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Jonesboro, Ark., had a history of horrifying tornadoes. The painful memories came roaring back Saturday.

Deep down, we knew it would be Jonesboro’s turn again someday. And it will be yet again.

Perspective by
March 30, 2020 at 3:34 p.m. EDT
The remains of a vehicle lie in a parking lot in front of a damaged Ashley HomeStore after a tornado stuck Saturday in Jonesboro, Ark. (Quentin Winstine/Jonesboro Sun/AP)

The author, Kevin Myatt, is a Jonesboro, Ark., native and weather journalist based in Roanoke.

The tacos for my stay-at-home work dinner were tasting wonderful as I took a break Saturday evening.

Keeping up with some weather elsewhere, I noticed the red box of a tornado warning covering Jonesboro, Ark., where I was born and raised, graduated from college and lived until my mid-20s.

I looked at the velocity scan showing the storm’s winds. The red and green patches in close contact signaled winds blowing hard in opposite directions, just south of Jonesboro, a few thousand feet high. Rotation within the storm was tight, and then so was my stomach. I didn’t eat another bite.

The inevitable, long-overdue big tornado was about to hit my Arkansas hometown.

Social media soon lit up with frightening live television images of a large tornado roiling through the eastern side of Jonesboro, shreds of debris lofting high in the air.

Saturday’s tornado has been determined by the National Weather Service to be an EF-3 (out of 5 on the scale for tornado intensity) with peak winds of 140 mph, focused along a 12½-mile-long path up to 600 yards wide through the city’s main commercial district, across its airport and some residential neighborhoods, then into more sparsely populated rural land paralleling U.S. 49 to the northeast. There were 22 injuries but — amazingly — no fatalities.

Large, destructive tornado strikes Jonesboro, Ark., leaving behind ‘severe’ damage

Jonesboro tornadoes are the reason I am in weather, writing a newspaper weather column in Roanoke, and online weather blog these past 17 years and helping lead Virginia Tech students on trips to the Plains states looking for tornadoes.

My birth in 1970 came between two F-4 tornadoes that brought death, destruction and misery to the northeast Arkansas college town. The retelling of accounts of these storms and my intense study of them helped fuel my deep passion for weather.

The May 15, 1968, storm cut a narrow but intensely destructive path along what was then the town’s southern edge, killing 34 people and injuring more than 300.

The May 27, 1973, storm took a wider path deeper into the core of Jonesboro, crushing the city’s commercial district, wrecking five schools and cutting a broad swath through many residential areas. Yet only three were killed, with more than 200 injured. That low death toll was considered a miracle at the time, given what had happened five years earlier.

Places like Moore, Okla., with its 1999 and 2013 EF-5 hits, among other tornadoes it has experienced, and Nashville, where a spot just east of downtown was hit by its second tornado in 22 years on March 3 and third in nine decades, remind us that tornadoes are not always a one-off, once-in-a-lifetime deal for some unlucky locations.

Jonesboro’s reputation in the 1970s was that it was a tornado target, but four decades of near-misses and minor scrapes had weakened that perception.

It all came crashing back Saturday.

As a storm chaser and weather geek, I maintain a deep internal struggle between my interest in tornadoes — and my desire to witness them — and fear of the havoc they wreak. I was the kid in elementary school who knew the most about tornadoes, but that also made me the most afraid of them.

Similarly, the fact that I have driven tens of thousands of miles taking college students to see more than two dozen tornadoes doesn’t lessen the nightmarish dread I felt watching my hometown get chewed up by the storm I knew would happen someday.

The world on hold with a pandemic, now this. “The apocalypse is amazing!” one man says in a humorous tone on a video of Saturday’s tornado in Jonesboro that has made the rounds of Twitter.

Jonesboro is not merely a college town now. It is a burgeoning regional commercial, medical and industrial center approaching 80,000 people, more than double the size of when the previous two tornadoes hit. It is a larger, more developed, more heavily populated tornado target than it was 50 years ago during its twin F-4 hits.

The devastated Mall at Turtle Creek was a pasture as late as the turn of the century, and several of the hardest-hit subdivisions in the northeast part of the city were only a scattering of farm homes a couple of decades ago.

Urban sprawl and development make many tornado-prone U.S. cities easier targets to hit.

But Saturday’s tornado, somehow, did not find anyone to kill.

Undoubtedly, closures related to the coronavirus pandemic kept people out of stores and restaurants and off streets that would typically be bustling on a Saturday evening. But there was also exceptional live media coverage by local TV station KAIT (Channel 8) and radio stations. This did not hit “without warning.”

And I’d like to think there is still a certain tornado savvy in my hometown area, won through the pain of the past and the continual reminders of other towns and cities in the region suffering devastating hits in the intervening decades.

Deep down, we knew it would be Jonesboro’s turn again someday. And it will be yet again.