The tornado that ripped through Dumas, Arkansas, on Feb. 24, 2007, injured 28 people and destroyed 75 homes in its 30-mile path. Two children were pinned in a mobile home and hospitalized in critical condition. Fifteen homes and 18 businesses were simply gone. Dozens more were damaged. 

In the midst of the destruction, teacher and small business owner Linda Weatherford led the disaster command center and the volunteer responders. An old hospital building became a “one-stop shop” for those affected. The school gave her two weeks off work, and she and her partner temporarily closed their screen printing business.

Weatherford can get stuff done. She’s a quick-responding and compassionate organizer. And she’s in it for the long haul. Eighteen years after the tornado, Weatherford is still working to make Dumas stronger in the face of increasingly severe storms.

Today, Weatherford leads the Dumas Housing Taskforce. They’ve leveraged about $100,000 to fund home repairs in Dumas, working with the nonprofit Communities Unlimited under USDA’s Rural Partners Network.

“We may not have lots of money, but we’ve got a work ethic,” Weatherford said. “Where we can find money, we’ll find money.” 

More than half of the 60 applicants for home repairs still needed to fix damage from over a decade ago. “People have been patching ever since,” Weatherford said.

It wasn’t just the tornado damage, either. “Something has changed since our tornado,” Weatherford said. “The storms have just multiplied. And these last two or three years, we’re getting bombarded. They seem to be stronger.”

Dumas is in the southeastern Arkansas Delta, not far as the crow flies from the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. “We get flat flooding,” she said. “In 2021, we had 18 inches of rain in a four-hour time span.” A huge hail storm damaged every city-owned roof and relocated city hall for four months.

Seeing the growing need, Communities Unlimited helped Dumas Housing Taskforce access an additional $400,000 for fortified roofing designed to withstand severe weather. The King Foundation, Wells Fargo, Simmons Bank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas all contributed to the effort.

Weatherford complimented fortified roofing contractors, noting that they took time to explain work carefully to homeowners and even other contractors if home repairs fell outside their scope. “They were so very gracious to the homeowners,” she said. “They worked quickly, they answered questions and they cleaned up the mess.” As people saw neighbors complete repairs, some who had hesitated to apply joined the second round.

Investing in housing resiliency can set off positive ripples of economic impact. In just one year, the work in Dumas generated almost half a million dollars in community investment and savings. Communities Unlimited estimates the total economic impact at $676,682.

That kind of investment has helped Dumas start to get back on its feet. Each repaired roof means a home protected, a family less likely to leave and dollars that stay in the local economy. Contractors got paid, materials were purchased from nearby suppliers, and homeowners gained peace of mind — all of which contributes to a more stable tax base and renewed confidence in the town’s future. For a community that’s spent years recovering from disaster, these home repairs aren’t just about safety, they’re about rebuilding economic momentum.

Weatherford sees the investment as one way to shift the tide in her shrinking community of 3,500 people. “For extremely large communities, over 50,000, they grow after disaster, but little places, if your home or your job gets displayed, and people go somewhere else for awhile, they don’t come back.”

Dumas has seen disaster displacement from both sides: when the town was on a main evacuation route from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Weatherford’s church put up a billboard. “If you need a place to rest, come to our church,” it said.

“We ran a shelter for three months,” Weatherford said. “By the day the levee broke, we had over 500 evacuees in Dumas.” About 100 people stayed at the church for weeks. More than half of those people settled for months in Dumas.

Volunteers scrambled to locate housing and enroll children in local schools. “We still have evacuees who are now Dumas citizens,” Weatherford said. “In the process, we found out a lot about our people who live here and housing.”

Those lessons continue to shape her work with the Dumas Housing Taskforce, which  brings together community members from landlords to renters trying to finance their first home. Weatherford retired from the schools in 2017 but now solely owns the screenprinting and dry cleaning business. “We’re also a town of side hustles,” she said with a laugh. Much of her work on Dumas’ city council is focused on economic development, including supporting entrepreneurs and small-business succession.

It’s not work she imagined doing when she moved to Dumas almost 40 years ago. She had planned to work in the Dumas schools for just a few years, until she could get a job in the embassy system.

But she ended up meeting  “this country boy,” two weeks after moving to town. “We got married the next June and started raising a family.” Now, he farms and serves as Dumas’ fire chief.

Looking back, Weatherford sees remarkable patterns emerge from her adopted hometown. To Weatherford, Dumas exhibits a collective gumption, with people working together to make life better for their neighbors, even in the face of disaster. “Oh, gosh, what makes it tick? We have people who care,” she said.