Tag: Fort Smith

I’d been planning on doing this for much of this year, but in the end really only had about half an hour to devote to it. I took a printout of the photos that I took in 1996 after the Fort Smith tornado, drove down to Garrison Avenue for the first time in ages, and then set out on foot – looking really odd running around with my camera and printed-out photos, I’m sure – to recapture as many of the sights (and the sites) as I could from as close as I could get to the same angles. A lot of the differences in camera angles are due simply to the traffic factor – one day after the tornado hit downtown Fort Smith in 1996, the National Guard had Garrison Avenue roped off from the bridge down to the 600 or 700 block, so yeah, you could walk around in the middle of a busy five-line artery leading from Arkansas to Oklahoma without a single smidgeon of fear. Ten years later…well, I hard a hard time finding opportunities to cross the street on foot, let alone get photos from the same out-in-the-middle-of-the-street angles. Anyway, you can see the results (along with commentary and the original 1996 photos of the same locations) here; it’s really quite sobering, actually. Garrison Avenue was already a bit of a poor area ten years ago when I was living in an apartment there; and today I walked past tons of places that were closed, or available for rent or sale, where there used to be at least small businesses.… Read more

With the 1996 Fort Smith tornado very much on my mind, and having recently re-read my “tornado diary,” I thought I would offer one major factual correction. The Arkansas River really doesn’t do anything to deflect tornadoes. Not a thing. It can’t stop a supercell thunderstorm from crossing the river and then dropping a funnel right into downtown, or any other part of town. And in the case of the ’96 storm, every once in a while you’re dealing with a storm that’s just too big to be bothered by a little river in the way. Sort of like every once in a while you’ll see a hurricane that tops the levees. So I just wanted to get that correction on the record, before anyone thought it was a true thing – it’s a local weather myth, a meteorological old wives’ tale, and a dangerous one at that because it gets people to let their guard down.
She’s a strange lady, this mother nature.… Read more