Tornadoes in Arkansas
Arkansas isn’t technically considered part of the region referred to as “tornado alley,” but we certainly get more than our fair share of these powerful, capricious storms. Two days ago one twister stayed on the ground in Arkansas for an astounding 120 miles through 6 counties and carved a mindblowing path of death and destruction. The town of Atkins, Arkansas, about 45 miles northwest of me, practically doesn’t exist any longer.
I have a friend in Iraq. He hadn’t caught me online since the storms and actually managed to call me today – yes, he called me from Baghdad – to make sure I was okay, even though he knows I’m in Little Rock, an hour’s drive south of the storm’s path.
Friends from all over the globe have emailed, IMed, and called to make sure my family and I are safe. We’re fine. I lost a few shingles in the storms that rocked our world Tuesday. They match the few I lost several days earlier when strong straight-line winds came through.
I take tornadoes seriously. I’ve seen firsthand what they can do. Little Rock was hit hard twice in the late 1990s by tornadoes, one of which leveled communities in the southwest suburbs of Little Rock, and another of which smashed a horrific swath through the Quapaw Quarter, little Rock’s oldest historic neighborhood. There were a lot of poor people living in these areas, people without luxuries like renter’s insurance. They lost everything, and there was no money for recovery. Years later they were still trying to put their lives back together. There are still homes that have not been completely repaired even a decade later.
I’ve seen twisters dip from the sky and my stomach has dipped and twisted along with them. Once, when I was a teenager, I was riding a horse in the country and saw a storm front to the north of me. The clouds looked ominous, so I headed for home. It wasn’t raining where I was, but I could see that the rain was pretty powerful not far away.
To my horror, a sideways rotation dipped down from that cloud, called a beaver tail. I didn’t just gallop home. My horse ran.
Tornadoes are the most capricious storms that have winds to blow. Miracles of survival and stories of bizarre damage seem to come from every storm. Truthfully, when they have the power to blow an entire house off its foundation leaving no trace behind, toss fully laden transport trucks around like plastic toys, and drive 2×4 planks through the trunks of 40-inch oaks, nothing short of caprice allows a jar of pickles to sit, apparently unmolested, on a concrete slab, or blows 40-year-old letters hundreds of miles without damaging them.
This picture was the Astronomy Picture of the Day on June 13, 2005.
The storms that hit Tuesday in Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama were killers. More than 30 people died in Tennessee. The last news report I heard said we lost 13 here in Arkansas. Kentucky lost 7 and Alabama four. These deaths are the most in one day from a thunderstorm system spawning tornadoes in a decade.
Search and rescue operations lasted throughout yesterday. Rescue workers went door to door checking houses that were barely standing after the storms. They also walked around debris-filled lots where houses used to be and the fields near where houses used to stand. Many of these lots and fields were filled with toys. In Tennessee, searchers came upon what they thought to be a doll at first. The doll moved, though, and searchers realized they had found a living miracle. The eleven-month-old baby’s mother was found in the same field. She did not survive.
This story is achingly familiar to me.
On the night of Friday, November 10, 1995, the National Weather Service issued severe thunderstorm warnings for Arkansas. The worst of the storms were supposed to hit Des Arc, my hometown, around 11:30 p.m. The storms moved faster than expected. Some families took cover. Others slept through the warning, only to be awakened by their windows breaking as the angry winds pummeled their homes.
At about 11:30, Jeff Calhoun called his father, Butch, because something large had blown up against his house. Despite the storm, Jeff’s sister Heather and her husband Lance Stallings decided to drive over to Jeff’s to check on things. When they turned up the country road leading to Jeff’s house, Heather said, “Lance, stop. I can’t see Donna’s house.” Rather than going on to Jeff’s, the pair turned around to check on the home of Donna and Keith Walls. It was gone. Donna was Heather’s aunt.
Lance and Heather stopped at a fish farm where several men were working to call Heather’s dad to let him know that his sister’s house was gone. Then Heather and Lance returned to look for Keith and Donna.
Emergency and law enforcement personnel came to the scene despite the storm still thrashing around them. Most of the debris from the house was scattered in a wheat field northeast of the home site, so that is where the searchers began looking for the young family. A firefighter called to the others that he thought he heard an animal whining in a field of rice stubble to the west. Rice had been cut weeks before, but the field had not yet been readied for the next spring’s planting.
The source of the cries was not a puppy. It was six-month-old Joshua, face down in a tractor rut full of mud, water, and rice stubble, pushing himself up on his sturdy little arms and wailing. He had been there for 45 minutes or more.
The men and women who found the baby knew that he had to be suffering from hypothermia. A deputy sheriff wrapped the baby in his jacket and gave him to another searcher, who happened to be a cousin of little Joshua’s on his mother’s side. (We’re all related in these small farming communities, especially when our families arrived together in covered wagons in the decades just before the Civil War.) Then, because the rain and wind still lashed them with the fury of the storm, the deputy led the baby’s cousin through the field to a paramedic.
The paramedic, Linda McIntosh, stripped Joshua’s wet, muddy clothes and wrapped him in the warm towels. Holding the baby in her arms, Linda got into the car of Des Arc’s police chief, Leon Moon (a schoolmate of mine) and they rushed the baby toward the nearest hospital. They were met by an ambulance at the county line. The ambulance crew took the baby the rest of the way to the hospital.
When he reached the hospital, Joshua’s body temperature was 90 degrees. His arms and legs were literally blue from the exposure. The trip to the hospital had probably taken the better part of 45 minutes, so Joshua’s body had regained some of its warmth by then. He was probably only minutes away from death when he was found.
Meanwhile, back in the rice field searchers found Keith about 10 feet from where the baby had been lying. He was dead. Donna’s body lay a little further away. Along with the debris from their house, the family had been blown about 270 yards – yes, the distance of almost three football fields. All that remained of the frame house were a few scattered cinderblocks from its foundation. Many of the family’s possessions landed miles away from their home.
Keith Walls was my cousin. When we were kids we skated at the roller rink his parents owned. It was the hot spot in our little community for kids who weren’t yet old enough to drive but who were too old and too social to want to stay home on Friday or Saturday nights.
I saw my brother and sister the next day. We hugged a lot. We talked a lot about Keith. We all had good memories of him. He was a sweet kid, and he grew up to be a kind, compassionate, good man. We didn’t know Donna as well. Donna was older. We knew Donna’s family, though. There are a lot of Calhouns in the Des Arc area.
Josh is a sweet kid, just like his dad. Keith’s parents have Josh, and he is a source of light to them. Both grandparents smile joyously when they talk about this miracle baby, who is now a teenager. Both the Calhoun family and the Walls family have a wonderful legacy from that tragic night: Josh survived.
Putting the War for Oil in Perspective
Graphic shamelessly ripped off from Robin Nixon’s blog, “It’s the Only One We Have.”
Perspectives on War
I was talking recently with a couple of friends who have experience in military and foreign relations. As sometimes happens with us, the discussion turned to politics.
The question was asked, “What do you think about Russia and China conducting joint military training?”
One friend, who has a military background, dismissed the exercises as “showing off.”
“So you don’t think they can amass the power to oppose the US in world military matters?” I asked.
“I think the trainings were a desperation move,” my other friend responded. This friend has worked with the American diplomatic corps in international locations for years.
“Why do you say that?”
“China and Russia consider themselves decision makers along with US on international levels, but in recent years, they have found themselves out the picture and being ignored. They are trying to drawn some attention hoping the world will remember their presences.”
“As though the world doesn’t remember that they are both serious nuclear powers?” I was skeptical.
“They hope, among other things, that if they make a display of comradeship and display their combined military might, other countries will look to them with more respect,” said my diplomatic friend.
“They can only do so much, though,” agreed my military friend. “In the end, they know and everyone knows that we could crush them and their entire military in less than 24 hours.”
“Yeah, right,” I said sarcastically. “Like we crushed Iraq.”
“No war has ever been won faster than Iraq,” declared my military friend.
“What about the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War?”
“No. We won the war in less than eight hours and then we invaded to take out the remaining resistance. It took time to cover the land and actually get to Baghdad, but by then the war had been won.”
“What do you mean, eight hours? Eight hours from when we got to Baghdad, or eight hours from when we crossed the Kuwait border initially?”
“By military definition, a war is won when one side destroys the enemy’s military and renders it unable to fight. That only took us less than eight hours with airstrikes, before we ever crossed the border,” my military friend explained.
I repeated one of my initial questions. “Could we cripple the combined military of Russia and China as quickly, without nuclear reprisal?”
“Easily,” my military friend asserted. My diplomat friend agreed with a nod.
“Without inviting a nuclear attack from them?” I was very skeptical.
“There is no assurance that we could avoid nuclear missiles getting into our territories,” said my diplomat friend. “Desperation may lead the losing countries to try using their nuclear power, and they might get missiles through before we could destroy them.”
My military friend added, “But we have jets that have never been used in any war, sophisticated weapons…”
“Do you really believe that we are 100% capable of taking out any nuclear warhead directed at the US or its allies?” I demanded. No matter what the technology might be, error-prone humans create the equipment, program it, and operate it.
“Nothing is one hundred percent assured,” agreed my diplomat friend.
“Do you think any country would actually use nuclear weapons?”
“Yes,” asserted my military friend without hesitation. “Any Muslim country that obtains nuclear weapons will use them against us.”
I was still skeptical, but thoughtful. “I prefer to think that the lessons of Japan and even of Chernobyl would cause leaders not to use them, but if the nuclear arsenal of a country got into the hands of fanatics, I don’t think we would be able to judge what might happen. Fanatics just don’t think like we do.”
“Consider, too, that the world population is increasing and there are not enough natural resources to satisfy everyone. It won’t be long before the countries of the world will be fighting over resources as basic to sustaining life as water.” My diplomat friend has already been at the negotiating table on matters of resources and the environment.
“That is definitely true,” I agreed. “But if nuclear weapons are used, then the land affected by them becomes uninhabitable, and resources like water that pass through contaminated lands will be unusable.”
“Right, but some countries may see themselves as having no choice but to destroy more powerful countries just so they can survive. They believe the historically powerful countries are dominating the world and they need to be taken out. For instance, that is what many Muslims believe. They think the only way for Islam and their way of life to survive is if there is no powerful Western influence over their government or their culture.” My military friend feels strongly about this, in case that fact escaped anyone.
“There are plenty of countries that resent our interference in their policies. Venezuela is one. Obviously the Muslim world thinks that of any non-Muslim power. China has been careful to prevent foreign influence and accused England of causing their population to become addicted to opium in the 19th century in an effort to control them,” my diplomat friend pointed out.
“No country appreciates the interference of outside forces,” I agreed, “unless they see that country as an ally that has been invited for a particular purpose – like Kuwait during the Gulf War.”
“The bottom line,” declared my military friend, grinning, “is that we need to destroy the rest of the world sooner rather than later if we want to stay in the driver’s seat.”
“Now you’re thinking clearly!” I laughed.
“Right,” said my diplomat friend. “Instead of annexing the rest of the world, we should just annihilate those other countries. We should learn from the mistakes Rome made.”
“Not to mention the Soviet Union,” I added. “Ancient Greece, ancient Persia, Hitler, Napoleon – all made the same mistake of trying to conquer the world when they should have just destroyed it.”
“Finally you two are talking like people who know what they are talking about,” my military friend chuckled.
What’s disconcerting is that I’m not sure he wasn’t just a little bit serious.
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