TWISTER LEAVES THREE DEAD Killer Tornado Rips Through Washington County Community

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Nathan Lawrence left the elderly couple’s bodies lying near their car and ran to the nearby barn, yelling. He could see an arm and head protruding from a pile of concrete blocks.

Lawrence found help to dig Mike Murray out. Mike's father, who had been milking alongside him in the barn, died when the walls fell. Cows, bloody from cuts, were wandering through the pasture behind the barn.

Three people died and nine were injured in a New Year’s Eve tornado that destroyed much of the western Washington County community of Cincinnati about 6 a.m. Friday.

Gerald Dean “Buck” Wilson, 88 and his wife, Mamie Wilson, 78, died when the tornado hit their mobile home at 12618 Arkansas 59 North.

“The trailer was blown on over the hill,” said Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder of the Wilsons.

James Richard “Dick” Murray, 78, died in the barn.

All three were longtime residents.

“Everyone knew them,” said resident Chris Sisemore. “They were nice people.”

Buck Wilson had been battling cancer, he said.

The storm that passed over Cincinnati and northwest of Tontitown was definitely a tornado, said Ed Calianese, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service in Tulsa, Okla. He was part of a survey team which spent the day inspecting damage in Northwest Arkansas.

“We can confirm one tornado so far,” Calianese said. The storm came down near Westville, Okla., and traveled about five miles northeast to Cincinnati and to the Tontitown area.

The most extensive damage indicates the storm was an Enhanced Fujita 3, with a wind speed of 140 mph. Enhanced Fujita is a scale that rates tornadoes from 0 to 5, based on damage caused by the storm. The finding is still preliminary, Calianese said.

The National Weather Service issued the warning at 6 a.m. Friday, but Calianese did not have the time the tornado touched down in Cincinnati.

The storm swept out of Oklahoma into the tiny northwest Washington County community, catching many residents unaware. The unincorporated community has less than 100 residents.

Sisemore woke about 6 a.m. to a sound he couldn’t identify.

“I thought the pecan tree in my yard was falling,” Sisemore said. “I rolled out of the bed and tried to crawl under it. Then the floor vanished.”

Caught up in debris, Sisemore was trapped for a moment before the storm flipped the collapsed house off of him, he said. He found himself lying across Arkansas 59, the highway that runs through the middle of town.

“I jumped up and started runnin’ like a little girl,” Sisemore said. “I cut my feet up, but I couldn’t feel it then.”

Sisemore landed only a few yards from the site of the deaths from the storm.

Jared Reades, who runs the tire shop in Cincinnati, drove to his business, north of the tornado’s path, to find the only damage a hay bale blown against the front of the building. He drove to the volunteer fire department station to find the sheet-metal building had collapsed on two fire trucks.

“I’ve seen tornadoes on TV, but I’ve never seen in anything like this,” Reades said. “The ice storm was bad, but this leveled everything. It took out half the town.”

The tornado cut a swath about 100 yards wide through Cincinnati. Of the nine people injured, seven were transported to Washington Regional Medical Center in Fayetteville, Helder said.

Fourteen houses in Cincinnati were damaged or destroyed, said Dan Short, chief of staff for Washington County Judge Marilyn Edwards. Homes and chicken houses were destroyed near Lake Wedington and there was some damage in Tontitown, Edwards said.

The county checked to see the extent of the damage with a helicopter, Helder said.

The tornado scattered debris — mainly sheet metal from chicken houses and roofs — across fields from Cincinnati to the Weddington community. Debris landing on the runway closed Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport for several hours. A sign from Cincinnati was found in Bentonville.

The first damage came on the west side of the community, said Capt. Dallas McClellan of the Sheriff’s Office.

“There were about 100 bales of hay there,” McClellan said. “The tornado scattered them like a kid throwing marbles.”

Community residents started digging through their homes by 9 a.m. Sisemore’s friends and relatives pulled his remaining possessions from under piles of splintered walls and stacked them on a concrete porch, the only undamaged part of his home.

Sisemore was sore, bruised and battered, he said, but felt thankful.

“I’m just glad my son, Tyler, wasn’t here,” he said. “He was with a friend in Prairie Grove.”

All five cats from one destroyed home were rescued, said neighbor Naomi Vaughn.

“We kept calling and they all crawled out,” Vaughn said.

Cincinnati residents have no choice but to rebuild, Reades said, but their lives will never be the same.

Between the Wilson trailer and the fire station, a refrigerator laid on its back in Cincinnati Creek, with photos floating nearby.

“You can’t replace those pictures,” Reades said. “People will build back, but some things they will never have again.”

The Red Cross set up a shelter in the Cincinnati United Methodist Church. The organization was distributing sandwiches and drinks to rescue workers.

“Anyone who needs shelter will be able to use the church,” Edwards said. “We’ve got a generator hooked up to give the church power.”

The tornado knocked out power for about 18,000 customers of Ozark Electric Cooperative, said Penny Storms, spokeswoman for the utility. An American Electric Power Co. line caused the wide-spread outage, Storms said.

Connections were restored to cooperative lines Friday morning, said Peter Mains, spokesman for Southwest Electrical Power Co., a subsidiary of American Electric. About 100 Southwest customers lost power during the storm, Mains said. Most of those were restored Friday, he said.

About 1,000 Ozarks Electric customers remained without power at 3 p.m. Friday, Storms said. Crews were still replacing utility poles and restringing wires, she said.

Rose Ann Pearce, Melissa Gute and Jeff Della Rosa contributed to this report.