Storms sock South again

VILONIA, Ark. – Residents in several states endured a second straight night of violent weather Tuesday, a day after a series of powerful storms in Arkansas killed 10 people in flooding and a tornado that twisted a tractor-trailer like a wrung dish rag.

The National Weather Service issued a high risk warning for severe weather in a stretch extending from northeast of Memphis to just northeast of Dallas and covering a large swath of Arkansas. It last issued such a warning on April 16, when dozens of tornadoes hit North Carolina and killed 21 people.

At least 100 homes in the East Texas town of Edom were damaged Tuesday night, and a woman was injured when her mobile home was destroyed, officials said. There were also minor injuries reported in Louisiana when an oil drilling site turned over in high winds.

In southwestern Michigan, nine people were sent to the hospital, one with serious injuries, when lightning struck a park where children and adults were playing soccer, police said.

Dozens of tornado warnings had been issued in Arkansas Tuesday night. Strong winds peeled part of the roof off of a medical building next to a hospital in West Memphis, near the Tennessee border, but no one was inside.

The latest round of storms began as communities in much of the region struggled with flooding and damage from earlier twisters. In Arkansas, a tornado smashed Vilonia, just north of Little Rock, on Monday night, ripping the roof off the grocery store, flattening homes and tossing vehicles into the air.

An early warning may have saved Lisa Watson’s life in that case. She packed up her three children and was speeding away from the Black Oak Ranch subdivision in Vilonia when she looked to her left and saw the twister approach. Two of her neighbors died in their mobile homes, and a visiting couple who took shelter in a metal shipping container where the husband stored tools died when the container was blown at least 150 feet into a creek.

Emergency workers kept nonresidents out of the subdivision Tuesday. Pictures Watson took when she returned home showed a collection of demolished mobile homes, including what looked like a pile of insulation that she said had been a trailer.

Faulkner County Judge Preston Scroggin said the tornado tore through an area 3 miles wide and 15 miles long, and he thought more people might have died if the residents hadn’t been receiving warnings about a possible outbreak of tornadoes since the weekend and the local weather office hadn’t issued a warning almost 45 minutes before the twister hit Vilonia.