By State › Arkansas
Arkansas: Risks & Trends
Download all of Arkansas as PDF PrintSame standard as every other page on this site: every figure below is independently sourced, and figures that vary across sources, or measure genuinely different things, are flagged as such rather than collapsed into one number that looks more precise than the underlying data actually supports.
The 2014 Mayflower-Vilonia tornado
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Date | April 27, 2014 |
| Rating | EF4 |
| Peak winds | 190 mph |
| Path length | 41.10 mi |
| Maximum path width | 1,320 yards |
| Duration | 56 minutes |
| Deaths | 16, including one inside an above-ground storm shelter |
| Injuries | 193 |
| Damage | $223.45 million (2014 USD) |
| Communities hit | Paron, Mayflower, Lake Conway, Vilonia, El Paso |
The above-ground shelter fatality
One of the 16 deaths occurred inside an above-ground storm shelter, believed to be the first documented fatality of its kind in a tornado. It doesn’t mean above-ground shelters are unsafe as a category; it means a shelter’s protection depends on its specific construction, anchoring, and placement relative to the tornado’s actual path and debris field, not on the fact that it is labeled a shelter.
The Guy-Greenbrier earthquake swarm: induced, not natural
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Active period | July 2010 - October 2011 |
| Earthquakes detected | 14,604 (magnitude -1.5 to 2.9 for the vast majority) |
| Largest recorded event | Magnitude 4.7, night of February 27, 2011 |
| Suspected cause | Wastewater disposal wells associated with Fayetteville Shale natural gas drilling, injecting near the Guy-Greenbrier fault |
| Disposal wells in the area, 2009-2011 | 6 |
| Regulatory response | Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission moratorium on new disposal wells in the area, adopted unanimously July 27, 2011 |
| Outcome after wells shut down | Seismicity dropped off within about three months |
A hazard that can be turned off
Every other seismic risk on this site, including the New Madrid Seismic Zone covered on Illinois, Missouri, and Tennessee’s pages, is naturally occurring and cannot be switched off by a regulatory order. The Guy-Greenbrier swarm is the exception: once the disposal wells linked to it stopped operating, the earthquakes largely stopped within months. That doesn’t make the risk zero for residents near other active injection sites, but it does mean tracking well permits and Commission actions is a genuinely actionable step in a way that tracking natural fault stress is not.