By State › Arkansas
Arkansas: Overview
Download all of Arkansas as PDF PrintEverything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Arkansas exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Arkansas go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.
The 2014 Mayflower-Vilonia tornado
On April 27, 2014, an EF4 tornado with winds up to 190 mph tracked more than 41 miles through central Arkansas, from Mayflower through Vilonia, killing 16 people and injuring 193. One of the deaths occurred inside an above-ground storm shelter, believed to be the first known fatality of its kind, a detail that matters directly for how this manual’s shelter guidance should be read: a shelter reduces risk, it does not eliminate it, and placement and anchoring still matter. See the Risks page for the full data.
The Guy-Greenbrier earthquake swarm: a hazard this manual hasn’t covered yet
Between 2010 and 2011, a stretch of central Arkansas near the towns of Guy and Greenbrier experienced over 14,000 earthquakes, most too small to feel, but including a magnitude 4.7 event, the largest instrumentally recorded in the area. This wasn’t ordinary natural seismicity: researchers linked the swarm to underground disposal of wastewater from nearby natural gas drilling, and the earthquakes largely stopped within months after the state shut the injection wells down. Every other seismic risk covered elsewhere on this site, from California’s San Andreas system to the New Madrid Seismic Zone under the central Mississippi Valley, is naturally occurring. Arkansas’s swarm is a reminder that some seismic risk is driven by ongoing industrial activity nearby, and can, in principle, be turned off rather than merely endured. See the Risks page for the full data.
What this means for how you use the rest of this manual
The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Arkansas: this manual’s storm-shelter guidance should be read alongside the Mayflower-Vilonia shelter fatality, not as a reason to skip a shelter but as a reason to take its construction and anchoring seriously, and residents in the Guy-Greenbrier area or near other active injection-well zones have a genuine reason to track local seismic activity that residents elsewhere in the state do not.