Tornado 3-31-20

Tornado preparedness, warning systems pay off

By Roy Ockert Jr.

Wife Pat and I, along with the neighborhood cat, rode out Saturday’s storm in the “Ockert Museum.” That’s what I call a large basement room that houses most of the files, mementoes, newspapers and other junk of my life and times.

When we were looking for a “retirement house” several years ago, one of the attractions to this one is that basement, which not only has plenty of room for my “stuff” but also provides safety from tornadoes, those freaks of Nature that many residents of the South and Southwest know too well.

Pat hardly ever ventures down there because it has stairs, and she gladly left those behind in our former house. The cat, a nap interrupted, was also not happy to go there.

Fortunately for us but certainly not for others, the tornado passed about a mile to the southeast of our house, which is between Arkansas State University and Airport Road.

That was not the case in 1973, when we were living in our first house, which is only about a half-mile from this one.

At the time I was a young journalism instructor at ASU. In fact, we had moved into a newly built house that spring and were still getting settled. It was damaged in the storm, but not heavily. Some of our neighbors weren’t as fortunate — a house 200 yards away, owned by an A-State drama professor, was destroyed; one across the street lost its roof.

Later that week Dr. T. Theodore Fujita, a meteorologist who developed a scale for measuring the intensity of tornadoes, came to town and flew around the city to inspect the damages. He concluded that Jonesboro had been hit by three tornadoes that night.

Like many residents who rode the storm out, I already knew there were three tornadoes. After each, I came out of our “hiding place” — between the mattress and box springs in our bedroom — and twice I retreated when the winds started up again. In between all I could see outside was torrential rain accompanied by persistent lightning that appeared to be hitting the ground all around us.

The first hit our neighborhood just before 1 a.m. on Sunday (May 27) of Memorial Day weekend. Our early-warning came from our little dog, Bumper, who came into our bedroom, waking me up, and hid under the bed. I quickly gathered our two girls, age 4 and almost one, and the four of us got under the mattress. While the house trembled around us, the baby screamed in my ear.

As it turned out, we were on the edge of the wide path of destruction cut by the three twisters.

Afterward, I searched unsuccessfully for news about the storm. Jonesboro’s three radio stations and TV station were off the air. Finally, I found a Memphis radio station that broadcast a bulletin, saying simply that Jonesboro had been hit by a tornado. Our utilities, including the telephone, were shut down and would remain out for a couple of weeks. We could not even call Pat’s parents, who lived across town, to tell them we were all right. The one entrance to our subdivision was blocked.

Contrast that with what happened Saturday. We got warnings on our cell phones with a screech that no one could miss. Since Jonesboro now has weather warning sirens all over town, we heard the one for our neighborhood wailing. We turned the TV to KAIT, whose weather staff members were watching the storm. Amazingly, a live camera view showed the tornado form and dip down in a commercial area.

That’s when we retreated to the basement, and we lost TV and cell phone reception. The lights flickered but never went out. I turned in to a local radio station, which had live coverage of the storm. All this happened shortly after 5 p.m., which is a little less scary than the middle of the night, but hearing familiar voices give an account of the storm is comforting, especially when you’ve already been in isolation.

After we emerged from hiding, we had no cable or Internet service, and cell phone service was on and off for the remainder of the weekend. Our landline stayed ready. I rigged an indoor antenna to our TV and picked up KAIT’s on-air signal so we could see what had happened. We stayed home despite my journalist’s inclination to take my camera and go out to record history.

Like others have said, the pandemic shutdown probably saved lives because 5 p.m. Saturday is usually a busy time for restaurants and stores in the area that was hit. In 1973 we attributed the low number of fatalities (four, three of them in Otwell) to the fact that it was a holiday weekend. But the tornado, which hit about 10 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, and ravaged Valley View and Nettleton claimed 34 lives and injured almost 300.

I’d rather think that we’ve learned from our experiences and we have improved dramatically on our preparedness and warning systems.

By the way, the Ockert Museum includes about a dozen newspapers from the 1968 and 1973 tornadoes, and I guess I’ll be adding a few more.

Roy Ockert is a former editor of The Jonesboro Sun, The Courier at Russellville and The Batesville Guard. He can be reached at royo@suddenlink.net.