Dozens of houses damaged in Benton

BENTON — Bernice Spillett had settled onto her couch to watch a soap opera when the phone rang about 9:45 p.m. Thursday. It was her mother-in-law warning about a tornado headed straight for Benton and Bryant.

Without that call, Spillett says, she and her two children, Juan and Yashira, may not have survived the EF2 twister that sheared the roof off their brick home near Springhill Road.

The storm spared the laundry room where the family hunkered down, but almost every other room was exposed to the sky.

Where Spillett had sat in the living room, the ceiling frame collapsed onto the couch.

As friends loaded salvageables into vans and trucks Friday, a detached smoke alarm emitted its final, plaintive beeps.

"It sounded like a grenade hit the back of the house," said Spillett, 36, whose husband, Christopher, was at work when the storm hit. "The kids were crying and screaming. It was very scary."

Most of Spillett's neighbors in the Hurricane Meadows subdivision in Benton witnessed similar destruction.

At least 35 houses took some damage; about 15 were either destroyed or severely hit, said Bryant police Sgt. Harold Edmonson. Yet only minor injuries, mostly cuts and scrapes, were reported, said Edmonson, whose agency served as first responder because of the proximity of the two cities.

Out of 19 houses along Hermitage Road - where the Spilletts live - at least 16 had some readily visible damage. One belongs to Heath and Kathryn Shumate, both 25, who took cover under a mattress in a hallway.

"I was on top of our dog Izzie, and Heath was on top of me," said Kathryn Shumate as she waded through a paste of wet carpet, insulation and soggy drywall that continued to drop from the ceiling. "The lights flickered and then went off. The storm hit right after that. It didn't sound like a train. Just windy. Really,really windy.

"After that, we sat in the bathtub awhile. Then Heath got up to walk around and said, 'You're not going to believe this. The roof is gone.'"

After the tornado sirens stopped, D.D. and Tonya Nichols of Benton went to bed, grateful they'd escaped the worst of the weather.

Yet just before midnight, they awoke to find up to 2 feet of water pouring in as a swollen Salt Creek flooded houses in the Hidden Valley neighborhood offArkansas 5.

Nichols, a bodybuilder, couldn't get his front door open. So he helped his kids out a bedroom window, and the family waded to higher ground.

"It made [me] nervous because of how fast it was rising," D.D. Nichols said. "I know my kids couldn't walk in it."

In all, Saline County authorities briefly evacuated about 75 residents - some by boat, Edmonson said. A woman and two children were rescued after their car was stranded in rising wateralong Schobe Road.

"In some cases, we had to wake up people who had absolutely no clue their house was flooding," Edmonson said.

At Benton's Hurricane Creek Mobile Home Park - where the tornado ravaged dozens of houses and fire destroyed another - residents waited all day Friday to retrieve some belongings.

Gov. Mike Beebe and other officials toured the site and spoke with displaced residents at a shelter at the First Pentecostal Church in Bryant and at the mobile home park.

But police blocked off entrances for most of the day while crews cleared trees and debris. Officials estimate that the tornado destroyed 12 of the mobile homes and damaged dozens more. Police said residents would not be allowed to return until at least today.

At Everett Buick-Pontiac-GMC in Bryant, an electronic sign flashed that the dealership was open even though the twister caused "moderate to minor" damage to at least half of 600 vehicles, co-owner Dwight Everett said.

A 2008 Ford Mustang on an elevated display was totaled after winds flipped it onto the northbound I-30 access road, Everett said.

Yet by noon Friday, the dealership had sold three cars and placed eight damaged vehicles on hold for prospective buyers, Everett said. Some are from cities such as Clinton and Mountain View, where tornadoes did severe damage in February.

"There are huge savings that come after something like this," Everett said. "All they [buyers] are waiting on is for [insurance] adjusters to look at the cars."

Two Benton firefighters received minor injuries Friday morning when their rescue truck was swallowed by a hole on McGee Road, where a culvert washed out a 20-foot-wide chunk of roadway, officials said.

Within Benton alone, the storms are estimated to have caused about $20 million in damage, Mayor Rick Holland said. Officials did not have countywide estimates Friday.