Papers collecting tornado-lost items
Posted on Saturday, February 23, 2008
The discovery in Viola of a photograph of a girl killed during the Feb. 5 tornado in Atkins is the catalyst for a group of north Arkansas newspapers’ attempt to reunite storm victims with their possessions.
Areawide News, a company that owns newspapers in Salem and Thayer, Mo., has created an Internet Web site that features pictures of items found scattered by the violent storm that hit Atkins, Clinton, Gassville, Mountain View, Izard County and Highland.
Other newspapers in Mountain View, Mountain Home, Batesville and Atkins are serving either as collection points or by touting the Web site to their readers.
“Some people may not have anything now,” said Janie Flynn, publisher of The News in Salem, 10 miles from Viola in Fulton County. “They may want a photograph.”
Flynn said she was moved when Brenda Guffey brought her a photograph that her husband found in their field behind their Viola home a day after an EF-4 tornado producing winds in excess of 200 miles per hour struck Highland, about 20 miles east of Viola.
Guffey electronically copied the photograph and e-mailed it to several newspapers in hopes of finding its owner.
The photograph ran in The Atkins Chronicle and Kay Cherry of Atkins recognized it. The photograph was of Emmy Cherry, 10, who was killed in the tornado. She was Kay Cherry’s granddaughter.
“A lot of people have brought things they found in and ask, ‘What do you do with this stuff ?’” Flynn said. “It’s crazy.”
People in Fulton County have found X-rays from a dentist’s office in Clinton, bills, bank checks, court documents and other papers blown from 50-100 miles away.
“It’s amazing” she added. “Some of the papers aren’t even wet.”
A resident of Myrtle, Mo., found a large business sign from the Highland Health Mart, some 25 miles to the southwest, Flynn said.
Richard Haber of Wiseman combs his northern Izard County farmland daily for debris. He’s found siding, 2-by-4 s and a log-in sheet for an Atkins dentist.
“I’ve got insulation everywhere,” he said.
He also found a bank loan note that indicated the borrower had only two months of payments remaining on the purchase of several cars, Faulkner County Circuit Court documents and a Farm Bureau document that reported a Clinton woman had just paid off her loan.
“I threw a lot of it away,” Haber said. “But I’m keeping some things that people might want back.”
People have delivered items cast by the storm to The Atkins Chronicle. Although much of the town was damaged by the tornado, the newspaper’s office was unharmed.
Beverly Davis, the paper’s circulation manager, said she has a U. S. Army Reserve Scholar / Athlete Award in a case someone found north of Atkins. She also has several photographs, plumbing pipes and a bashed computer. “We tried to get the hard drive out to see if we could find out whose this was, but it’s too damaged,” Davis said.
Each week, the paper will run photographs of the items delivered, she said.
“We’ll do this as long as it takes. This may be all someone ends up with,” she said of the retrieved possessions.
Nelson Snider, 80, of Gassville recovered a photograph of his parents’ 50 th wedding anniversary. The picture was lost when the twister destroyed his house. It was one of only a few photographs he had of his parents.
Someone found the photograph and gave it to The Baxter Bulletin, a Mountain Home newspaper. Snider saw his picture in the paper and retrieved it.
“I don’t know who turned it in,” he said. “I wish I did so I could thank them.”
Tom Larimer, the director of the Arkansas Press Association, of which scores of Arkansas newspapers are members, said he hopes other papers help with the lost-and-found recovery.
“It’s great what they’re doing,” he said of the newspapers helping reunite people with their possessions. “It’s amazing what people have found.
“ Stuff is always blown away in a tornado,” he said. “Where the heck does it go ? You wonder about that.”
“I hope more newspapers get involved in this,” Larimer said.
Debris scattered for miles is not that rare, said John Snow, the dean of the College of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.
“Most of the debris is natural material like branches and leaves,” he said in a telephone interview from Prattville, Ala., Thursday morning. “People find them in their yards and think nothing of it.
“ But occasionally, things that are durable, like bank checks, go a long way,” he added. “They are good tracers because they have addresses and telephone numbers.”
Snow conducted a study of debris strewn by tornadoes in the late 1990 s; he said a check traveled 210 miles from Milwaukee over Lake Michigan to Muskegon, Mich. — the farthest recorded flight of debris, he said.
Most items are flung to the right of a tornado’s path, he said, because of the counterclockwise rotation of the whirling storms.
The path of the twister and the length it remains on the ground don’t necessarily dictate where debris will be tossed, he said.
Although the Feb. 5 twister carved out a continuous 123-mile path on the ground, the debris was probably miles above the funnel cloud and would have probably stayed there for some time even if the tornado dissipated.
Light items, such as paperwork, photographs and documents are hoisted into the storm’s cell and often flutter 10 miles above the ground, he said.
“The tornado is the sideshow to the storm,” he said. “Some things fall near the event, but other things are carried as the storm system moves. They could go a long way before the system breaks up and the things rain to the ground.”
Flynn said she’s received calls at her newspaper from people who found things in Oregon County, Mo., some 30-40 miles from Salem. She developed the Web site Wednesday and hopes to have photographs on it soon.
The Web site is www. areawidenews. com. People can go to the Tornado Lost and Found link featured on the newspaper’s home page.
“There are a lot more things to be found,” Flynn said. “We hope we can find their owners.”
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
