Tornado hits near Hot Springs Village

A tornado struck near Hot Springs Village on Thursday night, the National Weather Service reported, with authorities reporting downed trees and at least one road rendered impassible by damage.

The National Weather Service office in Little Rock picked up a debris signature on radar around 8:05 p.m. that indicated a tornado had struck near the town in Garland and Saline counties, a post on X, formerly Twitter, stated. Baseball-sized hail was also reported there.

First responders from Hot Springs and Garland County were headed to help clear damaged areas in and around Hot Springs Village, Garland County Judge Darryl Mahoney wrote shortly before 10 p.m. in a post on Facebook.

Emergency personnel had set up an incident command post at the Cortez Fire Station in Hot Springs Village, The Sentinel-Record in Hot Springs reported.

Officials with the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management, in a 9:18 p.m. post on X, warned people to avoid areas of DeSoto Boulevard made hazardous by downed power lines. Houses along Arkansas 7 had sustained roof damage.

An official from the Garland County sheriff’s office later reported that DeSoto Boulevard had been cleared, The Sentinel-Record reported.

A Hot Springs Village police employee said just before 9 p.m. that police were still assessing the damage and were getting a lot of phone calls.

Sgt. John Schroeder with the Garland County sheriff’s office said the office had also gotten reports of power lines down across Arkansas 7 but that no injuries had been reported by about 9 p.m.

By about 9:45 p.m., approximately 2,471 First Electric Cooperative Corp. customers were without power, including 1,323 in Van Buren County and 1,147 in Saline County, according to an online outage map operated by the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.

At that time, Entergy Arkansas also reported about 1,312 customers in the Hot Springs Village area without power, with more outages reported northwest of the town, an online outage map showed.