EF1 tornado, Bullard, Texas, May 6, 2025

1. EF065 to 85 mph

   Light damage. Surface peeled off some roofs, gutters and siding damaged, branches broken, shallow-rooted trees pushed over.

2. EF186 to 110 mphthis tornado

   Moderate damage. Roofs badly stripped, mobile homes overturned or badly damaged, exterior doors lost, windows broken.

3. EF2111 to 135 mph

   Considerable damage. Roofs torn off well-built houses, frame homes shifted on their foundations, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, cars lifted off the ground.

4. EF3136 to 165 mph

   Severe damage. Whole stories of well-built houses destroyed, large buildings badly damaged, trains overturned, trees debarked, heavy cars lifted and thrown.

5. EF4166 to 200 mph

   Devastating damage. Well-built houses leveled, structures with weak foundations moved some distance, cars thrown and large missiles generated.

6. EF5over 200 mph

   Incredible damage. Strong frame houses swept off their foundations, car-sized missiles thrown more than 100 meters, steel-reinforced concrete badly damaged, high-rise buildings deformed.

7. Unrated

   The survey recorded a tornado but could not put a number on it, most often because it crossed open country and damaged nothing a rating can be read from.

Rating

EF1

Date

May 6, 2025

Touchdown

1:41 PM CDT (18:41 UTC)

Lifted

1:48 PM CDT (18:48 UTC)

On the ground

7 minutes

Path length

4.9 miles (7.9 km)

Path width

600 yards (549 m)

Deaths

0

Injuries

0

Property damage

$25,000

County

Smith County

Touchdown point

32.151, -95.352

Lift-off point

32.141, -95.268

Record number

2505061241-01

87 damage points were recorded along this path by NWS FWD and NWS SHV, in the Damage Assessment Toolkit the survey teams carry. The strongest indicator was rated EF1. The highest wind the damage implies is 93 mph.

• One tree damaged south of road too
• Uprooted tree fell on end of home injuring a male inside.
• Sheet metal carport torn up too
• Actual end of damage was north of the bend in the road. Can’t access farther north

Survey points are preliminary and are the raw material the published rating was built from. Source: NWS Damage Assessment Toolkit.

An upper level low pressure system over the Desert Southwest shifted east through the Intermountain West on May 6th, inducing surface low development over West Texas. This also resulted in a tightening pressure gradient across the Southern Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley, with increased southerly low level winds allowing for a warm front to shift north to the I-20 corridor of East Texas and North Louisiana before becoming stationary later in the day. A warm, moist, and unstable air mass developed during the 6th south of the front, as large scale forcing increased near and south of the front ahead of the upper trough. As a result, showers and thunderstorms, some of which became severe, developed across East Texas and North Louisiana, producing damaging winds, locally heavy rainfall, and isolated tornadoes. Given the already saturated grounds from heavy rainfall that fell only several days prior, flash flooding was also observed through the afternoon and evening.

An EF-1 tornado with estimated maximum winds near 93 mph touched down in a rural area west of Bullard in an open field just east of County Road 173 and gradually grew in size and strength as it continued just south of due east into the north side of Bullard. The tornado was at its most intense near North Houston Street and west of US Highway 69 where several hardwood trees exhibited snapped trunks and uprooted trees were quite concentrated, especially on the west side of a neighborhood just north of Lynch Drive. In this neighborhood, there were also quite a few residences with low end roof damage, mainly in the form of shingle loss. In this general area, there were also some|residences damaged by falling trees and tree limbs, but this was also the case east of Highway 69 in a residential area just north of East Henderson Street and in the rather large Pecan Valley subdivision south of East Henderson Street. The tornadic circulation appeared to have gone across the entirety of the latter subdivision. Many trees were uprooted in various directions in this subdivision, but the well-built residences in|this area generally did not sustain direct damage from the tornado because the winds were only judged at EF-0 intensity. Throughout the length of the tornado, downed hardwood and softwood trees were primarily uprooted and the somewhat saturated|state of the soils likely yielded more uproots than would otherwise have been the case if the soils were not as moist and the survey team took this into account in their rating|assessment. East of this neighborhood, the tornado continued across County Road 121 before the NWS survey team judged the tornado lifted near the intersection of County Road 118 and County Road 117. ||There were several individuals in the path of this tornado that were interviewed by the survey team and who reported seeing the tornado on approach. The tornado itself was part of an organized thunderstorm squall line that was producing damaging wind gusts |and doing at least isolated tree damage through the southern portion of Smith County Texas. The survey team estimated the tornado path away from other general tree damage due to tree damage oriented in different directions and at least occasionally |exhibiting convergent damage signatures.

From NOAA NCEI's Storm Events Database, the narrative the local forecast office wrote for Storm Data.

13 minutes of warning. NWS SHV issued a tornado warning for this county at 18:28 UTC, 13 minutes before the tornado touched down, in force until 19:15 UTC.

The county was under a tornado watch, issued at 18:39 UTC and running to 21:20 UTC.

Every warning and watch covering the touchdown point that day, from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of National Weather Service products. Lead time is measured from the issue of the warning in force to the touchdown time in the database, both of which were recorded to the minute by different people.

The Storm Prediction Center had this point in a Slight Risk, with a 0.05 chance of a tornado within 25 miles. The outlook in force was issued at 16:30 UTC.

SPC's Day 1 convective outlook as it stood when the tornado began, read at the touchdown point. The same archive is on the radar archive.

The radiosonde launches on either side of the tornado, from the nearest station that was launching then, drawn and analyzed the way Storm Lab does: the same diagram, the same parcel and shear definitions SPC's mesoanalysis uses.

The Shreveport radar (KSHV), 142 km away, was scanning. The volume nearest the touchdown began at 18:42 UTC.

Open the radar archive at this moment, over the track

Reflectivity and velocity, decoded from the Level II archive in the browser. Volumes take a few seconds to open the first time.

Local storm reports within 60 km of the path, in the three hours either side.

From the Iowa Environmental Mesonet's archive of National Weather Service local storm reports.

The live radar over the trackEvery 2025 tornado in TexasEvery tornado in Texas since 1950Warnings in force in Texas nowThe forecast where you are

10 more were confirmed in the United States that day.

Ratings are the survey's, read off the damage rather than measured; the rating scale is above. Tornado counts rise through the record as reporting improved, so a year in the 1950s is not comparable with one today except for the strongest tornadoes, which were always noticed.

NOAA Storm Prediction Center tornado database, 1950-2025, the official record kept by NOAA's Storm Prediction Center.