Storms cause damage in parts of state
A line of severe thunderstorms tore through the state Saturday evening, toppling power lines and damaging farm buildings before exiting to the east after 10 p.m.
The National Weather Service issued multiple tornado warnings beginning about 6:30 p.m. for an area roughly stretching from Northeast Arkansas to south-central Arkansas.
A suspected tornado damaged farm equipment, storage buildings and at least one business in Arkansas County, according to authorities.
Arkansas Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Barbara Hager said the Office of Emergency Management in that area was reporting damage along U.S. 165 South but no injuries. Farm equipment and farm storage facilities were damaged south of
DeWitt near Arkansas 276, Hager said.
About a half-mile of U.S. 165 and a portion of Arkansas 276 were closed late Saturday because of toppled power lines, according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation.
Meteorologist Justin Condry with the National Weather Service in Little Rock said he could not confirm that any tornadoes had touched down. He said the weather service would send crews out today to assess the damage and make that determination.
“Right now, we’re just getting some preliminary stuff,” Condry said late Saturday.
Storms knocked out power to thousands of customers in the central-southeast part of Arkansas and in some areas of north Arkansas, according to Entergy spokesman David Lewis.
A total of 2,724 Entergy customers in Jefferson County,
many of them southwest of Pine Bluff and southwest of DeWitt, lost power about 8 p.m., Lewis said. He could not say for sure what caused the outages.
“It could be wind,” he said. “It could be lightning.”
In Independence County, 1,462 Entergy customers lost power, according to Lewis.
Power was also knocked out to about 500 customers, many in Grady and Gould, in Lincoln County south of Pine Bluff, according to an Entergy outage map.
About 880 Entergy customers were without power near McNeil in Columbia County, the outage map showed.
Hail, high winds and isolated flooding were reported with the storm system.
About 10 p.m., a tornado warning was still in effect for south Arkansas in the area of Bradley and Drew counties in far southeast Arkansas.