Arkansas Tornadoes: The Natural State's Deadliest Twisters - Paperback

by Marlene Bradford (Author)

Updated with statistics through 2020. Arkansas is in the center of tornado activity in the United States. In spite of its relatively small geographic size and population, the Natural State ranks among the top 5 in the number of tornadoes and tornado deaths since 1880. This book focuses on superlatives: the deadliest tornadoes and outbreaks (multiple tornadoes on the same day) both before and after 1953 (the beginning of the modern era of tornado forecasting), the deadliest day, year, and decade, the longest tornado, and the largest number of tornadoes in one day. Also included are stories of twisters that did not earn a superlative but are historically important, tornadoes that struck schools, towns that suffered multiple tornado strikes, and tornado safety rules. These accounts encompass more than 50 counties and several hundred towns and communities on which these monsters of nature inflicted pain from 1898 through 2020.

Author Biography

Marlene Bradford has spent most of her life in Tornado Alley. When living in Lawrence, Kansas, Joe Eagleman, a meteorology professor at the University of Kansas, encouraged her to write tornado history. Her doctoral dissertation at Texas A&M University was the story of the tornado watch and warning system which was published in 2001 by the University of Oklahoma Press under the title Scanning the Skies: A History of Tornado Forecasting. She is also the author of Texas Tornadoes: The Lone Star State's Deadliest Twisters and the editor of Notable Natural Disasters. Her love (besides tornadoes) is teaching. The author has recently retired from more than twenty years of teaching U.S. history at the college and high school level and currently resides with her husband in Garland, Texas