When the powerful EF3 tornado formed in the sky over West Little Rock Friday, Benjamin Hoanzl was standing outside of Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe on Chenal Parkway watching the clouds.
“I saw it starting to form, starting to come down and it was heading towards us,” Hoanzl said.
An assistant director of operations for the restaurant chain, he’d stopped by to check on things unrelated to severe weather but heard the tornado sirens going off on the drive over. Hoanzl went over tornado procedures with the store’s general manager, Joey Cline. If and when the tornado hit, the plan was to cut the gas and usher everyone in the store to the downstairs walk-in cooler.
Minutes later, Cline was on the phone with his boss, who lives nearby and abruptly ended the call because he thought the tornado was about to pass over his house. “So me and one of the other crew members ran out the front door to see what was happening and sure as heck it was coming down right over there,” Cline said. “So we just start yelling, you know, ‘Everyone get inside! The tornado’s coming!’”
Cline went inside and saw that some customers were still enjoying their lunch.
“I’m like, ‘Hey, put your food down. Let’s go.’”
Ivy Chenault was in her car with her daughter Jessie parked in front of Rock N’ Roll Sushi after placing an order at Taziki’s. Chenault, a Camden resident, was in town doing some last minute prom dress shopping. Chenault tried to figure out which direction the storm was coming from and she was planning on driving north, when all of a sudden, she looked up and saw debris flying through the air.
Chenault and Jessie abandoned the car and started running toward the storefronts. She said they couldn’t hear each other over the strong winds. They ran from store to store seeking shelter but the doors were locked, she said.
After everyone inside Taziki’s had sheltered in the walk-in, Hoanzl made one more round through the restaurant to make sure everyone was accounted for, checking the restrooms and making sure no one was out in the parking lot taking selfies or pictures of the tornado.
“At this point in time, the tornado is about to hit the parking lot,” Hoanzl said. “And there were these two girls, I guess a mom and her daughter, who are running and like beating on windows going up and down the strip.”
Hoanzl yelled at them to come inside.
“By the time I got to the door I turned around and my daughter was three storefronts down. The wind was pushing her back and it had already ripped her shoes off of her feet. It was like she was running on a treadmill and not going anywhere,” Chenault said.
Hoanzl held the door open and helped pull Chenault and Jessie into the store. Cline ushered them into the walk-in.
“Her daughter’s shoes blew away, so she gave her her shoes,” Cline said. “Her feet were soaked, so we helped her out, gave her something dry to stand on, we got her some towels, an apron, basically anything we could think of and tried to make everyone as comfortable as they could be for a scary situation like that.”
Chenault was impressed with how concerned they were about her feet being wet. “They were very nice and very calm,” she said. “Taziki’s saved us. They waited for us. They were prepared, and they grabbed us and saved our lives.”
Hoanzl never made it downstairs. When the tornado cut a path through the parking lot, the doors to the restaurant blew open and pictures flew off the walls. He said it sounded like a freight train. He and Cline went outside to survey the damage and found the Baskin-Robbins across the parking lot was demolished.
“The ceiling was coming down, the top right side of their wall was ripped off, dumpsters were thrown down into the forest,” Cline said. Hoanzl said there was so much debris in the Baskin Robbins he feared that people might be trapped inside. “Fortunately, someone came out and was like, ‘We got everyone out.’”
Hoanzl called the Taziki’s location on Cantrell and told them to take cover. The crew was already hunkered down in the walk-in. Both locations sustained damage, but the Cantrell location got the worst of it, said Jim Keet, president of JTJ Restaurants. No one was injured. Keet praised Hoanzl and Cline for their leadership.
“They were real heroes,” Keet said. “They put themselves in danger to save someone they had never met. I was just very proud of those guys.”
When we reached Chenault for this story, she was in Wynne (Cross County) with her husband volunteering for the relief effort there after the same storm system spawned an EF3 tornado that did extensive damage to the city’s high school and killed four in the community.
“Wynne is my hometown,” Chenault said. “It’s my alma mater, it’s where I grew up. All my family lives here. So I had to go help.”
Chenault was living in Wynne in April of 2006, and her home was one of the many damaged when an F3 tornado struck the community of Fitzgerald Crossing. She was three months pregnant with her daughter at the time.
“She is a two-time EF3 tornado survivor as well,” Chenault said.
Hoanzl didn’t get a chance to speak to Chenault after the storm, but he saw a message she sent to the Taziki’s Facebook page thanking the crew for saving her and her daughter.
“We just did what we needed to do to take care of our crew and our customers,” Hoanzl said. “That’s why we’re here. We’re service industry, so people are number one.”
Katie Sanchez wasn’t aware of Friday’s tornado warning until she arrived to pick up her kids and found out their midtown school was on lockdown. Sanchez and about 15 other parents were checking their phones in the parking lot trying to track the storm, she said. The tornado had been reported to be near I-630 and one of the mothers realized that meant that it was probably directly behind the school and out of their line of sight.
“We kind of peeked around the alcove, and you could see it coming toward us,” Sanchez said.
Sanchez said she had to make the decision to either stay put or try to find a place to shelter. “I just sprinted to my car, and I remember there was the Dunkin’ and McDonald’s right there, and I figured maybe somebody could help me,” she said.
When she pulled into the parking lot at Dunkin’ on Rodney Parham, she could see the tornado coming.
“I remember at the school it was really quiet,” Sanchez said. “You could see it coming, but everything was silent, and then at Dunkin’ it was windy as all get out, and a lot louder.”
Sanchez sprinted across the parking lot and started banging on the door at Dunkin’.
“I saw somebody locking the back door. Her name was Sarah, and she made eye contact with me and sprinted up to the front and unlocked the door for me and pulled me in. They closed a little earlier, so it was just the two employees, Sarah and Rowan. They brought me into the walk-in and helped me calm down. They were on the phone with their manager, and he was taking us through breathing exercises, trying to help us all calm down because it was just terrifying, you know. I just kind of remember flashes of it. It’s almost like I blocked it out because it was so scary. We came out afterwards and kind of looked for a minute and just saw the devastation across the street.”
When Sanchez and I spoke on Tuesday she’d just visited Dunkin’ again to thank Sarah and Rowan. “It was so incredible how the whole time they were just thinking about other people. After the storm they were like, ‘Oh, we have all these donuts. Let’s box them up and get them to the police officers outside and the people walking around.’”
Sanchez shared her story with Kevin Shalin’s The Mighty Rib blog and was interviewed by THV-Channel 11, who reported that Dunkin’s corporate office sent the crew at Dunkin’ care packages with $1,000 gift cards.
“My goal in sending it to Mighty Rib is to highlight these employees and what they did for me,” Sanchez said. “I want these people to get the recognition they deserve.”
City Director and Trio’s owner Capi Peck wasn’t allowed to enter her restaurant when we spoke on Monday because of concerns over structural damage to Pavilion in the Park, located off Cantrell Road. But she and her crew and volunteers had been there Saturday to navigate through the dark, powerless restaurant to clear everything out of the coolers and freezers.
“We donated everything to Potluck [Food Rescue],” Peck said. She said Potluck was able to take about three huge loads — $7,000 worth of product.
“We were gearing up for a big weekend,” Peck said. “Everything from tenderloin to fresh fish, quiches. We’ll be able to recover that from our insurance, but Potluck could make immediate use of it. So it was good we got that done before they kicked us out.”
Peck said the restaurant had just closed after lunch when the tornado hit Friday afternoon, but about 20 customers were still dining in the restaurant when alerts started going off on everyone’s phones. The Trio’s staff turned the television on behind the bar and heard the orders for Little Rock to take cover.
Peck said her staff and customers, which included a couple of kids, Rep. Ashley Hudson and Judge Wendy Wood, a total she estimates to be around 31, were all corralled into Trio’s walk-in coolers.
Peck said she couldn’t get the picture out of her head of the people who survived the Rolling Fork, Mississippi, tornado earlier this year by taking shelter in a walk-in cooler. “It was kind of surreal. It was pitch dark and we all experienced that pressurization drop in our ears. People say it sounds like a freight train. I don’t know what it sounds like, it just sounded like rumblings from hell.
“And then it was over. We walked out and I thought, ‘Holy shit, how did we survive this?’ Most of our cars were totaled. It didn’t do a lot of damage to the restaurant except blow the glass out, and it blew the doors off the hinges. All the debris from outside came in. It was hard to get out of the doors, but man we were lucky.”
Peck is City Director of Ward 4 and walked around some of the parts of the ward that were hit the hardest by the storm around Colony West and Green Mountain neighborhoods and Walnut Valley. “There were just teams of volunteers out there with water and toiletries and hot meals and burgers. There were as many volunteers as the people who live in those homes that were trying to just salvage what they could. I mean, it was unbelievable.”
Peck said she doesn’t know when Trio’s will reopen. Landlords from two restaurants not under lease have reached out to her offering their space if she wants to try to gear up and open while Trio’s is being repaired. “If Pavilion in the Park sustained serious damage that will not allow us to get back in there for quite some time, that’s an option,” she said.
Peck said a friend walked up to her after the emergency briefing on Monday and handed her 10 $100 bills and told her to give it to her staff.
“That made me cry,” Peck said. “I mean, the goodness and kindness of people, it’s just overwhelming.”