A warm front that came up from the Gulf Coast collided Saturday evening with a cool front from the Plains to create scattered showers, strong thunderstorms and a tornado that first touched down near Grady, according to the National Weather Service.
Meteorologist Chuck Rickard, with the weather service's North Little Rock office, said Sunday that crews were out investigating the aftermath to determine more precisely the power and extent of the storm system that moved through, but there's no question about the tornado.
"We've confirmed one tornado," he said, adding that it touched down 8 miles northeast of Grady at 8:23 p.m. and spent the next 31 minutes on the ground as it headed east-northeast to southeast DeWitt almost 19 miles away. The twister was an estimated 600 yards wide, Rickard said, and has been determined at this point to be an EF2, which has winds of between 111 and 135 mph.
Such tornadoes can cause considerable damage, but Rickard said he didn't know of any injuries and that initial reports suggest that some power poles were snapped and farm outbuildings were damaged.
Crews, he said, would look at the radar data from Saturday night and use that information as a guide as they go out to see what evidence the storms left on the ground.
"We'll look at the different structures that were hit and the trees and see how they were blown down to see what was a tornado and what was the result of straight-line winds," he said.
All of those various factors are considered, even down to how damaged structures were secured to their foundations and whether they were built to code.
Rickard said the weather service office in Memphis was also just starting to do its own investigation into possible tornadoes in the northern and eastern parts of Arkansas, which the Memphis station oversees.
The risk early in the evening was for large hail to develop, Rickard said. And according to the weather service site, Clark County had baseball-size hail. People posted quarter- and half-dollar-size hail closer to Pine Bluff.
Entergy's outage site said there were still 400 or so customers without power in the Pine Bluff and southern Jefferson County area as of Sunday afternoon.
The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff's football game against Alabama State was called off during the second quarter Saturday night because of the storms. The teams had already moved the game, starting it at 4:05 p.m. in hopes of missing the worst of what was coming. Officials said the game would be considered a "no contest."