Fierce Storms Kill at Least 21 as Tornadoes Batter the South and Midwest

The storms that killed at least 21 people across Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri on Friday and Saturday continued to pummel a vast section of the South, leveling homes, taking down power lines and turning communities into debris fields.

Before the intense and long-lasting tornadoes arrived, forecasters said that their level of threat was typically experienced only once or twice in a lifetime.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported 12 fatalities in the southern and eastern counties of the state as of Saturday evening.

In Arkansas, three people were killed in Independence County, and 32 others were injured across the state, according to the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management.

Six people died in southern Mississippi and 29 others were injured across the state, Gov. Tate Reeves said on social media.

The National Weather Service tornado survey team said that it found that the damage sustained Friday night in Cave City, Arkansas, was consistent with winds of 165 mph.

The Storm Prediction Center reported at least 33 tornadoes on Friday and 16 on Saturday, though these numbers are likely to change in coming days.

“We know we’ve had some violent tornadoes that hit communities today,” William Bunting, deputy director of the Storm Prediction Center, said Saturday evening. “In the days ahead we’re going to get some details on really hard-hit communities. We won’t know for a few days the true scope of the impacts.”

At the badly damaged Qualls Funeral Home on Main Street in Cave City, heavy burial vaults were flipped and scattered on a concrete slab that only a day earlier had been a storage building behind the funeral home.

On Saturday afternoon, the buzzing of generators and chain saws filled the air in the city, as neighbors came together to help the city of 2,000 clean up. Bottles of water and pizzas were being handed out in a flattened residential area just east of the city center.

“We’re all a big family,” said Lisa Coles, a resident. “This will be devastating, but we’ll all pull together.”

By midafternoon Saturday, severe storms pounded parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The weather service reported that tornadoes touched down near Kentwood, Louisiana; near Jackson, Mississippi; in Pike County, Mississippi; and in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama.

The area near Tylertown was hit by tornadoes in two separate instances on Saturday, according to Bunting. He said such an occurrence was not unusual in an outbreak of storms like this.

Into the evening, the storms were expected to sweep across Alabama and into Tennessee before crossing into Georgia and northern Florida overnight.

The threat for tornadoes and thunderstorms will be over in the South on Sunday and will shift east, although at a level much lower than it was on Saturday, with a slight risk of severe storms and tornadoes from northern Florida to Washington, D.C.

On Saturday, central Mississippi and Alabama faced the highest risk warning — Level 5, in the Storm Prediction Center’s rating system.

Storms at this level can often produce intense long-track tornadoes, meaning they stay on the ground for a very long time. A slow storm will typically only affect one or two communities, but a faster-moving storm can cross multiple states, leaving a long trail of damage.

The weather service Saturday issued tornado watches for eastern Louisiana, nearly all of Mississippi and the western half of Alabama that they described as facing a “particularly dangerous situation,” a designation used during a high risk of violent tornadoes.

Only 7% of tornado watches receive this extra warning, and areas under these alerts are three times as likely to experience damaging tornadoes, according to a NOAA study analyzing tornado watches from 1996 to 2005.

A tornado struck Tideland Drive in Bridgeton, Missouri, on Friday night. Residents said Saturday that about eight houses were damaged. A resident, Matthew Adams, described the ferocity of the storm.

“I just heard a big boom and crashing and came outside and as soon as I came out, I didn’t even know my house had damage,” he said. “I just saw my neighbor’s house here and trees through her garage.”

Rich Gould’s home only had siding and fence damage, but the winds ripped open his neighbors’ garages, tore off walls and downed nearby trees.

A gazebo in the area became airborne and flew off into the forest like the home from “The Wizard of Oz,” he said.

Robbie Myers, director of Butler County Emergency Management in Missouri, said at least one person had died overnight after getting trapped in a house that sustained severe damage on a country road near Poplar Bluff, Missouri.

More than 500 homes, a church and grocery store were also damaged, he said. A mobile-home park, he said, had been destroyed. Storms caused widespread damage in the state, including in the city of Rolla, state emergency officials said late Friday.

The storms were all connected to an intense system wreaking havoc across the central United States, which brought dust storms and wildfires to the Plains.

Tornadoes typically occur across the South from the middle of March until late April, when the risk shifts to the Plains.

The most recent tornado outbreaks in the United States occurred March 31 and April 1, 2023, when 146 tornadoes, many of the less-intense variety, caused 26 fatalities, according to Bunting.

It ranks as the nation’s third largest-third outbreak for total number of tornadoes.

Several larger outbreaks, often referred to as “super outbreaks,” have caused more destruction and deaths, and there are three specifically “by which all other outbreaks are judged,” Bunting said.

On April 11 and 12, 1965, a barrage of nearly 50 tornadoes spread destruction across six states and caused 260 deaths. Less than a decade later, on April 3 and 4, 1974, an onslaught of tornadoes was reported across the central United States and into southern Canada, leading to 335 deaths.

More recently, from April 25 to 28, 2011, more than 200 tornadoes were reported in five southeastern states. April 27 was the deadliest day, with 122 tornadoes causing 321 fatalities, according to Bunting.