FEATURE STORY
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Left: Faulkner County Judge Pres- ton Scroggin surveys the damage in his own front yard after a deadly tornado tore through Vilonia April 25. Below: Gov. Mike Beebe, his Chief of Staff Morril Harriman (right), and Judge Scroggin tour the damage in downtown Vilonia.
(Bottom photo Kirk Jordan / Governor’s Office)
bottled water at a county truck for some of his road department crew working clean-up. A family riding four-wheelers stop to chat briefly with Judge Scroggin. “You hear we’re at 9 out of 10 on the probability scale for more of this tonight?” one of the riders asks him. He nods glumly. Tey drive on; so do we.
After driving through several
Vilonia twister almost claimed Judge Scroggin as one of its victims
By Randy M. Kemp County Lines Editor
VILONIA – A wicked storm system that killed five residents here and forever changed the landscape of this rural Faulkner County town was more than a professional headache for Judge Preston Scroggin. It was personal in every way. For starters, he has called Vilonia home since 1980. He lives on the outskirts of town, sur- rounded by his cattle farm. It was gut-wrench- ing for him to tour the aftermath of the April 25 tornado seeing friends’ and neighbors’ houses and businesses destroyed or their yards denuded of trees, knowing that his hometown would never be quite the same again. But that wasn’t the half of it. As the twister was roaring into town from the
southwest, it threatened to count him as one of its victims. After the fact, he admits it was a very close call. Judge Scroggin was patrolling in his pickup
COUNTY LINES, SUMMER 2011
truck when he spotted the tornado as it dropped off a nearby hill. “A mile wide,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. And after all was said and done, the path was well over a mile across – uncharacteristically wide for an Arkansas twister. By the time he saw it coming, it was upon him. “I barely got out from under it,” he said. He tells his story while driving this reporter around, pointing out damage 36 hours after the tornado has passed. He’s dazed and exhausted, having had no sleep in two days. No time for sleep; as County Judge, there is too much work to do, helping see to his neighbors’ needs. But then there is also the little matter of where to sleep; it seems that his house was among the many that were heavily damaged or destroyed by the twister. “It was a game-changer for Vilonia. You see those 100-150-year-old trees gone, and you know it was something bad,” he says as we drive north on Naylor Road, a chip-seal county road. He stops to leave boxes of pizzas and a case of
of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, stopping briefly to visit with several people out doing debris clean-up, we eventually make it to his older ranch-style house, where huge old oaks are broken and blown over and his house shows substantial damage. Te twister lifted the roof and left 2-4 inches of rain on the floors. Pressed to talk about it, he recounts that he tried to outrun the tornado in his truck as it bore down on him. He felt it throwing his truck around three different times, as if the tires were lifted off the road. “I could see the big one, and little ones spinning around it,” he recounts. “Tis is my hometown. It sure bloodied our
nose yesterday.” He said he has worked with nu- merous disasters before, but this was the worst he has been in charge of. Te tornado traveled 51 miles across Pulaski, Faulkner and White counties, leaving its trail of havoc. And in spite of the death and destruction all
around, “Te outpouring of support is what has amazed me,” he said.
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