At least 21 confirmed tornados over a three-day period left a swath of destruction across 15 states leaving at least 35 dead and more than 140 injured. Some communities were so badly damaged that all you could see left was the concrete slab on which homes and businesses once stood.
It was the first major tornado outbreak in the 2014 tornado season with 116 reports of tornado sightings. Some of the tornadoes were massive including one EF-4, five EF-3 and six EF-2. One half-mile-wide EF-3 tornado tracked around 40 miles and destroyed communities in the northern suburbs of Little Rock, Arkansas. That twister took 14 lives and injured nearly 100 others.
And in Mississippi an EF-3 tornado tracked 24 miles, killing one and injuring at least 40, while an EF-4, three-quarters of a mile wide leveled homes, warehouses, and a chicken farm, leaving nine dead, an undetermined number injured and one missing.
Storms battered the southeast United States for the better part of three days causing flash flooding in parts of the Florida panhandle and other parts of the Gulf coast.
“The time is at hand when there will be sorrow in the world that no human balm can heal. The Spirit of God is being withdrawn. Disasters by sea and by land follow one another in quick succession. How frequently we hear of earthquakes and tornadoes, of destruction by fire and flood, with great loss of life and property! Apparently these calamities are capricious outbreaks of disorganized, unregulated forces of nature, wholly beyond the control of man; but in them all, God’s purpose may be read. They are among the agencies by which He seeks to arouse men and women to a sense of their danger.” Prophets and Kings, page 277