Fifteen minutes after the whirling claw of a tornado raked across the Kingwood neighborhood in west Little Rock, Martin McAvoy stood in the rain on his small front porch, smoking a cigarette and grimly surveying the shattered remains of 50- and 60-year-old trees.
The McAvoys have lived at 3024 Circlewood Road four years. They were listening to the sirens when they heard another, louder sound.
“My wife had just looked out the window and she said, ‘Oh, my God.' And she just flew over that bed, and she pushed me down in the closet. And I pulled the door to, and everything just ... burst. Windows burst out. I mean, it was a vacuum. I had to hold the closet doors shut.”
The storm damaged his roof.
“We were standing at my wife’s closet door, in her closet, when the bedroom windows blew out and … yeah. It blew down the biggest tree in Pine Valley, in my backyard, and uprooted every other tree as far as I can see.”
McAvoy expected to be able to stay in the house. “The roof’s still … I have got enough rooms that it’s holding together.”
The roof of the Circle K gas station on Rodney Parham Road was mostly blown off by today's storms, too, as employee Brandi Pelkey was trapped inside.
She said her dad called to warn her at 2:17 p.m., about seven minutes before the storm struck.
“We were standing right here by the door, and we seen it come, swirling and getting bigger. I took off with two ladies and a little baby and we went into that storeroom in the back, in the garage.”
She gestured to the rear part of the store, where the roof had been torn off.
“It was just rattling and rumbling, debris was coming in through the cracks in the roof and stuff. And then we were trapped. It took four people to get us out of that back room.”
All were okay except for one lady who “got her head busted.”
By 3:45 p.m., after the storm had passed, Pelkey was picking through the mess behind the counter.
Elsewhere on the same road, T.J. Rowan, employee at Hungry Howie’s Pizza on Rodney Parham, said, “It was spooky as hell. You get in the walk-in, start taking shit down so it doesn’t fall on top of you, and then as you’re doing that, it’s shaking. Like oh my god.”
There was major damage to the front of the store. He took shelter in the restaurant’s walk-in freezer with another employee.
Cindy Mattison lives at 1616 Breckinridge Drive, which is behind the shopping center of the same name.
Her house was on the edge of what looked like the storm's main path. The siding on the front of it had been ripped away to expose pink insulation foam, and windows on the ground floor had been shattered.
The back of the house wasn’t visible, but she said trees were down all over.
She was taking shelter when the storm came through.
“I heard a freight train. It sounded just like a freight train, and I thought ‘oh crud’.
“I didn’t know the trees had fallen, I just heard the glass break and the freight train sound.”
She said, “We I got out of the downstairs room, I looked around and saw the glass window broken and glass all over and things knocked over. Upstairs was just insulation. Every tree is uprooted and down.
“But we’re safe.”
It's the closest call she said she's had with a storm in 27 years of living there. “It does not usually come this way. Very disconcerting.”
Rock City Running had significant damage, too. Bill Bulloch, its manager, took cover in the back office under a metal desk.
“I have a big steel desk … I went in there and got under the desk, and I was pretty damn safe,” he said.
He was trying to get his wallet from the rubble, and had to walk through the adjacent store to get back into his store.
Annette Blanton, an employee, took cover in a bathroom with concrete walls in the back of the shop. She was warned by a friend who is a producer at KARK.
“He said ‘get back now’ and we did, but I did see the tornado. I was out in the middle of this and I was trying to tell everyone to get back, and I saw it coming.”
About five people took cover in the shop.
The owner was injured and taken to the hospital, she said. “He’s got cuts and glass…”
“It blew your ears up. You know when your ears pop when you’re coming down from an airplane? It was worse than that, it was a weird like hollow… It was a weird feeling," Blanton said.
“I’ve never seen a real tornado before.
“There was a man in the parking lot running, and [someone] came out to help him. So he got sucked out, and two other people [who were trying to help an older woman] got sucked in.”
Blanton said she had to escape through the adjacent business because debris blocked the running store’s exit. “It was so surreal to be in that business, because the wall was just gone.”
She also said some women in the adjacent salon were hurt very badly.
Rebecca Hicks parked in the lot outside the closed Regal Breckinridge theater, and had at least three dogs with her in the car. She said she had been at work, but came back to get her dogs and had not been let back in her neighborhood because of gas leaks.
She lives on Walnut Valley, where she said her house is the only one that still had a roof on it.
Skylights in her upstairs bathroom shattered, windows were pushed in and broken, and limbs were downed on her upstairs balcony. Someone else’s “whirlybird” (roof turbine) had blown onto her patio.
“It blew out all the windows and everything that came in that direction," Hicks said. "I mean, I’m alive, so I’m good, but it’s pretty bad. There were trees everywhere, and nobody has a tree now. No trees whatsoever."