SOUTHWEST TIMES RECORD, Monday, April 16, 2001

Tornado's Damage Recounted

By Jeff Arnold
TIMES RECORD ¥ JARNOLD@SWTIMES.COM

Five years ago on April 21 shortly after 11 p.m. downtown Fort Smith was turned inside 
out by a ferocious tornado that took the lives of two children in a north side 
neighborhood. Without warning, the city was set upon by swirling winds that topped 
200 miles per hour and picked apart downtown buildings that had stood since at least 
the turn of the century. Fort Smith Mayor Ray Baker said looking down Garrison 
Avenue was like looking at a war zone.
"It was a very shocking thing to think that in a matter of minutes a storm could be so
destructive like that," Baker said. "You just can't get that picture out of your mind 
of the destruction that wind can do, and houses and buildings had been so terribly 
damaged."
The storm was not confined to Fort Smith or even Sebastian County.
It eventually moved into Van Buren, where it destroyed homes in Vista Hills estates 
and the Cedar Creek subdivision. More than 1,300 houses and apartments were 
damaged or destroyed in Crawford County. Fortunately, no deaths occurred in the 
Crawford County, and only a handful of injuries was reported.
In Fort Smith, 88 businesses were damaged or destroyed, as were almost 1,500 homes
And apartments. In monetary terms, in Sebastian and Crawford County the final bill 
added up to more than $300 million. In addition to the homes and businesses 
destroyed, historic landmarks also were erased from the Fort Smith landscape, but 
the most precious casualties of the tornado could not be measured in dollars and cents.
Two Fort Smith children, Angelica Marie Fleming, 2 years old, and 5-year-old Kyle 
Johnson, perished that night in homes only six blocks apart. Johnson was pinned 
under a piece of his home at 3419 N. 23rd St. for 45 minutes before he could be 
extricated, but by that time it was too late. Fifty more people were reported 
injured in Fort Smith.
The timing of the storm, late on a Sunday night, probably prevented additional 
injuries and even fatalities. "If it had hit during the evening hours of a rush hour, 
there would have been a huge number of casualties," Baker said.
It was the deadliest storm to hit Fort Smith in the 20th century but not in the city's 
history.  On Jan. 11, 1898, shortly after 11 p.m. a cyclone struck near the U.S. 
National Cemetery and then moved on a northeast path that eventually claimed the 
lives of 50 people and injured 44 more.
Most of the 1898 deaths, according to newspaper accounts, occurred along Garrison 
Avenue in boarding rooms and apartments above several downtown businesses. 
During that storm, the city also was pelted with hail the size of hens' eggs.
Even after the havoc wreaked by the 1996 storm settled, it is believed to be partially
responsible for the fire that destroyed the 99-year-old Eads Furniture Co. three days 
later.
Heavily damaged by the tornado, it is believed that the inferno was sparked when 
the lights in the building were turned on for the first time since the tornado. Fire 
officials suspect that the fire spread with the speed it did because of a gas leak in 
the basement of the building. In addition to the Eads Building, five other 
downtown businesses were destroyed by the blaze.
Aside from the damage left in its wake, the tornado also left a controversy swirling 
about the lack of advance warning from the National Weather Service office in Tulsa 
before the storm slammed into Garrison Avenue.
Officials with the NWS in Tulsa claim that they issued a tornado warning at 
11:08 p.m., four minutes before the twister struck, although officials with the Fort 
Smith Police Department said they never received the warning message until after 
the tornado touched down. 
Regardless of where the breakdown in communication occurred, warning sirens 
never sounded,  and the last word many Fort Smith residents received about the 
impending storm was a severe thunderstorm warning issued by the NWS less than 
20 minutes before the tornado exploded on  the city.
Today's Times Record Insight section, Picking Up the Pieces, takes a look at what 
happened that night five years ago and how the area slowly began to pull itself back 
together.

Web Publish: Monday, April 16, 2001

FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY
Why Didn’t The Sirens Sound?
INVESTIGATION FOLLOWING 1996'S DEADLY TORNADO FOUND SEVERAL REASONS

By John Lyon
times record • jlyon@swtimes.com
© 2001, TIMES RECORD

In the aftermath of the deadly tornado that slammed into Fort Smith on the night of April 21, 1996, many local residents complained that they had received little warning. The city’s emergency sirens never sounded that night, and the area was not under a tornado warning when the tornado hit.
Amazingly, although thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, only two people died in the tornado. Still, many were left wondering: Why wasn’t there more warning?
Wayne Johnson of Fort Smith, a volunteer storm spotter, remembers the night well. Johnson and other storm spotters had been following the progress of a supercell across Oklahoma all evening.
“They were issuing tornado (warnings) off and on all evening from McAlester all the way up this way,” Johnson said. “Tornadoes were coming down, touching down, going back up. A lot of hail reports, damage and a lot of funnel clouds were spotted during this track across Oklahoma.”
Johnson said that shortly before 11 p.m., local storm spotters, communicating by ham radio, saw a funnel cloud near Arkoma. They alerted the National Weather Service and the 911 center at the Fort Smith Police Department, where the storm sirens were controlled, expecting that a tornado warning would be issued and the city’s sirens would be sounded at any moment.
Instead, they received word at 10:56 p.m. that the NWS had issued a severe thunderstorm warning for south Crawford and north Sebastian counties.
“We couldn’t believe it,” Johnson said. “I looked at Warren (Hadley, then a meteorologist at the Fort Smith Weather Office), and he looked at me. We couldn’t believe it. We just threw our hands up and said, ‘Maybe they know more than we do.’ ... A few minutes later we got a report that a four-story or five-story brick building (in downtown Fort Smith) was destroyed.”
So why did the sirens never sound?
Johnson said it was the city’s policy at that time to sound the sirens only when directed to do so by the NWS or when a tornado was sighted by a Fort Smith police officer. Storm spotters were welcome to report whatever they saw, but their reports alone were not considered sufficient cause to sound the sirens.
“If I’d had a police radio, I’d have been on it shouting my head off to sound the sirens and it wouldn’t have done any good,” Johnson said.
And why was no tornado warning issued? Steve Piltz, a meteorologist with the NWS office in Tulsa at that time — he since has been promoted to meteorologist in charge — said radar information about the storm was deceptive.
“The storm gave the impression of cycling down and not intensifying,” he said. “That was the overall impression — the storm was winding down to some extent. But in actuality it rapidly intensified.”
Johnson questioned whether the NWS paid enough attention to information from storm spotters.
“They just bottom-line ignored us,” he said.
Piltz said storm spotters were not ignored, but he said their report of the funnel cloud west of Fort Smith was followed by no damage reports and no new reports of funnel clouds, so the meteorologists believed their interpretation of the radar data — that the storm was winding down — was accurate.
According to NWS documents on file at the Fort Smith Museum of History, a tornado warning was issued for Sebastian County at 11:08 p.m. Piltz said the NWS called the Fort Smith Police Department to pass on the warning, but because of the storm the line went dead during the call.
A tornado touched down at the Garrison Avenue bridge at 11:12 p.m., according to the NWS.
In the aftermath of the storm, the NWS conducted an investigation to determine what had gone wrong on its end. Findings that were later listed in an NWS report included:
w The NWS warning team “put too much importance on the lack of damage reports from areas over which the storm passed in making their decision.”
w The warning team dismissed some reports from storm spotters because of “inconsistencies between locations of funnel clouds reported by spotters and the mesocyclone location as depicted by the (radar). ... No spotter report should be dismissed solely on the grounds of not coinciding with the location of a radar signature.”
w NWS radar was not used to its fullest capability.
w The NWS office in Tulsa needed to enhance its working relationship with the Fort Smith Weather Office and clear up confusion about the Fort Smith office’s role during severe weather.
w Additional means of communication between the Tulsa office and Fort Smith were needed.
Dave Whiteis, communications officer for the Sebastian County Department of Emergency Management, said new means of communication have become available since 1996. Two radio towers are now in the area that can relay ham radio signals to and from Tulsa, instead of just one, and storm warnings now are sent out automatically over the National Crime Information Computer, he said.
Storm spotters also have a new base of operations — the Emergency Operations Center at the Sebastian County Sheriff’s Office. The usefulness of the office became apparent after recent ice storms, when ham radio operators used it as a base from which to coordinate communications for the Sheriff’s Office after the Sheriff’s Office lost contact with the southern part of the county.
Whiteis said the EOC is connected to two Internet radar systems that provide much more detailed information than the radar that was available in Fort Smith five years ago. Piltz said the Tulsa office also has more advanced radar today, and it has better information about this area in part because a Doppler radar site was built in Fort Smith in 1997.
Whiteis noted that after the 1996 tornado, the city of Fort Smith changed its policy regarding use of the emergency sirens.
“If we (storm spotters) say, ‘Sound the sirens,’ they don’t question it,” he said.
Although many were quick to criticize the NWS after the 1996 tornado, Whiteis said useful lessons were learned by both the NWS and local authorities, and the result is that local residents are much more likely to receive a warning today before a tornado strikes.
“It was a learning curve on a lot of people’s part,” he said.
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Web Publish: Monday, April 16, 2001

Memories Of Grandchild, Home Live On

By John T. Anderson
TIMES RECORD • JANDERSON@SWTIMES.COM

He’s there, blue eyes shining, tousled blond hair, little-boy grin. Five-year-old Kyle Richard Johnson’s picture hangs in the living room of his grandparents’ home, just a few feet from where he died in the April 21, 1996, tornado.
Of all the homes hit by the storm that night, the Johnson family was the hardest hit. Kyle, cradled in his mother’s arms, was killed when a blast of wind struck the home where his mother had grown up, the home where his grandparents had raised seven children and lived since 1960.
“It was time for God to take him,” said Connie Johnson, Kyle’s grandmother. “We still miss him. He would be 10 or 11 years old now.”
Kyle and his mother, Rosetta, had been at his grandparents’ home at 3419 N. 23rd St. in Fort Smith on the night the sound of “rolling thunder” began and “kept getting louder and closer,” Connie Johnson said.
Connie, her husband Bobby, Rosetta and Kyle took cover in the home’s hallway and listened as nails that had been in place for decades groaned as they were pulled free.
“It sounded like someone had a crowbar, pulling out nails,” she said.
Two rooms of the three-bedroom house were ripped away. The yellow house where Connie and Bobby had raised their children was moved completely off its foundation. When the storm passed, Rosetta was pinned under debris. Neighbors had to use jacks to free her. Kyle was dead.
“It’s hard on her, especially this time of year,” Connie Johnson said of her daughter.
The Johnsons rebuilt their home, just behind where the old yellow house had stood. A painting of the old home, surrounded by trees, hangs on the wall of their new home. Many of the large trees where their children had played were taken out by the storm. Stumps dot the yard. Now grandchildren play there.
“It is home. It has always been home,” she said.
Neighbors helped the Johnsons rebuild their home. Their Catholic faith helped them rebuild their lives. The storm killed another child that night, 2-year-old Angelica Marie Fleming.

Her family lived not far from the Johnsons.
“The family more or less scattered. I don’t know where they went,” Connie said.
Kyle’s picture hangs on the “saints wall” of the living room alongside a picture of her eldest son, who died in the military, and her son-in-law, who also died young. A tree, planted as a memorial to Kyle, still stands in the playground at Spradling Elementary, where Kyle was a kindergarten student. It stands higher than a man can reach, a young tree, strong limbed, healthy. Today, children born the same year Kyle died play at its base.
Bobby Johnson has little to say about the boy who liked to ride the lawnmower with him, laughed with him, spent time with him. They were buddies.
“He was Grandpa’s boy,” Connie said.
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Web Publish: Monday, April 16, 2001

Community Pulled Together
VOLUNTEERS CREDITED

By John T. Anderson
TIMES RECORD • JANDERSON@SWTIMES.COM

Five years later, after the trees have been hauled away, the homes rebuilt and the rooftops repaired, a lot of folks struck by the 1996 tornado say friendship, faith and federal money came together at just the right time.
“You would be surprised how good people are when you need them,” said Jackie Parsons, 63, whose home at 4608 N. 29th St. in Fort Smith was hit hard by the twister.
The home where she and her family had lived for 30 years had its roof and a back room lifted away by the storm. The family’s front door ended up imbedded in the neighbor’s garage door.
Windows were broken, walls were left ragged. A tree fell across her car. A dark foul-smelling sludge splashed across her couch, chairs and carpet.
“It was unreal,” Parsons said. “We had to get rid of the furniture and carpet.”
And she had no home insurance.
But Parsons, like a handful of other Fort Smith residents hit by the tornado, got help through federal Housing and Urban Development funding channeled through Fort Smith. HUD grants totaling $190,000 were spread out over nine families. Volunteers from Interfaith Disaster Recovery, coordinated locally through the First United Methodist Church in Fort Smith, provided manpower.
“I couldn’t have got my home built back without the help from (HUD) and friends and a lot of different people,” said Betty Smith, 71. The tornado totaled her home at 4206 N. 31st St.
First of all, most of her 12 children helped clean up, then volunteers showed up and started hammering.
“To clean it up, it was all a family thing,” she said. “We just made a big old party of it.”
With the help, she and her family were able to have Christmas dinner in the rebuilt home that same year. The contractor hooked the water up on Christmas Eve. Mayor Ray Baker dedicated the home for her.
John and Sherrie Myers also rebuilt their home at 2109 Pryor Ave. with volunteer help and a federal grant.
“It rained two days after (the tornado). We just had to gut it,” Sherrie Myers said. “It was a year before we could move back to the house.”
Cheryl Turrentine of the city’s planning department said the grant money, coupled with the work of volunteers from Interfaith Disaster Recovery and others, helped bring the community together.
“They (volunteers) did a great job,” Turrentine said. “The (grants) went for materials. The volunteers did the work.”
Louanna Green is a member of First United Methodist Church and one of scores of volunteers who worked to build back homes in western Arkansas after the tornado. Because the organization brings together many different faiths, the work is especially rewarding, she said.
“It is wonderful to see,” Green said. “We called in groups from everywhere to help rebuild. ... I can’t begin to tell you what it is like. We do a lot of listening.”
Green said Interfaith Disaster Recovery responds to like disaster across the nation, wherever needed.
If another disaster strikes, Green promises, “We’ll be there.”
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Web Publish: Monday, April 16, 2001

Haunting Reminders Remain
TORNADO WAS 'BLESSING IN DISGUISE' FOR DOWNTOWN

By Michael Ream
TIMES RECORD • MREAM@SWTIMES.COM

Two downtown businessmen who suffered large losses as a result of the April 21, 1996, tornado in Fort Smith have seen renewal on Garrison Avenue since the violent storm demolished a few blocks of Fort Smith’s Main Street.
“It was a blessing in disguise,” said building owner Harry Schwartz, whose four Garrison Avenue buildings received an estimated $500,000 in damage as a result of the tornado.
“If you drive around now, you’ll see we’ve got parking for some of the buildings that are left. ... A little bad makes a little good out of something,” Schwartz said.
The Hamburger Barn and Joni’s Linen Mill are just two of the businesses that lease space in his buildings, which he said have completely recovered from the storm.
Fort Smith developer Richard Griffin saw two historic structures he owned on Garrison Avenue demolished and a third severely damaged by the thundering twister.
The Reynolds-Davis Building, a five-story structure in the 300 block of Garrison, was torn down after it suffered significant damage from the tornado. Only an empty facade now looks out on the rush of traffic along Garrison. The four-story Eads Bros. Furniture Building in the 400 block of Garrison burned in a spectacular fire a few days after the tornado struck and was subsequently demolished, as was the Josiah Foster Building, which burned in a fire several months after the tornado, Griffin said.
“(The buildings) were all early 1900s-vintage, with brick and big windows. ... They were good-looking buildings,” Griffin said.
The sturdy facades could not withstand the twister’s powerful winds, which whipped along a few blocks of Garrison Avenue at up to 200 mph before heading north through Fort Smith, Van Buren and rural Crawford County.
Parking lots now lie behind the Reynolds-Davis facade and the site of the Eads Bros. Building. The site of the Josiah Foster Building stands vacant as well, Griffin said.
“When you lose these big buildings, you create some holes,” Griffin said.
The empty spaces stand as a haunting reminder of those brief moments on a late Sunday night when the storm hit Fort Smith. Schwartz recalled emerging from refuge under the Garrison Avenue Bridge into an apocalyptic landscape.
“I thought it was the end of the world,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said his first concern was his buildings.
“I was real scared. I thought I was going to lose Joni’s. ... The whole wall, the right side, was just completely missing,” Schwartz said.
Incredibly, all four of Schwartz’ buildings survived, and only the structure housing Joni’s, at 315 Garrison Ave., was significantly damaged by the tornado, he said.
Schwartz said all four of his buildings received severe damage to their roofs.
“I had to put new roofs on every building. ... (the tornado) just sucks the roofs up and blows them away ... what happens is there’s so much air that goes in that something’s got to give,” Schwartz said.
During the several months of cleanup and repair, Schwartz said he installed “tornado straps,” twisted metal rods that snake through a building’s walls and foundation, in each of his buildings.
Schwartz said his buildings also sustained collateral damage because of events following the storm.
“They wouldn’t let us back in the buildings for five days, and it rained. ... it flooded my whole apartment and flooded the restaurant underneath it,” Schwartz said of his living quarters above the Hamburger Barn.
Fate kept Schwartz out of his apartment when the storm hit Garrison Avenue. He rushed under the bridge, which led to an unintentionally humorous moment.
“I was underneath (the bridge), and this Rottweiler ... he reached up and grabbed a hold of my pants and was hanging on my butt. ... I didn’t know whether to be scared of the Rottweiler or the tornado!” said Schwartz, who was hanging on to a bridge pillar.
Schwartz said the dog vanished soon after the storm passed.
“He let go and took off running,” Schwartz said.
Once the shock of the storm passed, local businesses got to work picking through the rubble to see what could be saved. Thirty-one demolition permits were issued to buildings damaged by the tornado, including seven permits for structures on Garrison Avenue, according to the Fort Smith Building Department records.
The building department also issued 97 commercial repair permits totaling $3.15 million as a result of the tornado, including 15 repair permits for Garrison Avenue buildings.
Griffin said renewed interest has been shown toward Garrison Avenue since the tornado.
He pointed to efforts by the city to develop Ross Pendergraft Park in the 200 block of Garrison, as well as efforts by the Central Business Improvement District to look at potential renovations and architectural standards for Garrison.
“It sure made us realize what we had, what we lost and what we still have,” Griffin said.
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