OKLAHOMA CITY — A tornado outbreak across the central Plains has killed at least 14 people and damaged more than 1,800 structures over a 36-hour period that began Tuesday evening, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency deploying disaster response teams to Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas and Missouri on Thursday morning. The Storm Prediction Center in Norman has counted 71 preliminary tornado reports across the four states, with the heaviest concentration in central Oklahoma and southern Kansas.

The deadliest single tornado of the outbreak struck the town of Sulphur, Oklahoma, late Tuesday night, when an EF-4 tornado roughly half a mile wide tracked through the southern and eastern portions of the town for fifteen minutes and destroyed approximately 280 structures. Local officials confirmed eight deaths in Sulphur on Wednesday and reported a further three deaths on Thursday morning as search and rescue operations expanded into the agricultural areas east of the town.

Three additional deaths were reported in Kansas, where an EF-3 tornado tracked through portions of Reno and Harvey counties Wednesday afternoon, and in north Texas, where a smaller EF-2 tornado struck a mobile-home community north of Wichita Falls. A senior official at the National Weather Service forecast office in Norman, briefing reporters Thursday morning, characterized the outbreak as “the most significant single multi-day event we have seen in the central plains since the May 2024 cycle.”

The synoptic setup for the outbreak — a strong upper-level trough advancing across the Rockies, a warm and moist boundary-layer flow drawing up from the Gulf, and a pronounced jet streak overhead — had been forecast by the Storm Prediction Center as a high-risk scenario as early as Sunday evening, with a moderate-risk outlook upgraded to high-risk for Tuesday afternoon and a second high-risk window issued for Wednesday afternoon. The advance warning, the Norman office said, allowed several local emergency management agencies to pre-position shelters and to issue tiered watches that local broadcasters had been able to amplify.

President Trump, in a Thursday morning Truth Social post, said he had spoken with the governors of all four affected states and had directed FEMA Administrator Eric Lambert to “deploy every available resource immediately to our great Plains communities.” A senior administration official, contacted Thursday morning, said the agency was operating with two Incident Management Assistance Teams already in the field — one in Sulphur and one based in Wichita — and that a third would be deployed to north Texas pending the outcome of damage assessments.

FEMA’s regional administrator for the central Plains, speaking from the agency’s regional operations center in Denton, Texas, said the agency had pre-positioned generator sets, communications-restoration teams and meals-ready-to-eat caches at staging areas in Oklahoma City and Wichita, drawing on the spring-positioning rotation that the agency had recalibrated last year. The administrator said the agency expected to receive expedited disaster-declaration requests from Oklahoma and Kansas on Thursday and from Texas on Friday.

State-level emergency management coordination across the affected jurisdictions has been comparatively well-rehearsed; the central Plains states have shared mutual-aid frameworks for tornado response since the 2013 Moore outbreak, with regular tabletop exercises across emergency management directors. Oklahoma’s emergency management director, Brian Marrie, said Thursday morning that the state had received personnel deployments from National Guard units in Texas and Arkansas and that the urban search-and-rescue capacity available to the state had been “matched to the operational picture.”

In Sulphur, where the most significant urban damage has occurred, a temporary debris-management site has been established at the Murray County fairgrounds and a casework center has been opened at the town’s Methodist church. The town’s mayor, Logan Pittman, said in a brief televised statement Thursday morning that the rebuilding effort would take “months, not weeks” and that the town was working with state and federal counterparts to ensure that displaced residents had temporary housing options.

The outbreak has come during a spring tornado season that has produced both a higher-than-average number of tornado reports through the first half of May and an unusually high proportion of significant (EF-2 and above) events. The Storm Prediction Center’s preliminary tally for May to date stands at 274 tornado reports, against a ten-year average of 218 reports through the same calendar date. A senior NWS meteorologist, asked whether the early-season pattern was consistent with the longer-run trends the agency had been tracking, said the year-to-date numbers were “well within the variability the climatological record can account for,” but cautioned that the late-May and early-June outlook continued to feature elevated severe-weather risk.

Insurance industry analysts have begun to assess the financial scope of the outbreak. A senior catastrophe-modeling official at one of the larger U.S. reinsurance markets, asked Thursday for an early estimate, said the outbreak was tracking toward a $1.4–$1.8 billion insured loss event, putting it in the second tier of central Plains tornado outbreaks behind the major 2013 and 2019 events but ahead of most year-on-year comparison points. The estimate is preliminary and is expected to be refined as damage surveys complete over the next ten days.

Search and rescue operations were continuing Thursday morning across several rural areas east of Sulphur, where a number of mobile-home and small farm structures had been destroyed and where the population density made comprehensive damage assessment time-consuming. The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management said that two persons remained unaccounted for in Murray County and one in Garvin County, and that K-9 teams from neighboring states had been deployed to assist with the search.

The Storm Prediction Center’s outlook for the rest of the week showed an elevated severe-weather risk shifting eastward, with a moderate-risk area issued for portions of the lower Mississippi Valley for Friday afternoon. A separate slight-risk area was issued for the central Tennessee Valley for Saturday. The agency’s longer-run outlook indicated that the synoptic pattern responsible for the current outbreak was likely to begin breaking down by the start of next week.

Across the affected states, governors have indicated that initial damage assessments and federal disaster declaration requests will be the operational priority through the weekend. President Trump is scheduled to travel to Oklahoma City on Saturday morning to view damage in Sulphur and to meet with state and local officials, the White House said in a Thursday-afternoon advisory.