Weekend storm damages DeGray Lake docks, boats

ARKADELPHIA, Ark. – After a storm rolled through parts of south Arkansas Sunday night into Monday morning, winds and rain left some significant damage in its path.

One of the places that suffered damages is along the shores of DeGray Lake in Arkadelphia. The winds peeled off the tin roof and caused some damage to the boats underneath it.

Dockhand, Tristan Smith, was in a cabin on the lake when the storm began to roll in. He says the damage done to the dock’s roof is nothing like he’s seen before.

“It was like a sardine can, it just pulled it straight back all in one piece,” Smith said.

He arrived at Dock ‘C’ – the dock at Iron Mountain Lodge and Marina Sunday night, hearing the damage caused before he got the chance to see it first-hand.

“It’s like if you took aluminum foil, and you rattled it really quick, but you multiplied the sound and the size of it by 15, 20 times,” Smith explained.

Tommy Pearson’s boat lays underneath the wood that once held up the dock. He said that while the leaning wood makes him nervous, the most damage he’s seen to his boat are bent handrails.

“The boats are pretty tough, so it didn’t do a lot of damage to the boats, but it looks like it’s pretty extensive to the top of this dock,” Pearson said.

Smith said it will probably take months to clean up and restore the dock to how it was before the storm – cleaning it up piece by piece.

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