A multi-day severe weather outbreak that swept the lower Mississippi Valley between Tuesday night and Thursday morning has killed at least 14 people, leveled neighborhoods in Arkansas, Mississippi and western Tennessee, and forced more than 4,200 residents into emergency shelters, state and federal officials said Friday.

The Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma confirmed 38 separate tornadoes from the three-day sequence, including two rated EF-4 — one that carved a 22-mile path through Pulaski and Lonoke counties in Arkansas late Tuesday, and a second that struck the outskirts of Tupelo, Mississippi, in the early hours of Thursday. Preliminary survey teams said both twisters carried peak winds above 175 miles per hour.

“This was one of the more violent late-April, early-May setups we have seen in the past decade,” said Dr. Marisol Hendricks, lead meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center, in a midday briefing. “We had a textbook combination of a deep Plains trough, a 70-degree dewpoint surge off the Gulf and very strong low-level shear. The atmosphere was loaded.”

Search-and-rescue operations remained active through Friday afternoon in the Arkansas town of Cabot, where a residential subdivision was largely flattened, and in the small Mississippi community of Saltillo, where a high school gymnasium being used as a shelter took a partial roof collapse. State officials in Little Rock said roughly 60 people remained unaccounted for across the affected region as of 1 p.m. Central time, though most were expected to be found alive once cellular service was restored.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency Wednesday morning and requested an expedited federal disaster designation, which the White House granted late Thursday. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves followed with a parallel declaration covering 18 counties. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had pre-positioned roughly 1.2 million liters of bottled water, 480,000 ready-to-eat meals and more than 60 generators at staging sites in Memphis and Little Rock.

“Our priority right now is life safety, then power restoration, then a roof over every head,” said FEMA Acting Administrator Daniel Whitaker, who toured the Cabot damage path Friday morning with Sanders. He said federal individual assistance grants would begin processing within 72 hours for displaced households.

Power outages peaked at just over 410,000 customers across the three states early Thursday, according to aggregated utility data published by Entergy and the Tennessee Valley Authority. By Friday afternoon, roughly 138,000 remained without service, concentrated in rural counties where transmission corridors were severed by falling timber.

Insurance industry analysts said preliminary loss estimates were running between $2.4 billion and $3.1 billion in insured damages, with total economic losses likely higher once agricultural impact in the Arkansas Delta was tallied.

“You’re looking at one of the costlier April-into-May outbreaks of the modern record, even before the crop side gets factored in,” said Renee Albright, a Chicago-based catastrophe analyst at Aon. “Soybean and rice acreage in eastern Arkansas took both wind and hail. The hail swaths in particular are going to be expensive.”

The American Red Cross said it had opened 31 shelters across the region by Friday morning, the largest at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson, which was housing roughly 720 evacuees. Volunteer crews from as far as Texas and Ohio were being routed in to supplement local chapters.

For survivors, the scale of the destruction settled in slowly. In Cabot, Linda Pruitt, 58, stood Friday morning on what had been her front porch and described hearing a roar “louder than any freight train you’d ever imagine” as she huddled with her two grandchildren in a hallway bathtub. “We made it,” she said. “The house didn’t. But we made it.”

The outbreak comes against the backdrop of a stormy spring across the central United States. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the country had already logged more than 720 tornado reports for 2026 through April, running roughly 28 percent above the 30-year average for that point in the year. Climate scientists have flagged a trend of severe-weather activity shifting eastward out of the traditional Plains “Tornado Alley” and into the Mid-South, a region with denser populations, more mobile-home housing stock and fewer hardened shelters.

“What we keep seeing is high-end events happening in the worst possible geography for them,” said Dr. Henry Marchetti, a climate-extremes researcher at the University of Oklahoma. “Nighttime tornadoes, in forested terrain, hitting communities that don’t have basements. The fatality math gets ugly fast.”

Federal officials said a longer-duration severe weather pattern was expected to return to the southern Plains by Monday, with the Storm Prediction Center already drawing an enhanced-risk outlook across portions of Oklahoma, Kansas and north Texas for early next week. Forecasters urged residents in the affected zones to review shelter plans and to keep multiple ways of receiving warnings overnight.

In Little Rock, Sanders said the state would convene a damage-assessment task force on Monday and that public-school districts in three counties would remain closed at least through midweek. Officials said additional federal disaster declarations and individual-assistance approvals would be announced as ground surveys were completed in the coming days.