The Smithville tornado of April 27, 2011

EF5  Monroe and Itawamba counties, Mississippi, and Marion and Franklin counties, Alabama · surveyed by NWS Memphis, NWS Birmingham and NWS Huntsville

Smithville is a town of about 900 people on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway in northeast Mississippi. At 3:44 pm on April 27, 2011 a tornado three-quarters of a mile wide crossed it at 60 mph and took the town hall, the post office, the police station, four of its five churches, the school, the only grocery store and the water system, and 16 of its people. Well-built brick houses bolted to their slabs were swept clean. A Ford Explorer was carried half a mile and thrown into the top of the water tower. The tornado was the third of four EF5s that afternoon, and the Columbus Air Force Base radar watched it from twelve miles away, closer than any WSR-88D has been to a tornado of this rating.

A row of steel post office boxes stands on a bare concrete slab under a flagpole flying the United States, Mississippi and Smithville flags, with a heap of twisted metal and debris behind where the post office stood.
The post office, May 2011. The building was swept from its slab; the flagpole and the mailboxes stayed. Photo: Howard Greenblatt, FEMA, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Rating
EF5 205 mph estimated
Path length
37.3 mi four county segments; 6 mi at EF5 around Smithville
Max width
¾ mi 1,320 yd
Touchdown
3:42 pm CDT 3 mi southwest of Smithville; in town 3:44
Forward speed
~60 mph
Deaths
16 in Smithville; 23 along the track
Injuries
37 137 along the track
Damage
$14.4M 2011 USD, Storm Data segments
Radar
KGWX 12 mi; no dual-pol yet
Warning lead
23 min warned 3:21 pm; 43 min from an earlier warning
Watch
PDS 235 issued 1:45 pm CDT
Outbreak
199 tornadoes 316 deaths, April 27

The setup

The forecast, the watch and the outbreak are described on the Hackleburg-Phil Campbell page: a High risk by morning, "a major tornado outbreak" expected, and a Particularly Dangerous Situation tornado watch at 1:45 pm whose discussion warned of "strong/violent and potentially long-track tornadoes."[7] What matters for Smithville is a boundary. The morning and midday storms left a thermal boundary across the region, and Kevin Knupp and colleagues noted that "both the Smithville and Hackleburg EF-5 tornadoes were located near the thermal boundary."[8]

The 2022 reanalysis of the day's supercells labeled the Smithville storm supercell A. Its first echo appeared at 11:47 am in the Louisiana Delta, and for three hours it produced no tornado at all: "Supercells A, E, and I, all of which initiated in cluster 1 in the Louisiana Delta region, were dormant (with respect to tornado production) from the time of CI until they reached the boundary zone, when each produced EF3 tornadoes." Supercell A's first tornado formed at 2:48 pm and ran 51 miles through Webster, Calhoun, Chickasaw and Monroe counties at EF3, killing four people. It lifted at 3:38 pm near Bigbee. Four minutes later, four miles on, the Smithville tornado touched down.[3][10]

The warning

Smithville was under two tornado warnings when the tornado formed, both issued for the predecessor. NWS Memphis warned Monroe County at 3:01 pm for a storm "producing a tornado 7 miles south of Pyland." At 3:21 pm it warned northern Monroe County again: "NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A LARGE AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TORNADO NEAR TREBLOC ... MOVING NORTHEAST AT 55 MPH. THIS TORNADO WAS REPORTED ON THE GROUND SOUTHEAST OF HOUSTON. THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS SITUATION." Smithville lay inside that polygon, 23 minutes before the tornado reached it, and on the edge of the earlier one, 43 minutes before.[6]

No warning or statement that afternoon named Smithville, and none used the words "tornado emergency." The statement issued at 3:40 pm placed the tornado "near Wren, or 7 miles west of Amory, moving northeast at 60 mph"; the one at 3:47 pm, as Smithville lay in ruins, placed it "near Hatley, or near Amory, moving east at 60 mph."[6] The town's warning, in practice, came from WTVA's Matt Laubhan, whose broadcast that afternoon is embedded below, and from the sky: the tornado was visible from the town for minutes before it arrived.

Chronology

Times are CDT (UTC−5). Storm Data records the same events an hour earlier under a Central Standard label.[3]

One minute in Smithville

The official record of what happened is a single paragraph. "The town of Smithville was almost completely destroyed by the tornado. Homes and businesses were completely wiped off of their foundations. The town hall, post office, police station, and four churches were destroyed. All appliances and plumbing fixtures in the direct path of the tornado were shredded or missing. Granite tombstones were knocked down in the opposite direction of the tornado passage. In total, 117 structures were destroyed with an additional 50 structures sustaining major damage. Trees were debarked, twisted, and snapped. Power lines were knocked down and the town's water system was destroyed. A lot of the homes that were destroyed were well built, bolted to their foundations and were less than 10 years old."[3]

A surveyor stands before a bare concrete slab in a field of splintered debris, with debarked trees and the shells of houses beyond.
The Pearson family's home, April 28. One of the swept slabs the rating rests on. Photo: NWS Memphis, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.[1]

Survivors told the Commercial Appeal what it sounded like: "like a jet fan with trash stuck in it"; a "buzz saw then thousand pigs squealing"; a "high-pitched scream, scratching and squealing of a demon." What it looked like: an "odd, gray mass, a half-mile wide," a "breathing mammoth of dust," a "massive black wave" with "white dots surging in and out." Jimmy Cowley, 69, whose truck rolled as its windows exploded: "I covered up, 'cause I thought I was gone." Mayor Gregg Kennedy was locked inside the town hall when it hit, and afterwards directed the rescue and set up a morgue in the water department's metal shed.[12] Fifteen years on, the town's current mayor, Phil Goodwin, described riding it out on a restaurant's kitchen floor with eight others: "I could feel myself moving up some and when the top of the restaurant came off, I thought it was going to suck us out of there."[18]

A man stands on a lawn beside a white fence watching a vast dark wedge tornado fill the sky beyond the trees and rooftops.
From two miles south. The tornado over northern Smithville. Photo: Sylvia Poppell Menold, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The water tower

Every account of this tornado includes the water tower, and the technical literature confirms it. "The tornado swept away much of the town of Smithville, and lofted a large SUV 0.5 mi before throwing it into the town's water tower, where it left a large dent; the SUV landed another 0.25 mi downstream in a crumpled ball." Knupp's overview gives the vehicle's weight, about 2.2 tons, and the distance, about 900 m, and notes the tower stood "on the right edge of the tornado damage path." Storm Data adds a second vehicle: a 1965 Chevrolet pickup parked in front of one of the destroyed homes "has not been found." Its owner, McCaul and colleagues reported, "speculates that the truck may have been deposited in Pool B of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, some 0.3 mi north." A bag of athletic gear weighing an estimated 40 pounds was carried 30 miles to Hodges, Alabama.[1][8][9]

Smithville's pale blue water tower against a clear sky, sheet metal wrapped around its legs, a debarked tree beside it and wrecked vehicles below.
The water tower, April 28. Sheet metal wrapped around the legs; the tank carries the mark of the Explorer. Photo: Sgt. Ed Silence, Mississippi National Guard, via DVIDS, public domain.[20]

One widely shared image was not what it seemed. "Early reports on the internet that a steel drainage culvert had been ripped out of the ground by the tornado proved erroneous; Smithville police officials confirm that the street had been earlier declared unsafe, and that road crews had dug up the culvert to ensure no vehicular traffic could use it."[9]

The radar record

KGWX at Columbus Air Force Base stands about twelve miles south of Smithville, which puts its lowest beam only a few hundred meters above the town, low enough to see the circulation near the ground and close enough that the radar's own ground clutter fills the bottom of every frame. The dual-polarisation upgrade had not reached it, so there is no correlation coefficient to confirm debris; the reflectivity does that on its own. No rotational velocity for this tornado has been published: the outbreak's overview quotes a 129 m/s velocity difference, but for the Tuscaloosa tornado on KBMX, not this one.[8]

Radar reflectivity from KGWX showing a supercell's red core over Itawamba County with a hook echo curling southwest toward Smithville, and the radar's clutter cone at the bottom of the frame.
Reflectivity, 3:42 pm CDT (20:42 UTC), KGWX, 0.5°. The moment of touchdown. The storm's core sits over the Fulton area and its hook curls back south-west toward Smithville, with the inflow notch between them. The radar is at the bottom of the frame, twelve miles away.
Radar reflectivity from KGWX five minutes later, with the hook's tip and a single magenta gate directly on the north edge of Smithville.
Reflectivity, 3:47 pm CDT, KGWX, 0.5°. Five minutes on, the hook's tip is on the town and a single gate above 70 dBZ, magenta, sits on Smithville's north edge: the debris ball, the town in the air.
Radar velocity from KGWX showing a tight pairing of green inbound returns west of Smithville and red and orange outbound returns east of it, with range-folded black areas to the east.
Velocity, 3:47 pm CDT, KGWX, 0.5°. The radar is due south. Green is air moving toward it, red and orange away. The pocket of inbound flow immediately west of Smithville against outbound flow immediately east is the tornado, its rotation resolved at a range few violent tornadoes are ever sampled from. The black to the east is range folding.

Replay the strike on Smithville on KGWX, reflectivity and velocity side by side, from the first tornado's end near Bigbee to the Alabama line.

Open in the archive

What the EF5 rests on

NWS Memphis's survey put it plainly: "MOST THE HOMES DESTROYED WERE WELL BUILT...TWO STORIES...LESS THAN TEN YEARS OLD AND BOLTED DOWN TO THEIR FOUNDATIONS." The estimated peak wind is 205 mph, an EF-scale estimate for a three-second gust at ten meters; nothing measured it.[1] Smithville is one of nine EF5s rated in the United States between the scale's adoption in 2007 and the end of 2022, and one of four that afternoon; the 2025 review of the years without one that followed lists the anchored, above-code homes swept from their slabs as the kind of indicator the later "drought" lacked.[11]

16 or 15 the Smithville death toll in Storm Data and every local count, against the figure on NWS Memphis's summary page, which also gives 40 injuries to Storm Data's 37 and a path of 35.1 miles to the four segments' 37.3 The page's ending point is the Marion-Franklin county line, not the tornado's end; its width, it says, was "widened to match" the Alabama segment.[1][3]

Two figures often attached to this tornado belong elsewhere. Ground scouring half a meter deep is from the Philadelphia, Mississippi EF5 earlier that afternoon, and the 129 m/s radar couplet is Tuscaloosa's.[8] And the four EF5s of April 27 were rated by three different offices on different evidence; no published survey ranks them.

Into Alabama

The Mississippi and Alabama damage were surveyed separately and joined afterwards: "Based upon further examination of satellite imagery which depicted tree scars and other ground survey evidence, the National Weather Service office in Memphis in coordination with the National Weather Service office in Birmingham has connected the Smithville MS and Shottsville AL tornado damage segments."[1] The tornado entered Marion County near Bexar as an EF1 with winds of 110 mph, crossed the future Interstate 22, and four miles east-southeast of Shottsville "strengthened to an EF3 rating with winds of 160 mph, and destroyed several homes. This resulted in 6 fatalities." The county's segment carries seven deaths and 100 injuries in Storm Data, on an 18.5-mile path averaging half a mile wide.[3][4] In Franklin County it was an EF2 for three minutes, collapsing two chicken houses and taking a roof near Hodges, and "appeared to quickly dissipate over the forested area northeast of Old Line Road."[5]

Eight miles east of that point, the Hackleburg-Phil Campbell tornado, from the next supercell to the southeast, was already an hour into its own track. The two are constantly confused and share nothing but the afternoon, the rating and Marion County.[3][10]

The victims

The sixteen: Jesse Cox, Courtney Easter, Mildred Elam, Celia Fay Jackson, Roy "Peanut" Estis, Ruth Estis, Karla Jones, Mavis Jean Manley, Alan Scott Morris, Betty Newkirk, Jessica Pace, Lucille Parker, Maxine Chism, Elvin Patterson, Hazel Noe and Laverne Patterson.[13][18] Ruth Estis was torn from her husband's arms; Peanut Estis died the next day. "Son, I was holding her in my arms and she just went up," he said. Karla Jones was babysitting the Pearson children, eight and four, when the house came apart; the children survived with fractured skulls. Maxine Chism was found alive and died three weeks later.[12]

"You could come in on the south end of town and see the beautiful roses in Ms. Jackson's yard. My first job as a teenager was driving a green Jon Deer tractor for Mr. Jesse Cox. When I went deer hunting in the hills, I would have a great time fellowshipping with Peanut Estis. I miss them. I miss all of them."

Mayor Gregg Kennedy, at the first anniversary, April 2012, as printed by The Dispatch[13]

Aftermath and recovery

A year on, the school was in 44 trailers beside concrete storm shelters, three of the four destroyed churches had been rebuilt, Smithville Baptist had broken ground on a $3 million replacement, and the post office was operating from the corner of a Texaco station.[14] By the fifth anniversary the school was in a new building, the town hall was rebuilt and the churches were back; the Piggly Wiggly, the town's only grocery, never returned, and its slab stayed bare.[15] The new Smithville Attendance Center cost $13 million and doubles as a community storm shelter, used "numerous times" since. Phil's Place, the restaurant whose kitchen floor the current mayor survived on, never reopened; its sign was never found.[18]

The census counted 942 people in 2010 and 509 in 2020, a loss of more than 46 percent, among the largest in the state; the mayor and town clerk believe the 2020 figure a severe undercount, and the town reports 25 new houses in the eighteen months to 2026 and a string of new businesses.[17][18] A memorial park at Monroe and Elm streets carries the sixteen names; a street was named for WTVA meteorologist Johnny Parker on the thirteenth anniversary. "The countless lives that were saved because of what happened here," NWS Memphis meteorologist Matt Laughan said at the tenth, "it's impossible for me to wrap my brain around it."[16]

"There are lots of people, including me, who still think about it every single day, especially when there's a threat of severe weather."

Johnny Parker, meteorologist, to the Daily Journal, April 2026[18]

Videos

The broadcast, footage and retrospectives, all via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embeds.

On air, 3:42 to 3:57 pm. WTVA's coverage as the tornado crossed Smithville.
A documentary treatment. Its title is the film's claim, not this page's.
Fourteen years. A meteorologist's anniversary retrospective.
The response. The American Red Cross in Smithville, spring 2011.

The other EF5s of the afternoon: Hackleburg-Phil Campbell, from the next storm east, and the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado, an EF4 to the survey and the source of most of the radar figures wrongly attached to Smithville. For the tornado that killed more people in a town than any since 1953, see Joplin, 25 days later.

All tornado profiles · Search the radar archive by date and time · How to read reflectivity and velocity

Sources

Path length, deaths and injuries in the vitals follow the NCEI Storm Events segments; NWS Memphis's differing figures are given in the text. Times are CDT (UTC−5).

  1. NWS Memphis, Smithville, MS EF-5 Tornado, survey statement and radar imagery.
  2. NWS Memphis, April 27, 2011 Tornado Outbreak.
  3. NCEI Storm Events Database, 2011 bulk details file, events 303248 (the predecessor tornado, Monroe County), 303562 (Smithville), 303563 (Itawamba County), 309295 (Marion County, Alabama) and 315232 (Franklin County, Alabama), from ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/.
  4. NWS Birmingham, Shottsville Tornado, April 27, 2011.
  5. NWS Huntsville, EF2 Hodges April 27, 2011 Tornado, Franklin County.
  6. Iowa Environmental Mesonet, archived NWS Memphis tornado warnings and severe weather statements of April 27, 2011.
  7. Storm Prediction Center, Tornado Watch 235 (Particularly Dangerous Situation), April 27, 2011.
  8. K. R. Knupp et al., Meteorological Overview of the Devastating 27 April 2011 Tornado Outbreak, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 95(7), 2014.
  9. E. W. McCaul, K. R. Knupp, C. Darden and K. Laws, Documentation of Extreme Damage from the 27 April 2011 Tornado Outbreak, 26th Conference on Severe Local Storms, 2012.
  10. A. W. Lyza, M. D. Flournoy and E. N. Rasmussen, Observed Characteristics of the Tornadic Supercells of 27–28 April 2011 in the Southeast United States, Monthly Weather Review 150(11), 2022.
  11. A. W. Lyza, H. E. Brooks and M. J. Krocak, Where Have the EF5s Gone? A Closer Look at the "Drought" of the Most Violent Tornadoes in the United States, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 106, 2025.
  12. K. Goetz, Deadly tornado destroyed town, not spirit, of tiny Smithville, Miss., The Commercial Appeal, October 23, 2011, as republished by the author.
  13. J. B. Clark, Smithville focuses on recovery, The Dispatch, April 30, 2012.
  14. The Mississippi Link, One year after deadly tornado, memories still vivid in Smithville, April 27, 2012.
  15. Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Smithville remembers deadly tornado 5 years later, April 27, 2016.
  16. Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Memorial ceremonies reflect on April 27, 2011 Smithville tornado, April 25, 2021.
  17. D. McArthur, Consequences of the count: Smithville census shows significant decrease, officials disagree, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, January 23, 2022.
  18. Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Smithville leaders reflect on progress 15 years after EF-5 tornado, April 27, 2026.
  19. WCBI, Smithville recognizes 10 year anniversary of EF5 tornado, April 25, 2021.
  20. DVIDS, City water tower wears remnants of recent storm, Sgt. Ed Silence, 102d Public Affairs Detachment, April 28, 2011; and Wikipedia, 2011 Smithville tornado, consulted September 2026, used as a finding aid.

Radar imagery on this page was rendered by WeatherOverTime from NOAA Level II data recorded by KGWX. Where sources disagree on a figure, the difference is noted in the text. Corrections: contact@weatherovertime.com.