BOONEVILLE — The electricity was already out Sunday night when Mike Crowley, owner of Crowley’s City Service, received a phone call from Booneville Superintendent Donnie Hardin about 9:15.
“He said I need to get down here,” Crowley said Monday morning, standing outside his tire and quick-lube shop at the corner of Broadway Avenue and First Street. “‘You took a pretty good hit,’ I think were his exact words.”
Although business was in full swing, the twisted aluminum awnings and glass from the store’s western-facing windows lay on the sidewalk outside, damaged the night before when wind gusts greater than 50 miles per hour tore off the roof and part of the eastern-facing exterior brick wall from a building across the street. The wind sent the debris flying into the street, damaging several vehicles and Crowley’s storefront.
“It did some roof damage, too,” Crowley said. “I’ve got some leaks. But we’rereally fortunate.”
The building across from Crowley’s business housed a state Revenue Office and a pediatric and internal medicine clinic belonging to Dr. Richard Eccles, among other businesses. No one was in either office at the time of the storm, and Booneville and Logan County officials said Monday that no injuries or fatalities from the storm had been reported.
The brief but violent storm burst that swept through western and central Arkansas on Sunday night was part of afront stretching from central Missouri to Dallas, said Julie Lesko, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Little Rock.
The state’s first tornado of the year touched down briefly in rural southern Franklin County about 8:45 p.m. Sunday, damaging several barns and snapping the tops off numerous trees. The EF1 twister, with winds between 86 mph and 110 mph, cut a 4-mile-long path between Vesta and Peter Pender, said National Weather Service meteorologistAmy Jankowski of Tulsa.
The weather service office in Memphis had issued a tornado warning for Poinsett County after Doppler radar indicated a storm with rotation, but no twister touched down, meteorologist Zach Maye said.
A weather service crew traveled to Havana in Yell County, as well, to inspect wind damage to determine if it may have been caused by a tornado. Meteorologist Marty Trexler of North Little Rock said it appeared the damage was caused by straight-line winds, rather than a twister.
Strong winds damaged homes and toppled trees around the state, and heavy rains caused flash flooding. More than 3 inches of rain fell in North Little Rock on Sunday evening, flooding several roads.
One to 2 inches of water also poured into the science building at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, forcing the cancellation of classes there Monday, said Tracy Courage, a spokesman for the college. She said crews cleaned the building Monday, and she expects classes will resume there today.
In the Booneville area, Lesko said that gusts of 52 miles per hour were recorded between 9 and 10 p.m., and the area received 1.36 inches of rain Sunday night.
Logan County Judge Gus Young said little damage had been reported in the county outside Booneville. As of Monday afternoon, Young had not declared a state of emergency.
Eccles said he and his wife were contacted by an employee after the storm had blown through the town.
“Once we knew there was no personal injury, anything like that, we were fine,” Ecclessaid. “It’s all stuff. Our clinic is our patients and our staff.”
Eccles said he and his wife drove to the clinic to see if they could salvage its computers. Harold Robinson, who owns the building that houses the revenue office, the clinic and several other businesses, had an empty office space two doors down, which he unlocked. Eccles said more than a dozen volunteers helped to move his clinic’s furniture and other items into the empty office.
Eccles said that because his patients’ information is stored on secure cloud-based servers, his staff members wereable to resume work Monday, following up on referrals and prescription refills.
Marla McHughes, the administrator of revenue offices for the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration, said she expects to have the damaged Revenue Office’s operations relocated to another Booneville location within the week.
Although the state Revenue Office would not have had to deal with today’s most widely noted deadline - the deadline to file federal tax returns - McHughes said any Booneville area resident who misses an important deadline with the state because of the damaged building doesn’t need to worry.
“I’m sure we can find a way to work with them,” McHughes said.
Through 10 a.m. today, a freeze warning was issued for the western two-thirds of the state. Trexler said temperatures could dip into the lower 20s across the northern tier of the state by early this morning and climb into the mid-50s during the day in the north and the upper 50s in the central and southern parts of the state.
Information for this article was contributed by Kenneth Heard of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/15/2014