CNN
—
Misty Drope was anxious. As she went about her day on Friday, March 14, a feeling of dread accompanied her. Severe thunderstorms were coming that night to her town of Paragould, Arkansas — she’d been hearing about them all week on the news. Tornadoes were likely.
“I’m trying to tell myself that there’s no reason to be anxious,” Drope recalled. “But I’m just so anxious today and that’s not my personality.”
When she returned home to her husband, Bruce, and 19-year-old daughter, Keely, the family did what any lifelong Arkansans would do: They prepared for the worst.
It was far from their first experience with ominous forecasts and volatile Southern weather, and similar preparations had served them well last year, when a tornado damaged their home over Memorial Day weekend.
So, instead of getting ready for bed, they dressed in clothes and shoes that would keep them warm and dry. They gathered important medications, phone chargers, sentimental jewelry and of course, flashlights. Drope’s husband told the family to grab “whatever you’d have to have if you were walking out of here and never looking back,” she said.
From their living room, they watched as the violent storms tracked closer on their local news radar, the weather outside getting more intense with each passing minute. Then, the station’s meteorologist highlighted a particularly concerning storm crossing over an even more concerning landmark — a nearby Walmart — and that sent the family into motion.
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Their home has no basement, Drope said, and so there was only one place to shelter: A windowless bathroom. They grabbed their two dogs and waited on the floor for the inevitable.
Similar scenes would play out in dozens of communities across the South that weekend. The same wide-reaching storm that sent the tornado barreling toward the Drope’s home would spawn at least 100 others across multiple states during a severe thunderstorm outbreak. In Arkansas, it would leave at least three people dead.
It didn’t take long before a tornado warning set off the Drope’s phones. Outside, the sirens blared. It was an all-too-familiar cacophony.
“What’s the chance something like this could happen again?” Drope remembered asking herself amid the din; they’d had barely six months back in their home after the repairs from last spring’s tornado.
Then, an eerie, movie-like quiet set in, Drope said. A tornado was coming.
Suddenly, violent winds roared, debris whizzed through the air and pipes burst as the tornado tore into their home.
For 15 to 20 seconds, it sounded like the tornado was devouring the world around them, Drope said: “The storm eating a roof, eating your home. It’s just a sound you never forget.”
“I was holding onto my daughter, we were laying across our dogs. Bruce had his feet pushed up against the door,” Drope recalled. “I could tell it was worse than the last time.”
The EF2 tornado with 125 mph winds around 12:30 a.m. on March 15, was the second to inflict damage to the house since the Dropes moved there in December 2023.
Last year, severe thunderstorms roared through the central and eastern US — including Arkansas — and produced dozens of tornadoes during Memorial Day weekend. One of those tornadoes, an EF2 with winds of 120 mph, destroyed Drope’s garage, damaged the roof and left debris embedded in an exterior wall on May 26.
The family was out of the home for almost the whole summer while it was repaired.
But even that wasn’t the first tornado to damage a home owned by the Dropes.
The family lived about 10 miles up the road in Marmaduke, Arkansas, in April 2006, when a monstrous tornado tore through town. The tornado damaged the roof and shattered the windows of Drope’s home. The surrounding town was hit much worse.
That tornado had vicious winds up to 200 mph, just 1 mph short of an EF5 — the strongest rating.
Three tornado strikes in one lifetime is tough for Drope to wrap her head around.
“In my mind, I have a better chance of being run over by a train than being hit (by a tornado) twice in one year,” Drope mused.
But last weekend’s tornado inflicted the worst damage of the three for her family.
Minutes after the tornado passed, Misty, Bruce, Keely and their dogs emerged from the bathroom “without a scratch on them” to find they were in the only part of their home that was still standing.
The rest looked like a bomb had gone off. Rain poured through the nonexistent roof. In the dark, Drope said she managed to spot shattered glass, splintered wooden boards, broken metal and ripped up insulation strewn both in and outside her home.
But the shock didn’t truly set in until Drope saw the rest of her neighborhood.
“I did not start crying until I saw my neighbors’ homes just gone too,” she said.
In all, over three days, this cross-country storm fanned wildfires, dust storms and created tornadoes that destroyed neighborhoods, uprooted trees and downed power lines from the central US through the South. It killed at least 42 people from the Plains to the Carolinas and set into motion a long road to recovery for many families, like the Dropes.
Fortunately, they have a close-knit community in Paragould to lean on, Drope said. They were swept to safety by family in the aftermath, but a full recovery is going to take time as their home is a total loss.
Still, the Dropes aren’t going anywhere. They have deep roots in northeastern Arkansas, she said, with multiple generations nearby.
“I’m thankful we can just kind of let family wrap their arms around us, let us catch our breath, let us deal with insurance and let us get our plan together,” Drope said.
“At the end of the day, we know from tragedy that life is short. A tornado is not fun, I’ll be real honest, it sucks, but we are a family of faith and God was absolutely watching over us.”
CNN’s Elizabeth Wolfe and Arriyanna Brookins contributed to this report.