Only 1 home left standing at Arkadelphia trailer park

ARKADELPHIA — Saturday morning there were 57 mobile homes in the Walnut Trailer Park between 14th and 15th streets.

Sunday morning there was one.

All of the other mobile homes had been destroyed, broken apart by the high winds of a quarter-mile-wide tornado Saturday afternoon that killed at least six people around Arkadelphia, four of them in the trailer park.

"They tell us to do a door-to-door search of the area," said Larry Cane, a member of the city Board of Directors who accompanied Gov. Mike Huckabee on a tour of the trailer park.

"How can we go door to door here? We can't even see where the doors were."

Mayor Mike Kolb said three of the dead were from the same family.

A motorist on Interstate 30 near the city was killed when his vehicle was swept off the highway into some trees, while another person was killed in a residential area next to downtown, authorities said. They said they would withhold the names of the dead until today because identities still were unconfirmed and relatives hadn't been notified.

At least 88 people were injured seriously enough to go to Baptist Medical Center in Arkadelphia, and some of them were transferred to two Hot Springs hospitals. Damage in the city was so severe that authorities couldn't begin to make an accurate dollar estimate.

Scores of people are homeless and are staying at three shelters established in Arkadelphia, but authorities didn't have accurate estimates of the total number. Officials said the storm damaged or destroyed 75-80 blocks in town.

Two of the dead in the trailer park were teen-age girls whose bodies were found on the roof of a mobile home, said Jim Burns, the Clark County coordinator for the state Office of Emergency Services. At least 18 people in Saline, Pulaski and Jackson counties also were killed in Saturday's storms.

On Sunday morning, the trailer park was a collection of piles of broken wood, water-soaked mattresses and ripped tin. The streets were speckled with mud, pine needles and glass; the residents muddy and wet from a morning rain.

"I didn't believe it until I saw it," said Toni Lehman, one of the park's residents, as she pulled boards and sheet metal off of her belongings. "I still don't want to believe it. We've saved some clothes. And dishes. But only a few of those."

And then Lehman went back to sorting through the rubble, the same way her neighbors were: clear away a board or a piece of sheet metal, look at what's beneath it, sigh, hold the item up to the gray sky and put it back down again. Repeat.

Sixty feet away, another trailer park resident couldn't even bring herself to sort through the piles of wreckage that she called her home until about 2:46 Saturday afternoon.

Laverne Mitchell shifted from foot to foot in a cleared spot near where her trailer once stood. Over and over again, she twisted her hands and murmured: "My God, my God."

"I can't believe this happened," she said. "You can just imagine what I thought when I came here and saw this. I don't know what to do next."

Mitchell's pile of wreckage was not among the ones that Huckabee visited in his 20-minute trip to the park, part of his statewide tour Sunday. Huckabee visited the Lehmans and another family who had their house blown 10 feet off of its foundation.

"This is apocalyptic damage," the governor said. "This is much worse than what we had been told last night. This is the same kind of damage that we've seen in Pulaski County and that we expect to see in Saline County."

A house in Arkadelphia where Huckabee and his wife once lived was still standing in a neighborhood that sustained extensive damage. Huckabee attended Ouachita Baptist University in the southwestern Arkansas town of about 10,000.

The trailer park wasn't the only disaster area in Arkadelphia. The historic downtown of the city was also the scene of broken-out store windows, water-soaked computers and sidewalks covered in brick dust, mud and broken glass.

"We had some brand-new computers in our offices, a brand-new laser printer -- I mean not even out of the box and it's all soaked now," said Eric Hittenrauch, an appraiser at Horizon Mortgage Co., which has its office on Main Street. The office no longer has windows, a roof or a dry floor.

"I was in there with my wife and baby boy when this started," he said. "I laid them down in the corner of the office and put my boy, Brian, between us and hugged Julia. She was hugging me so hard I had to keep saying, "You're going to crush Brian. You're going to crush Brian."

The corner of the office that Hittenrauch chose was the only corner not savaged by the storm.

Other buildings downtown -- including numerous residences -- suffered severe damage. Wind-damaged walls, roofs caved in by fallen trees and mud on the interior furnishing was the common signature.

A local restaurant, Shawn's Garden and the Garden Tea Room, was destroyed. Chandeliers lay on the bricks from the walls that had fallen in to crush the tables.

One bright spot was that neither university in town, Henderson State University nor Ouachita Baptist, apparently suffered major damage.

But approximately 40 percent of Arkadelphia residents were without electricity and telephone service. Authorities said Sunday that electricity should be restored to everyone in Arkadelphia in two to three days. Telephone service to residents will take a week to two weeks to restore, they said.

About 150 Entergy workers arrived Sunday morning and rented all the available rooms at the Days Inn off Interstate 30, several miles outside the city.

"We have people staying here whose homes were destroyed and Entergy employees," motel manager Kyle Graham said. The hotel, which has 53 rooms, usually rents out about 25 a night, he said.

The Hardee's outside of downtown had lines 10 people long at 8:30 a.m. as repair crews stopped in to warm up and get something to eat after working all night.

Elsewhere in Southwest Arkansas, Shane Davis, a dispatcher with the Hot Spring County sheriff's office, said a tornado struck along Arkansas 222 at Donaldson in the southern part of the county between 3-4 p.m. Saturday.

There were 24 homes, including 15 mobile homes, destroyed and 75 residences damaged, authorities said.

Nevada County Sheriff Steve Otwell said several houses were "completely demolished, but no serious injuries were reported. In Hempstead County, the Office of Emergency Services reported two residences damaged and four commercial chicken houses destroyed.

In Arkadelphia, volunteerism was peaking Sunday afternoon as volunteer fire departments -- and just regular people volunteering -- spilled into the city, willing to help.

Huckabee called out members of the Arkansas National Guard shortly after the tornadoes hit Saturday, and the streets of the city Saturday night were guarded by members of the 39th Infantry Brigade, utility workers, Clark County sheriff's deputies and Arkadelphia police.

"We're turning away volunteers now because we have to follow a process," Burns said.

The influx of volunteers created complications for authorities early Saturday afternoon when gas leaks in the downtown area forced an almost-total evacuation, causing traffic snarls on the routes away from the storm-wrecked business district.

"It's frustrating," said an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who had driven to the city from Little Rock to help. "Too many people, too few roads that don't have stuff or trucks or people blocking them."

Even more frustrating than getting out of the city was trying to get into it. To hold the influx of visitors to a manageable number, authorities issued permits. Those who got them -- the people who arrived before gas leaks were detected and authorities began shutting down large portions of the city -- drove through state police, state highway police and National Guard roadblocks with relative ease.

Those who didn't get a permit -- like Ely Goodrum of Poplar Bluff, Mo. -- fumed at the command center on the outskirts of town.

"I've been waiting an hour and half for them to tell me I can go to my son's apartment," Goodrum said while standing with his son at the end of the line for permits. "I drove five hours. We just want to go up there and see if anything's left. It probably isn't, or what is, is ruined anyway. But we'd walk in there if they'd let us.

"We just want to see."