This is one of those stories that really makes you stop and think, and it is probably one of my most in-depth works to date. I thrive on stories like this, where I can dig deep and talk to people about events that truly changed their lives.
By JOHN WORTHEN
News-Times Staff
On Jan. 12, 2005, just before midnight, the skies over Union County unleashed several decades of pent up fury, spreading a path of destruction from Junction City to Lawson – 26 miles as the crow flies. That’s how long the swath of damage was from the powerful F3 tornado.
And it spared nothing in its path.
Local officials, residents and even the National We ather Service in Shreveport, La., said they hadn’t witnessed such a destructive event in Union County in years. Mark Frazier, warning and coordination meteorologist for the NWS, said the Jan. 12 tornado was at least the strongest one to hit this area in the past decade.
From 1950 through September 2004, 28 tornadoes have directly hit Union County, according to NWS statistics. The only other storms approaching the magnitude of the Jan. 12, 2005, storm occurred in November 1983 and December 1978, both of which were also F3s.
The Jan. 12 storm killed two Union County residents, Johnny Williams, 83, of Ta tum Road, and Inez Skaggs, 83, of Rushwood Road, both from the Mount Union-Faircrest area. But everyone who witnessed the storm’s destruction said that the death toll could have been much higher considering the large damage path.
Union County Judge Bobby Edmonds said that the Jan. 12 storm was the worst he has ever experienced. "It was a terrible tornado, mass destruction," Edmonds said.
"The area (where the tornado hit) was beautiful ... covered with large oaks and now they are all gone, which makes it look different. I think we are very fortunate that more people weren’t hurt or killed."
Edmonds helped oversee the massive cleanup operation that began shortly after the tornado hit. Calhoun and Ouachita counties donated labor and equipment to help their Union County neighbors clean up, and people came from as far away as Texarkana to donate their time, as well as food, clothing and other necessities.
"It was really a touching scene to witness as people were so helpful after it was over," Edmonds said. "It was, and still is, something that I remember ... seeing all these people that had lost everything they had. It’s not a pretty sight at all."
No time to react
Just minutes before the tornado swept through the Lawson community 10 miles east of El Dorado, it had spread its misery through Junction City and the Iron Mountain Road area, including Rushwood Road, Tatum Road and Patterson Loop.
At Junction City, the storm ripped a massive pine tree out of the ground and sent it hurdling into a mobile home occupied by Russell and Shari Hux. The Hux couple suffered broken bones but made it out of their home alive.
Attempts by the El Dorado News-Times to contact the Hux family were unsuccessful.
On Iron Mountain Road, Rex Thurlkill, 66, had just gone to bed when he heard the first rumblings of the approaching storm.
Claps of thunder began rattling the windows in Thurlkill's mobile home, and soon it shook back and forth from the violent winds. Without thinking, and in what seemed like only a few seconds, he hurried out of bed, threw on a jumpsuit and hit the floor.
"Once I hit the floor, that’s when the big blast hit," Thurlkill said. "I could feel the shaking, and I heard the tin being ripped from my roof. Then I felt water hit my back and I knew the roof was gone.
I didn’t have time to react at all."
After a storm blew his mobile home off its foundation in December 2004, Thurlkill had it thoroughly tethered to the ground, a move that may have saved his life. "I probably would have taken a ride if I hadn’t been tied down well," he said. "It really shook the place good."
After surveying the damage at his home, Thurlkill made his way to a small store he owns on Iron Mountain Road called Percy’s, which has been in his family since 1961. When he arrived, he found the destruction to be bad but not complete. All four walls were standing, but the roof had caved in and the place was ankle deep with water and had suffered severe wind damage.
At first, Thurlkill wasn’t sure if he would rebuild, said his son, Todd Thurlkill, who rode out the storm at his home approximately one mile away from the store. But the morning after the tornado hit, the first words out of his father’s mouth were "I’m going to rebuild," Todd said.
Today, Percy’s is thriving once again, and Thurlkill has just poured a concrete storm shelter at his home in case another twister comes his way. He plans to be ready if another storm strikes. "I’m not going to take any chances this time," he said. "You can’t ever be too careful."
Lawson’s recovery
"It’s comfortable, but it’s just not home." That’s how Peggy Jones, 71, describes her new red brick house in Lawson. The house is tidy and well organized and still smells of fresh paint and new carpet, but it lacks something very dear to Jones’ heart: memories – a lifetime of memories to be precise. And that isn’t something that can be bought with an insurance check and a trip to the local building supply store.
On Jan. 12, the pair of homes that Jones’ family had owned for generations were destroyed in less than 20 seconds. Jones’ home was shredded by the tornado, and the home next door, which belonged to her son-in-law, Don Travis Jr., and his wife, Robin, was picked up and slammed back down, all while these terrified family members rode it out inside.
Ironically, though, the mobile home owned by Jones’ son, Slade Jones, was spared by the storm. It sat just a few hundred yards across a small pond from the other two homes and suffered only minor cosmetic damage.
The Travis’ home was the oldest on the property and was built by Jones’ grandfather, Dr. Daniel McCall, in 1901. It served as a local museum of sorts and had been the birth, and death place for many local residents throughout the years. A small shotgun structure beside the home served as McCall’s office and is where he saw his patients. The loss of this landmark was especially hard because of its rich community history.
"It was really like a museum," Travis said. "We were planning on turning his office into a museum or something like one. It still had a lot of the equipment that he used in his practice. But now it’s all gone."
Like Jones, Travis, 49, and his family have also rebuilt, but not on the same location. They chose a spot on the far side of the pond several hundreds yards from where their old home once stood. It’s a place that they had had their eyes on for several years before the storm forced them to move.
"From the outside, people said that they thought our old house could have been salvaged," Travis said. "But it was bowed out and the paneling was severely cracked. You could tell that the tornado tried to make it explode, but the storm got mad and left before that happened."
The Travis’ new home is spacious, yet quaint, and has a large front porch with plenty of room for their chocolate lab, Wrigley, to sleep on lazy summer days. But the house is still a work in progress, like so many things in this community.
Several days before the tornado’s one year anniversary, Jones, Travis, and his wife gathered at Jones’ dining table to remember the night their lives forever changed — the night an F3 tornado turned their quiet community into a macabre scene of complete devastation.
A few minutes before the tornado hit, Travis had been asleep in bed after a long day.
His wife and teenage daughters, Kaci and Callie, were up, though, and had their ears glued to a weather scanner that chirped with updates on the approaching storm.
And it sounded bad.
The National Weather Service had been reporting that Junction City saw damage from the tornado and that it was tracking northeast toward Lawson, which sits just 10 miles east of El Dorado. Calm, but realizing the situation was serious, Robin Travis decided to wake up her husband so the family could prepare if disaster struck.
"They (Robin and his children) knew the situation was unstable," Travis said. "But how many times do you hear about warnings and nothing happens? Why was this going to be any different? But I got up and just before it hit they said it was four miles away."
Four miles – that isn’t far for a powerful, fast-moving F3 twister that had kept a true northeast track from Louisiana. And it wasn’t even thinking about slowing down.
The storm followed its projected path and headed straight for the little hillside in Lawson where the Jones’ and Travis’ were preparing for the worst.
A total loss
Just down the road from the Jones’ and Travis’ homes, Dwayne Worth, chief of the Lawson-Urbana Fire Department, received an emergency call about a tornado that had hit a few minutes earlier in Junction City, some 26 miles away. The quick-thinking chief gathered his gear, grabbed his wife, and the two headed to the fire station so he could dispatch his crew to Junction City.
But that’s when it happened.
The monster F3 tornado, packing winds exceeding 200 miles per hour, dealt Worth’s small community a severe blow, then another and another. The deafening sound he heard when he opened his front door — the sound of his community being ripped apart —will always be with him. "It was like 20 jet airplanes hovering over the top of my house," Worth said. "I stood on my carport and watched it happen, but I had no idea that it had hit the station."
Worth, 53, and his wife tore through their yard, hopped into his truck and made their way to the fire station. When they got to Abe’s Old Feed House, which sits a few hundred yards from the station and was missing part of its roof, they realized they couldn’t go any further because the road was completely blocked by trees and other debris.
After making his way to the fire station on foot, Worth was astonished at what he found — the 20 years of blood and sweat he and other volunteers had put into this small station was gone in a matter of seconds.
"Have you ever seen a grown man cry?" Worth said of his reaction to the scene. "I had no idea what we were going to do, and after all we had done to make this department what it was, to see it like this, was just devastating."
Instead of blowing away,the structure collapsed on top of the department’s fire engines, which had barely cooled off after working a silo fire in Urbana the night before. One of the ladder trucks, like the building, was a total loss, and everything from boots, hats, coats and radios had disappeared.
As Worth surveyed the scene, he wondered how all of it would be replaced. "Our insurance covered our gear, and that worked out great," Worth said. "But we needed more money to build our station back, and that’s when the governor stepped in. He told us the state was going to help us pay for building a new station. That really meant the world to us."
Before the tornado struck, the Lawson-Urbana Fire Department had achieved a class 3 rating from Insurance Services Office, which is practically unheard of for an all volunteer organization. ISO ratings range from class 1 to class 10, class 1 being the best.
Worth is proud of the fact that his department was able to keep the class 3 rating even while their new facility was being built. Today, a new building stands just where the old one had, only this time more space was added, and Worth said he is a bit more organized. In all, he is thankful that everyone in his community made it through the storm with their lives.
"I knew we were going to survive this one way or another," Worth said. "It’s hard to keep us down."
‘A 20 second terror ride’
Just as Worth got the call about a tornado ripping through Junction City, the Travis’ were scrambling to prepare for the storm.
Thinking they had more time, the couple rushed toward their front porch to gather things they didn’t want damaged by wind and rain. They had just opened the front door and were about to step onto the porch when the tornado hit with its full F3 — some say F4, although that’s unofficial — force. The wind blew them back through their hallway, and the entire home was instantly showered with glass and torrential rain.
The tornado had literally picked up the Travis’ home and moved it several feet off its foundation. The Travis’ daughters, unharmed but very scared, crouched in the next room screaming for their parents. It’s the place the girls had always been taught to go in case of a tornado, but it put them several yards away from their parents, who were trying to gather their wits after being thrown several feet by 200-plus mile per hour winds.
"(During the storm) we could hear the kids crying, but we couldn’t get to them right away," Robin Travis said. "We couldn’t stand up because the house was moving," Don Travis added. "It was such a helpless feeling. We had just gone through a 20 second terror ride and we wanted to see our girls. We finally were able to make our way to them and hug them. That was a great moment."
As bad as things were at the Travis home, the scene was even worse next door where Jones was. Before the storm hit, Jones had gone to Slade’s house to get Pam Jones, Slade’s wife, so the pair could share Peggy Jones’ cellar in case the worst happened. Since her son was still at work, Peggy Jones felt that her daughter-in-law would be safer in the cellar.
The pair hurried through the water-logged yard toward the house, which was only a few hundred yards away, just before the tornado hit. They managed to make it inside, but not to the cellar. Just as they walked in the door, the tornado ripped off the roof and tore through several outer walls, having its way with Jones’ home.
In an instant, not even enough time to microwave a cup of coffee, Jones’ home splintered around her, scattering a lifetime of pictures, antiques and memories across the countryside. And what didn’t blow away was being soaked by the relentless rainfall. "There wasn’t a place in my house that didn’t have water on it," Jones said. "I lost so many pictures, that’s the one thing I am very sad about losing."
Dazed, Jones and her daughter-in-law made their way outside a few minutes later to reunite with the Travis family, who was just as stunned.
They didn’t know what to do, who to call, or where to start cleaning up. After several hours of digging through the rubble, they decided that the best thing to do was try and get some sleep. They spent the night in Slade Jones’ mobile home, hoping to get at least a couple hours of rest before the cleanup process began. Since all of her clothes were either soaked by rain or gone, Jones had to borrow a pair of her son Slade’s pants until she could find a dry pair of her own. Those pants ended up bringing a brief moment of laughter to Jones and her family after she put them on.
"I had on his camouflage pants that were way too big for me," Jones said, laughing. "It was really a sight to see, me in those camouflage pants that were five sizes too big. "But I didn’t have anything else to wear."
The next morning, after just a couple hours of sleep, the Jones family and Travis family joined dozens of volunteers who swarmed the Lawson area to help put the pieces of this community back together. Many of the volunteers were complete strangers to the family, a testament, Travis said, to the kind nature of area residents.
"That’s one thing we want to do is thank the many volunteers who came out here to this little hill to help us," said Travis, who admitted he was dazed for several weeks after the tornado hit. "That really meant so much to see people we didn’t even know helping us like that. They brought us food, clothes and offered moral support. It really meant the world to us."
Today, there is little to remind anyone who doesn’t live in Lawson that a powerful tornado ripped through the community. There is a pile of debris behind Jones’ home — items that were in a storage shed destroyed by the storm — that Travis is planning to dispose of soon, and several large trees with obvious missing limbs dot the landscape.
In the next few weeks, Travis plans to gather several people together on fourwheelers to try and find items that may have been strewn several miles through the woods near his home, but he isn’t expecting to find much that’s salvageable.
He’s still searching for his college diploma, which is one item at the top of his list of things to find. "There is a chance that it’s just packed away somewhere," he said. "We have so much stuff in boxes. But it could be somewhere miles away from here. I might not ever find it."
Looking back at one year ago today, everyone who lived through the tornado considers themselves lucky to be alive, and they continue to pray that it will never happen again. As she often does on cloudy days since the storm hit, Jones eased her front door open and walked out into the yard to look at the sky. Standing in her yard, the unusually warm January sun bathing the parched earth around her, Jones said it felt much like the day before the tornado hit — warm and dry.
"It’s unnerving," Jones said, crooking her neck toward the sky. "I’m afraid if it rained today that we might get another big storm." Another storm is always in the back of Jones’ mind, and after having her old home ripped apart around her by an F3 tornado, it’s not hard to understand why
