Multiple tornadoes touched down Saturday morning in various parts of the state, causing damage to homes and structures, a spokesman for the National Weather Service said.
Early Sunday, the agency confirmed an EF1 tornado in south Pulaski County. Later in the day, it revealed that at least two tornadoes were captured on video south of Lonoke County and near Prairie County.
“The ones captured on video have yet to be surveyed,” said meteorologist Heather Cross with the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock. “Additional surveys will occur in the coming days.”
Cross said the agency also had crews heading out to western Arkansas to determine whether there were other tornadoes in the state.
The weather agency said the confirmed tornado was the second in Arkansas for 2019.
The tornadoes spun out of a larger line of storms that swept across the central United States.
“The storm was in the state for a total of eight hours,” Cross said. “The worst of it was in the state for closer to four hours.”
A preliminary damage survey stated the EF1 tornado that touched down in Pulaski and Lonoke counties and injured two people had traveled a total of 6.4 miles with a max width of 150 yards. Wind gusts would reach peaks of 110 mph, the National Weather Service stated.
“We have gotten several reports about damage across the state, but the most substantial damage was confined in Scott, Logan and Prairie counties,” Cross said.
The weather service stated in posts on social media that its survey team looked at damage in Logan County caused by straight-line winds that reached 80 to 90 mph in some areas. Most of the damage was in and around the Scranton area.
Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokesman Dan Noble said that as of Sunday afternoon, 13 counties had reported damage from Saturday’s severe weather. No fatalities were reported, he said.
The only storm-related injuries were two people hurt near Scott when a mobile home was destroyed by the tornado that went through the area, said senior forecaster Chuck Ricard with the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock.
“The injuries came from the tornado that moved from Pulaski to Lonoke counties,” Ricard said. “I don’t know the extent of the injuries, but they don’t appear to be life-threatening.”
In Johnson County, the Clarksville School District issued a statement that said winds had toppled a light pole at the football field during a soccer match. A student from the opposing team and a referee were injured, the statement said.
Ricard said those injuries weren’t deemed to be storm-related but were due to high winds that followed the system out of the state.
No large-scale damage was done by the storms, Noble said.
“We didn’t have a long tornado path or life-threatening damage or anything like that,” Noble said. “I know we had three homes destroyed in Pulaski County, but no major damage to infrastructure has been reported. The storm seemed to get out of the state by 4 p.m. or 4:30 p.m. [Saturday], and we haven’t gotten any more reports of damage since then.”
At the height of the electrical failures Saturday, Entergy spokesman Kerri Case said about 13,000 customers were without power across the state.
“It looks like we have a handful of outages [on Sunday],” Case said. “The handful of outages now are just typical day-to-day stuff that happens.”
From Arkansas, the storm system moved into Mississippi. The Associated Press reported that it tore away roofs and caused superficial damage to buildings in Walnut near the Tennessee border.
Tornadoes were identified in northeast Texas, northern Louisiana, northern Mississippi and southern Tennessee. These areas also had instances of wind damage and hail, according to the National Weather Service.
Cross said there will be a chance of severe weather returning to the state on Wednesday.
by Stephen Simpson (2019, Mar 11) Arkansas Democrat Gazette
