One month after the storms, a community in North Little Rock is still recovering

North Little Rock, Arkansas – Some feel as though time has stopped as the water drips into homes and cascades down Sonora Drive on March 31.

Lindsay Holloch has been doing one duty followed by another for several weeks.

“It’s hard to see the end. Like, I didn’t even know it’s a month. It feels like it just happened,” Holloch said.

Getting a hotel room, a rental car, and enrolling her kids in school was preferable to staying with family many hours away. Now that her family has been given the go-ahead by a structural engineer, she is seeking for a six-month lease apartment for her crippled parents.

“Things look better, but they don’t, and coming back every day to take care of the animals and stuff or just check on things, it’s just this heavy pressure,” Holloch said.

She hasn’t gone back to work, making her almost as stray as her pets. Malachi Bailey was evacuated by his employer further down Sonora Drive after a tornado directly overtook his McDonald’s at the intersection of McArthur Dr. and Military Dr. while he was inside.

“It feels like your ears are just like burning or just ringing, and it’s something that I’ve just not seen or experienced before,” Bailey admitted.

He hurried right home due to a gas leak.

“I was just hopping over stuff, power lines. I had to see if my family was alright,” Bailey remembered.

He was unclear of when his neighborhood will recover when he walked through it 27 days later. Some things will never change for Holloch. The lone storm fatality reported in central Arkansas was her neighbor.

“I lost somebody I’ve known my whole life, and we couldn’t help him, so that’s really hard to come back and see, and you can’t avoid it,” Holloch said.

Burns Park is still closed down the road. Though Holloch and her kids used to play there all their lives, Sonora Drive-like permanent changes have been made to the area’s landscape.

Since March 31 some homeowners have remained in their damaged homes for almost the entire four weeks. Others are waiting for repairs or don’t have any plans to return. Other homes require demolition, inside or outside debris removal.

Some homeowners announced that their roof replacements would begin on Monday. It must be done first before any work can be done underneath them.

“It’s going to be a long time before it’s ever right again or feels right. I don’t know if it ever will be,” Holloch said.

But no matter how many months it takes, Holloch and many others will keep coming back and relying on one another to rebuild.