Roller-Chenal’s Miracle, and Building Back After the Storm

Damage at the Roller-Chenal Funeral Home in Little Rock after a tornado ripped through the city on March 31, 2023 (Madison Ogle)

When the March 31 tornado ripped through the Roller-Chenal Funeral Home in Little Rock and the company’s office building, President Bill Booker “didn’t have time to get scared.”

No sirens were sounding, but Booker saw through the window that high winds were carrying objects that should never be airborne. “We’re being hit,” he called to a colleague, moving her away from the windows.

“We made it about six steps to an interior hallway” and they cried out to one another to hit the floor. “We instantly fell to the floor as the ceiling was coming down on us. The good thing was that the ceiling tiles are not very heavy and then 4 to 6 inches of insulation formed a pretty good protective barrier” before heavier items like lighting fixtures and air-conditioning ducts came down.

“The whole thing did not take more than I would say 15 to 20 seconds.” In what Booker called a miracle, no one was hurt, though something sliced through his shirt but somehow left him uncut.

Eight employees and a deliveryman were in the landmark funeral home building nearby on the 7.2-acre campus on Chenal Parkway. They took shelter, appropriately, in the “ministers’ room,” the most interior place on the site, which protected them as both the funeral home and office building were devastated.

Building back is going to be a long multimillion-dollar effort, but a new office building roof is already up, and Kinco Constructors of Little Rock is working with architects to remake the interior and rebuild the 22,000-SF funeral home site.

With 25 funeral home sites around the state, Roller had the ability to pivot. “We have five [locations] within a 30-minute drive, and we have Roller-Drummond right here in Little Rock,” said Renata Jenkins Byler, who owns the businesses.

Her husband, Vice President Tim Byler, was with Booker and Payroll Specialist Beverly Moguin when the tornado struck. Tim Byler was something of a hero that day, keeping abreast of weather reports and evacuating almost all of the office staff 15 minutes before the powerful tornado struck. He was also unhurt.

Both buildings took a direct hit from the storm, but they are far different buildings, Booker said. Both were built after the funeral home chain bought land on Chenal in 1988 and divided it about equally into 3.5-acre developments. “The office building is a relatively simple structure of steel surrounded by brick and glass,” Booker said. “The funeral home is unique. There’s not another structure like that in Little Rock, and I’m not sure there’s one anywhere. But that also meant that it was more exposed to the elements in a dynamic storm.”

Ceramic roof tiles from the funeral home were blown into the second floor of the 20,000-SF office building. A brick car wash opposite the funeral home was obliterated. “That brick car wash now, I guess, belongs to us in the form of millions of pieces embedded into a lot of our exterior walls,” Booker said.

Timeline, Costs Unknown

The timeline for reconstruction is uncertain, but both Renata Byler and Booker emphasized that Roller continuously served its customer base. “We were serving customers 24 hours a day before and after the storm,” Booker said. “Our administrative services like payroll and things like that. Ourselves and our employees have not missed a single paycheck.”

The timetable for reconstruction is “unknowable,” he said. “We have not run into any supply issues yet ourselves, but people are cautioning us that some items may be hard to find at some point. But Kinco has been through this rodeo before, and they’re already preserving pieces of equipment like electrical components. They’re very conscious to preserve items that could cause delays.”

The new structures will look pretty much like the old ones on the outside, Renata Byler said.

“But we moved some walls inside. We were one month short of celebrating 30 years on Chenal, and a lot of things have changed in 30 years. … We’ll have more restrooms for people to use at funerals, and we’re changing the configuration of the chapel” to make use of chairs instead of pews.

Booker praised Roller’s insurance carrier, Cincinnati Insurance.

“It’s still ongoing, but it has been a hospitable relationship to this point,” he said.

And the damage estimate in total? “I think we would share that with you if we knew it,” he said. “A damage estimate is an accumulation of estimates from subcontractors to the general contractor. And those subs are probably being asked to get quotes all over the place. So as of today, we still do not have a cost estimate for either structure.”

It’s going to be in the millions of dollars, “there’s no doubt about that,” Booker said.

But money is secondary to humanity. No one was killed in Little Rock, but the line of storms that day killed five people across the state.

“We finally got a text from our colleagues next door that they were OK, and they asked how we were,” Booker recalled. “But we couldn’t even text them back.”

He described a quick response from the Little Rock Fire Department and Entergy Arkansas, which had linemen out almost immediately. Looking back, he said it’s hard to believe the storm didn’t cause more human misery. “It was a miracle that was repeated across Little Rock over and over again.”