weather Service office in North Little Rock has confirmed that the EF-3 tornado, with winds reaching 165 miles per hour, cut a path of destruction through the metro area that stretched for 32 miles before the twister dissipated.

Information on the weather service website said the tornado touched down at 2:22 p.m. and ran along a northwest track through Pulaski and Lonoke counties before it dissipated at 2:57 p.m. just south of Cabot cutting a 600 yard-wide path at its widest.

Pope, the National Weather Service staff meteorologist, said on Sunday that surveyors have determined that the worst damage in central Arkansas was along a northeast track from the North Shackleford Road area into west Little Rock before the storm crossed the Arkansas River into North Little Rock. Pope said that surveyors are also investigating an area in Garland County near Pine Mountain where damage reports were received. He said the storm cell that passed over Garland County is the same one that produced the tornado that initially touched down in Little Rock.

“We want to make sure it wasn’t on the ground earlier in the Hot Springs vicinity,” Pope said. “We’re also trying to confirm reports of possible damage in Stone County and also in Prairie County, near and just northeast of Des Arc, so those will be some places we’ll be surveying in coming days. Sometimes we get damage reports that turn out to be straight line winds but we have to conduct a survey to know for sure.”

Pope said it will take several days to complete the surveys and to release final information on the storms.

The National Weather Service office in Memphis, which is responsible for eastern Arkansas including Cross County, said a preliminary report has determined the tornado that struck Wynne, destroying much of the town including the high school, was likely an EF-3, but said final determinations of wind speed, the width and length of the tornado track and total damage estimates will take time because of widespread damage in Tennessee and Mississippi associated with Friday’s storms.

Sheana Walsh, a staff meteorologist with the Memphis office said more information will be made available in coming days and survey teams continue inspecting the area.

“They’re still out in the field, still surveying,” Walsh said. “This could be a days thing but we’re comfortable right now with a preliminary reading of EF-3 for that particular tornado.”

Pope said there is concern regarding a system approaching from the west that could bring another round of severe weather as early as Tuesday that was forecast to bring some rain to the area Sunday night as the warm front begins moving closer to the state.

“This is going to prime the environment for the potential on Tuesday,” he said. “We’ll see a lot more moisture and a lot warmer temperatures that we’ll notice Monday and even during the day on Tuesday. We expect the next round of severe weather, at least the potential for severe weather will be late Tuesday afternoon into Tuesday night.”

On the heels of that system, Pope said, is a cold front that is expected to move into the state on Wednesday before stalling and becoming stationary near the Gulf of Mexico. That, he said, will funnel moisture into Arkansas through the end of the week making rain more likely.

“Between now and Friday,” he said, “across far southern Arkansas, we could see anywhere from three to six inches of rain. The central part of the state could get anywhere from a half inch to two inches of rain and across northern Arkansas, they could see from a few tenths of an inch to upwards of an inch.”

Persistent power outages

As the storms moved through, in addition to damage to homes and businesses, electrical service was interrupted to 56,000 Entergy Arkansas customers throughout the state. An Entergy Arkansas spokeswoman, Brandi Hinkle, said as of Sunday evening, those outages have been reduced to 12,050 statewide and more than 3,000 linemen are working to restore existing outages.

“We’ve actually restored about 50,000 but that’s because sometimes the power goes on and goes off, depending on the weather, trees continue to fall, limbs and things like that,” Hinkle said. “Also, we’ve had a lot of debris, not just tree limbs but roof shingles, trash, piles of debris that we have to maneuver around to get to the power lines … and these happen to be in heavily populated neighborhoods where we can’t just pull up in a bucket truck. We have to use a lot of specialized equipment.”

With damage to Entergy’s equipment 95% scouted and assessed, Hinkle said, crews are working to replace 1,500 damaged power poles, 400 transformers and some 2,000 spans of wire. Once the work is complete, however, Hinkle said much of the replaced infrastructure will be better able to withstand severe weather when it occurs.

“We’re replacing the broken power poles with larger poles and in some instances, concrete poles, so they should be more resilient going forward,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they’re going to be tornado proof but we do hope they will be more resilient going forward because some of these power poles that were blown down are decades old. We don’t necessarily replace poles unless they are damaged or decaying but this is a great opportunity to put newer equipment up.”

Hinkle said Entergy officials are keeping a close eye on the sky over the next several days as a weather system moves closer to the state that is predicted to bring more severe weather, which could complicate restoration efforts.

“A lot of the damage at this point is going to be small areas that are going to be difficult to access,” she said. “Typically, what we try to do is get the most people back on at a time along with our critical customers like hospitals, schools, churches, things like that.”

Much of the remaining damage, Hinkle said, is in densely populated neighborhoods that take time to get into with the proper equipment, a process which she said takes time.

“We do have additional crews in town but a lot of the damage that’s left is going to be in those neighborhoods and in backyards,” she said.

To meet the challenge, Hinkle said Entergy Arkansas has 3,000 “boots on the ground” with additional crews called in from Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas, as well as customer service representatives, schedulers, logistics personnel and others.

It’s an all-hands storm response,” she said. “That’s not unusual for us. We stay storm ready year-round because unfortunately in Arkansas we have to deal with storms, with ice, snow and we’ve had some of the worst tornadoes in history in March and April.”

Weather events in Arkansas the past several years have tended to be extreme, Hinkle said.

“We’ve had the polar vortex, we actually had a hurricane that came this far inland, and of course, we have thunderstorms and tornadoes that cause a lot of damage,” she said. “We have to stay storm prepped year-round.”

As of Sunday night, Hinkle said, Little Rock still had 7,276 customers without power, Wynne had 2,478, Jacksonville had 2,157, Sherwood had 430, and Cammackcq Village had 203.

According to the outage map on its website, North Little Rock Electric had just under 8,000 outages Sunday night.

Price gouging

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in a statement issued on Sunday that with the emergency declaration issued by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the state’s anti-price gouging law, which prohibits businesses from increasing prices more than 10% above pre-disaster prices on goods such as food, water, fuel, blankets, medical supplies and construction materials is now in effect.

Griffin said the price gouging law is triggered whenever a state of emergency is declared by federal, state or local governments and violations can carry fines of up to $10,000.

Griffin said his office has received several phone calls from people concerned with price gouging, including one regarding a person from Mississippi looking for work clearing trees and other debris.

“He indicated his understanding was that our law allows him to double or even triple his prices during a storm,” Griffin said. “We reached out and we educated him very quickly on Arkansas law … We straightened him out on what Arkansas law allows, what it doesn’t allow and hopefully we won’t hear any complaints about him.”

Griffin said several other complaints, including one from eastern Arkansas concerning tree removal and another regarding room rates at a North Little Rock motel are being investigated. Several other complaints, he said, have been investigated and found to be legitimate service fees.

“It’s not just a matter of whether you’ve raised your price,” he said. “It’s whether you raised it by a certain amount and whether you raised it for no reason. Certainly, if necessary, people need to be able to pay double overtime. If someone wants their tree removed immediately, that’s going to cost more than a situation where it may be two weeks, that sort of thing.”

Griffin said so far his office has stepped in before a violation of the law occurred but he said that for the duration of the emergency, anyone with concerns regarding price gouging should contact his office.

Gallery: Sunday Tornado Coverage

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