April 2, 2006 Tornado Outbreak

Tornado outbreak of April 2, 2006

The F3 Marmaduke/Caruthersville tornado near Kennett, Missouri
Type	Tornado outbreak
Duration	April 2, 2006
Tornadoes confirmed	66 confirmed
Max rating1	F3 tornado
Duration of tornado outbreak2	6 hours, 43 minutes
Damage	$1.1 billion
Casualties	28 fatalities (+2 non-tornadic), 348 injuries
Areas affected	Midwestern United States, Mississippi River Valley
1Most severe tornado damage; see Fujita scale 2Time from first tornado to last tornado

¹Most severe tornado damage; see Fujita scale

The Tornado outbreak of April 2, 2006 was a series of tornadoes that occurred during the late afternoon and evening of April 2, 2006, in the central United States. It was the second major outbreak of 2006, in the same area that suffered considerable destruction in a previous outbreak on March 11 and March 12, as well as an outbreak on November 15, 2005. The most notable tornadoes of the outbreak struck northeastern Arkansas, the Missouri Bootheel, and West Tennessee, where several communities – including Marmaduke, Arkansas, Caruthersville, Missouri, and Newbern, Tennessee suffered devastating damage. In total, 66 tornadoes touched down across seven states, which is the most in a single day in 2006. In addition, there were over 850 total severe weather reports, including many reports of straight-line winds exceeding hurricane force and hail as large as softballs, which caused significant additional damage in a nine-state region.

The outbreak was a deadly one; there were a total of 28 tornado-related deaths plus two other deaths from straight-line winds. It was the deadliest tornado outbreak in the United States since the May 2003 tornado outbreak sequence in the first week of May 2003, which killed 48 people. Twenty-six of those deaths were caused by a single supercell thunderstorm which produced damaging and long lived tornadoes from north central Arkansas into northwest Tennessee.