An EF-2 tornado touched down near Sardis in Saline County on Friday night, National Weather Service personnel confirmed Saturday. Meteorologists said it seemed likely that additional reports, including one near Wickes in Polk County, would also be confirmed as tornadoes.
The twister that hit near Sardis a few minutes after 11 p.m. Friday damaged homes and snapped trees. It produced winds that peaked at 115 mph, and its path was about 1.6 miles long and 200 yards wide at its peak, according to a tweet from the weather agency in Little Rock.
The worst damage was along Pruett Road, where several homes were damaged, the tweet stated.
No injuries or deaths had been reported from the storms as of Saturday afternoon, said John Lewis, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Little Rock. However, he warned that survey teams were still reaching storm-hit areas and talking with locals.
“Right now it’s just word-of-mouth,” Lewis said.
Systems that can track storm rotation appeared to trace the storm all the way from northern Texas up to Wickes, Lewis said. That storm had the potential to produce multiple tornadoes along the way.
“Damage over in Wickes sounds fairly substantial, that’s probably gonna be a tornado,” Lewis said.
Other areas of interest were near Kirby in Pike County, and near Gamaliel in Baxter County, Lewis said.
Most if not all of the outages caused by Friday's storms appeared to be repaired by Saturday afternoon, based on the Entergy Arkansas online outage map. Reports of outages peaked at about 18,400 at 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Entergy spokeswoman Brandi Hinkle previously said.
— Grant Lancaster
9:44 a.m.: Storms in Arkansas leave thousands without power, damage homes
Thousands of Arkansans were left without power Saturday morning after severe storms downed trees across portions of the state, damaging homes and power lines, according to reports from utilities and forecasters.
The National Weather Service will send teams this morning to investigate several reports of possible tornadoes in west Arkansas.
Several tornado warnings were issued throughout the state on Friday night, forecasters from the National Weather Service said.
Joe Goudsward, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock, said southwest portions of the state were the most likely to have had a tornado overnight, and that there were reports of damage in Wickes in Polk County and in Sardis in Saline County.
In the Wickes area, a local coordinator reported at least 12 homes were damaged, according to the weather service. However, the agency hasn’t confirmed whether the damage was caused by tornadoes.
“We are sending survey teams out later this morning to assess the damage,” Goudsward said. “Then we will be able to say whether a tornado was in the area or not.”
The meteorologist said that even without confirmed tornadoes there were many reports of wind damage.
“We saw reports of downed trees and powerlines. We have reports of wind moving as fast as 60 to 65 mph and that was consistent all over the state,” Goudsward said.
Brandi Hinkle, a spokesperson for Entergy, said that the utility was responding to roughly 9,000 outages in Arkansas caused by damage to power lines and a substation from wind and lightning.
“Our peak outage time was around 12:30 a.m. and we had 18,413 outages reported,” Hinkle said. “We restored over 17,000 outages But we still have just over 9,000 left, that means that we were turning power on and then it was going back off again. That is not atypical during a storm.”
Hinkle said teams would focus on restoring areas that were safe and affected the most customers at once.
“Our hope is to have everyone restored by today and we will keep our customers updated. The best way to check for restoration times is to check the outage map,” Hinkle said.
Roughly 2,500 Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas customers were without power shortly after 8 a.m., according to the utility’s outage map.
— Remington Miller
Damage to homes can be seen on Pruett Rd. south of Little Rock on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2022 after severe weather moved through the area. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Colin Murphy)
Utility crews work to repair damage from severe weather on East Sardis Rd. south of Little Rock on Saturday, Nov. 5, 2022. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Colin Murphey)