Last Thursday, April 3, 2008, I was watching Pam Grier night on IFC. My wife was asleep in her chair as usual, my daughter was at work at Starbucks, and I was about 40 minutes into Coffy. There had been a thunderstorm brewing (not rare for this time of year in Arkansas) and I heard a faint noise outside and determined it was the tornado siren at the firehouse a couple of miles away. I quickly switched channels to one of the locals and sure enough it was coming close to us. I woke the wife and got her into the hallway bathroom. I kept going out and getting the latest word on the TV as to where the storm was heading.
It was going right to where the daughter was. She called a couple of times to give us a status.
Long story-short, the National weather service proclaimed that six tornadoes hit the ground out of the same super-cell. Today they are doing another survey to determine if there was a seventh.
After the first storm cleared us a second started up and it scared me worse than the first because I have never heard it rain so hard for so long in my life. Friday we had a pond in the front yard.
Anyway, none of us got hurt. There was some damage done a couple of miles from us, so it did get pretty close. As far as the daughter, she went home with her shift supervisor for the night because it's 17 miles from where we live and the roads were pretty bad. They were pretty close to where the storm tracked as you can witness in the video below. This took place at a car dealership about a block from the Starbucks.
The first two show the same footage taken by a police officers dashcam. He backed up to the building and left the camera on while he made his escape into the dealership.
The first video shows a car that was tossed out of the car lot into the frontage road.
Pretty harrowing stuff.
