The Repository Hook Echo

Mayflower-Vilonia Tornado: Debris on Radar for an Hour

November 2, 2026 · Runtime 15:21 · Watch on YouTube

On 27 April 2014, a tornado crossed 41 miles of central Arkansas, through Mayflower and Vilonia, and killed 16 people, the deadliest single tornado in the state since 1968. The Weather Service radar at Little Rock was 12 to 26 miles away the whole time. We measured its debris signature scan by scan: debris in every scan from 7:06 to 8:06 PM, over Mayflower in the scan that began at 7:29, the minute a Tornado Emergency named the town. Vilonia had been hit three years and two days earlier. And the survey found why this tornado was rated EF4, not EF5: no anchor bolts.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Vilonia, the day after
  2. 0:53 A high risk and a PDS watch
  3. 1:42 A radar twelve miles away
  4. 2:22 The warning and the tornado, 7:06 PM
  5. 2:58 How a radar sees debris
  6. 3:58 Three Tornado Emergencies
  7. 4:48 Mayflower, scan by scan
  8. 5:53 Debris in every scan for an hour
  9. 6:48 The path the radar traced
  10. 7:26 Vilonia
  11. 8:47 Hit three years and two days earlier
  12. 10:52 When did it end?
  13. 11:52 Why EF4 and not EF5
  14. 13:12 The deadliest tornado of 2014
  15. 13:51 What the record supports
  16. 14:52 Next: Hurricane Maria, 2017

Transcript

Vilonia, the day after 0:00

The Mayflower-Vilonia tornado stayed on the radar at Little Rock, as debris, for an hour. On April twenty-seventh, 2014, it crossed forty-one miles of central Arkansas and killed sixteen people, the deadliest single tornado in the state since 1968.

We measured the debris signature in every scan the Little Rock radar recorded that evening, to see what it saw, and when. This is the scan that began at ten past seven, four minutes after the first warning: the tornado's debris, already in the air.

The radar was never more than twenty-six miles from this tornado, and it watched the whole path. It shows how the warnings turned into emergencies. And it shows where a radar stops: why one of these towns had been hit three years earlier, and why this tornado was rated EF4, and not EF5.

A high risk and a PDS watch 0:53

That Sunday, the Storm Prediction Center had raised the alarm hours ahead. At three in the afternoon, it added a high risk of severe storms across much of central Arkansas. At three thirty-five, three and a half hours before this tornado formed, it issued Tornado Watch number one hundred, marked as a particularly dangerous situation.

The watch text was blunt. Numerous tornadoes expected, with a few intense tornadoes likely. And the potential for long-track, strong or violent tornadoes, well into the evening.

Just after seven, the Weather Service office in Little Rock wrote, a supercell rapidly intensified northwest of the city. At seven fifteen, the Storm Prediction Center wrote that the near-term risk for a significant tornado west and northwest of Little Rock was high.

A radar twelve miles away 1:42

That radar, KLZK, sits just north of Little Rock. The tornado's path ran past it to the northwest and the north, between twelve and twenty-six miles away. Close enough that its lowest beam stayed near the ground the whole way.

That distance matters. A radar beam leaves at a slight angle and climbs with distance, so the farther away a tornado is, the higher above the ground the radar looks. Over Mayflower, the lowest beam of the Little Rock radar passed about a thousand feet above the ground. At Joplin, in our fifth episode, the beam crossed the tornado about a mile up.

The warning and the tornado, 7:06 PM 2:22

At six minutes past seven, the Little Rock office issued the first tornado warning. It says Doppler radar indicated a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado, five miles north of Lake Norrell. The places in its path included Maumelle, Roland and Mayflower, and Interstate Forty between mile markers one hundred thirty-three and one hundred forty-five.

The damage survey puts the start of the tornado in the same minute, at seven oh six, five point four miles west of Ferndale, near the Saline and Pulaski county line. The warning and the tornado began together.

How a radar sees debris 2:58

Here is how a radar tells debris from rain. This one sends out two pulses at once, one wide and one tall. Raindrops are nearly all the same shape, so the two echoes match, and a number called the correlation stays close to one. Pieces of houses and trees tumble in every shape. The two echoes stop matching, and the correlation falls.

In the lowest scan of each volume, we counted the points with a correlation under zero point eight and an echo of at least forty decibels, within three kilometers of the debris nearest the survey line. Each point is a sample of the scan, about two hundred and fifty meters long.

In the scan that began at seven oh six, eleven points pass, at the spot where the survey begins the path. In the next scan, at seven ten, there are forty.

The forecasters saw it too. Four minutes after the warning, the Weather Service wrote, the radar clearly showed a debris ball just north of Ferndale, and it was certain that a tornado was present and causing damage.

Three Tornado Emergencies 3:58

That prompted the first Tornado Emergency, for Maumelle, at seven fourteen. The text called it a confirmed tornado with reports of damage. A potentially deadly tornado, moving northeast at forty-five miles an hour.

The tornado crossed the eastern part of Lake Maumelle. At seven twenty, a second Tornado Emergency went out as the storm neared Morgan. Five minutes later, the State Police confirmed the tornado at Roland.

In Pulaski County, the survey rated this part of the path EF3. Seven houses were destroyed. Three people were killed in one of them.

At seven twenty-nine, a new warning named the next two towns. Its words, in capitals: this is a Tornado Emergency for Mayflower and Vilonia. Take cover now.

Mayflower, scan by scan 4:48

In our measurement, the scan that began at seven twenty-nine puts the center of the debris about one mile from the center of Mayflower. Sixty-nine points pass. The first warning, twenty-three minutes earlier, had already listed Mayflower by name.

The survey traced the tornado through the River Plantation subdivision and into Mayflower, where homes and businesses were destroyed. Then it crossed Interstate Forty, throwing cars, trucks and road construction equipment off the freeway. Traffic on the interstate was backed up for weeks afterward.

In Faulkner County alone, according to the American Red Cross, the tornado destroyed two hundred and sixty-one houses and one hundred and twenty-one mobile homes. Hundreds of cars and pickup trucks were mangled along the path. A dealership and dozens of recreational vehicles were destroyed.

The highest count of the evening is in the next scan, at seven thirty-four, just past Mayflower: one hundred and six points. The debris was about twelve miles from the radar, the closest it came all evening.

Debris in every scan for an hour 5:53

Here is the whole count, scan by scan. This radar repeats its lowest scan about every four minutes and forty seconds. From seven oh six to eight oh six, there is no scan without debris. It never drops below eleven points, and for most of the hour it stays above sixty.

Past Mayflower, the tornado crossed part of Lake Conway. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission later removed six hundred and twenty-seven tons of tornado debris from the lake. Then it crossed part of Camp Robinson, a National Guard facility.

The Arkansas National Guard filmed what the tornado left the next day. That footage, published by the Guard, is what you are seeing in this episode.

Five days later, a NASA satellite passed over. In this image from the Advanced Land Imager, the path is visible from space, a trail of damaged trees and homes running northeast from Lake Conway, near Interstate Forty.

The path the radar traced 6:48

We followed the center of the debris from scan to scan, from seven oh six to eight oh two. It traces a path sixty-seven kilometers long, forty-one and a half miles. The survey measured forty-one point three. It moved at about forty-four miles an hour, close to the speeds in the warnings.

At seven thirty-eight, the Weather Service wrote, the radar showed strong rotation between Mayflower and Vilonia, with a debris ball present. The update at seven forty-three called a Tornado Emergency for Saltillo and Vilonia.

Vilonia 7:26

In our measurement, the scan that began at seven forty-eight puts the center of the debris a mile and a third from the center of Vilonia. Sixty-one points pass. That is nineteen minutes after the emergency that first named the town.

The Weather Service also published a cross-section through the storm near Vilonia, showing debris lofted nearly fifteen thousand feet. Our test is stricter: it only counts points within three kilometers of the debris column at the ground. By that test, the debris reaches between three and six thousand feet. Debris that high drifts away from the column, so the two readings measure different things.

In Vilonia, nearly two dozen businesses along Main Street were destroyed. So was the town's new intermediate school, still under construction. The Weather Service wrote that it had been set to open in the fall.

About four hundred people had taken shelter in a safe room at the Vilonia high school. Of the sixteen people killed by this tornado, nine were in the Vilonia area.

The federal record says where each person was. In the Mayflower area, three were killed in their houses. Near Vilonia, most were in houses too, and one woman was killed in a vehicle on U.S. Sixty-Four. None of the deaths was on the interstate.

Hit three years and two days earlier 8:47

Vilonia had been here before. On April twenty-fifth, 2011, an EF2 tornado killed four people on the southwest side of town. In the federal record, its path through this county also began at Mayflower and passed through Vilonia.

In this county, the 2011 path was up to two thousand nine hundred yards wide, more than twice the width of the 2014 tornado at its widest. The four deaths were in a mobile home park, where numerous mobile homes were destroyed. About thirty-four houses and sixty-two mobile homes were destroyed in the county.

The federal storm record puts it plainly. The 2014 tornado hit Vilonia three years and two days after a tornado had destroyed some of the same structures. Since 1950, the Weather Service counts five tornadoes through the present-day city limits.

The other three are from 1961 and 1982. The two in 1982 came on consecutive days, December twenty-third and December twenty-fourth.

The engineers who surveyed the damage looked at the storm shelters in the path. Generally, they wrote, the shelters built above ground performed well, and dozens of people survived in them. One person was killed when a hard object struck a shelter door and deformed it, and the door opened into the shelter.

From Vilonia, the tornado moved into White County. It killed one more person, in a mobile home near El Paso. The survey ends the path about a mile and a half northeast of El Paso.

The warnings kept pace. At seven fifty-six, a new warning placed the tornado two miles northeast of Vilonia, and carried another Tornado Emergency, for El Paso and Floyd. In forty-two minutes, the office had issued Tornado Emergencies naming Maumelle, Mayflower, Vilonia, Saltillo, El Paso and Floyd.

When did it end? 10:52

When did it end? The Weather Service page and the federal record say eight oh two. The survey statement issued three days later says eight oh six. The radar cannot settle it.

Our count still finds seventy points in the scan that began at eight oh two. At eight oh six there are twenty-five, about three miles past the end of the surveyed path. Debris keeps falling after a tornado lifts, and the radar keeps seeing it.

The federal record splits this tornado into three entries, one per county, each with its own rating: EF3 in Pulaski, EF4 in Faulkner, EF2 in White. Together, sixteen dead and one hundred and ninety-three injured.

At its widest, the path was thirteen hundred and twenty yards, three quarters of a mile. The Weather Service estimated that four to five hundred homes were destroyed.

Why EF4 and not EF5 11:52

The rating for the whole path is EF4, winds of one hundred and sixty-six to two hundred miles an hour. The preliminary survey statement estimated the peak at one hundred and eighty to one hundred and ninety. So why not EF5?

In a subdivision in Vilonia, houses were swept off their foundations, with only slabs remaining. The survey found its answer in the slabs. Its notes read: no anchor bolts used in foundations.

The Arkansas residential building code calls for anchor bolts every six feet in the foundation. Without them, the Weather Service wrote, it took less wind to sweep a house away. That was a big reason, though not the only one, for the EF4 rating instead of EF5.

The engineers found the same weakness in new homes. Their wall plates were fastened to the slab with cut nails, an attachment they wrote had little resistance to sideways and uplift forces.

In our episode on the EF scale, we showed this from the other side. A house swept clean off its slab is the scale's highest degree of damage for a home, and its expected wind is two hundred miles an hour, the top of EF4. How the house was held down decides what the slab can prove.

The deadliest tornado of 2014 13:12

2014 was a quiet year. The Little Rock office counted only twenty tornadoes in Arkansas, and seven in the spring. This was the first tornado of EF4 or stronger in the United States that year, and it killed more people than any other tornado in the country.

In Arkansas, it was deadlier than the Interstate Thirty tornado of 1997, which killed fifteen, and the Super Tuesday tornado of 2008, which cut a one hundred and twenty-two mile path and killed thirteen. The last single tornado to kill more in the state struck Jonesboro, in May 1968: thirty-five. And the same supercell went on to produce four more tornadoes.

What the record supports 13:51

Here is what the instruments support. The Little Rock radar saw debris in every scan for an hour, and the center of that debris traces the surveyed path to within a fraction of a mile of its length. It put the debris over Mayflower in the scan that began at seven twenty-nine, the minute of the emergency that named the town.

Here is what they cannot say. Exactly when the tornado ended: debris stays in the air after it lifts, and the two Weather Service records disagree by four minutes. And how strong the wind was: the rating is limited by what the houses could prove, and a house without anchor bolts proves less.

One question we could not close. The scan that began at one minute past seven already has specks of low correlation, and three of them pass our test, about four miles north of where the survey begins the path. Three are too few to call a tornado. If you know what the radar saw there, tell us in the comments.

Next: Hurricane Maria, 2017 14:52

Next, the radar that did not survive. On September twentieth, 2017, the Weather Service radar in Puerto Rico sent its last image at ten minutes to six in the morning, local time, just before the center of Hurricane Maria came ashore. Then the wind destroyed it. That is the next episode. Hurricane Maria, 2017.

Description and sources

The Mayflower-Vilonia tornado began 5.4 miles west of Ferndale at 7:06 PM CDT on 27 April 2014, the same minute the first tornado warning was issued, and ended near El Paso at 8:02 PM (NWS, NCEI; 8:06 in the preliminary survey statement): 41.3 miles, up to 1,320 yards wide, EF4 (166-200 mph), 16 deaths, 193 injuries. Our measurement on the KLZK Level II archive (correlation coefficient under 0.8 with reflectivity of at least 40 dBZ, within 3 km of the debris nearest the survey line, lowest scan): 11 points at 7:06, 40 at 7:10, a peak of 106 at 7:34 just past Mayflower, 70 at 8:02, 25 at 8:06, and none near the path at 8:11. The center of the debris traces 41.5 miles at about 44 mph. Tornado Emergencies were issued for Maumelle at 7:14, for Mayflower and Vilonia at 7:29, and later for Saltillo, El Paso and Floyd. Vilonia had been hit by an EF2 on 25 April 2011. The survey found houses swept to the slab with no anchor bolts in the foundations, a big reason for the EF4 rating instead of EF5.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • FEMA — 2014-05-02 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • FEMA — 2014-05-07 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Staff Sgt. Caleb Pierce — 2014-04-28 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • FEMA — 2014-05-03 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Arkansas National Guard — 2014-04-29 | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain

... and 5 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Hook Echo reads a disaster through the instruments that recorded it: radar, sensor, survey and report, with the primary sources above.

About the material. Video: Arkansas National Guard footage from Mayflower and Vilonia, 28-30 April 2014, published on DVIDS. Photos: FEMA and the U.S. Air Force (public domain); satellite image: NASA Earth Observatory (EO-1 ALI, 2 May 2014). Radar: NOAA NEXRAD Level II (KLZK), rendered by us with the National Weather Service colour scales; our debris count uses the correlation coefficient of the lowest scan. Every diagram is drawn in code. Nothing in this video is AI-generated imagery. The narration is synthetic (Google Gemini text-to-speech), checked word by word against the script.

#Tornado #Arkansas #Radar