Melinda Mayo stood in the muddy March air, staring down at what Mother Nature was capable of at her worst. She had finished a shift at KATV Channel 7 and already returned home when the sirens went off.
Little Rock’s 2023 cyclone flirted with EF4 power, and Mayo felt every bit of that in the soggy aftermath, the humidity so thick it formed a halo on the camera lens and settled as mist over the wreckage. It was enough to put a faint yet perceptible wobble into her voice as she broadcast against a backdrop of utter devastation set to a soundtrack of emergency vehicles.
“I had never gotten to a tornado scene so quickly,” she said. “When I heard the tornado siren here at my house, that’s all hands on deck. I just looked at my husband and said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go find a photographer and get live somewhere.’ We were able to get to the businesses that had been hit, as well as the Colony West neighborhood, where people were still just getting out of their homes…