Tornado

During your exchange many unpredictable things happen, however I believe nobody expected this not even the people permanently living in Wynne, Arkansas. There were some tornadoes that hit in Northeastern AR in the past and did some serious damage. However, this intensity has never been seen here before. 

3/31/23

During the whole day there was a tornado watch, this has happened many times before. It means that the weather is prone to create tornadoes and other extreme weather situations. Later in the afternoon we saw that there were some tornadoes that hit Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas located to the southwest of Wynne. Meteorologists predicted the route of the tornado to possibly hit our town. The first estimate of victims in Little Rock was around 100, "thankfully" just one life was lost there. Around 4:15 pm we received a tornado warning. This was a new thing for me, I've never seen it before. After 5 minutes our phones started beeping super loud and everyone received a message to find shelter where there are no windows and stay close to the ground. We wanted to drive to Merriman an old sturdy building in Downtown Wynne that my host parents own. We couldn't make it in time though, just as we had everything packed and were one foot out the door an alarm started to sound all across the whole city. We decided to stay home and hide in a hallway under mattresses.

We were laying there for a good 20 minutes, lost electricity and the wind suddenly started to pick up. We could hear branches hitting our house and debris flying all around. When the vortex of the tornado was getting closer it sounded like a train. The whole thing flew past us in 2 minutes. After 2 minutes of sounds and collisions it was over. We carefully stepped outside and saw that in our neighbourhood there were some trees torn out of the ground and some trees fell on our neighbour's  cars. We realized that it is serious, however we had no idea how big this catastrophe really was. Our phones had no signal so we couldn't check on our family nor our friends. We decided to drive to the city and see if everyone is okay. Unfortunately we couldn't find a road that would lead us there, every road was blocked by fallen trees, lamps or electricity poles. 

We found out that our grandma is okay after some time, we decided to go and stay over at her house since she has a generator. During the next few days, when we temporarily had signal or data we could see drone shots of our town.

The whole school is gone, the field is destroyed, the stands are folded and torn from the ground. Whole neighbourhoods are lost, completely devastated. This is just tragic and one can't explain how those people who lost their homes, pets or cars must feel. We got VERY lucky, our house was basically untouched and we were all in perfect health. 

However, since Arkansas are so very strong, everyone immediately helped and the roads were clear of debris after a few days. There was a place for people to sleep at and get some warm meals for free. Peoples roofs were getting patched by the minute and everyone helped to remove fallen trees from driveways. The school is now getting demolished and new architecture plans have been made and the town is slowly recovering.

Don't get me wrong it will take years to completely recover and rebuild but I have faith in Wynne because I truly know how passionate these people are about their city and their community. I have witnessed how close people become after something like this and that we can endure whatever happens as long as we keep going and don't give up. 

This tragedy made it to National news with 4 victims and countless injured. It was even on the Czech National news. If you wish to see pictures and/or videos search it up.

Ondrej