CARLISLE, Ark. (AP) -- The National Weather says the storms that passed through Arkansas on Friday included 11 tornadoes. The death toll from the storms included seven Arkansans.
After touring storm-damaged Carlisle this morning, Governor Beebe encouraged school systems around the state to build tornado-safe areas in their schools. Carlisle is one system that has such rooms, and Superintendent Floyd Marshall says that's where students of the high school and elementary school gathered when a tornado passed through the town on Friday. warning from police -- a tornado was coming right for the town's elementary and high school.
Marshall said it doesn't take but one event involving student injuries or fatalities to devastate a community and its families.
He said that, if there's a way to prevent that from occurring, then it needs to be done. He said a school may never need its tornado-safe room, but but that one time that you do need it that you don't have it, it's something you can't recover from.
The National Weather Service said the Carlisle tornado Friday had a path 2.6 miles long and was rated an E-F1 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale from 0 to 5, meaning it had winds of 86-110 mph. It veered away from the shared campus of the elementary and high schools at the last moment.
Beebe said he'd like to see the tornado-safe rooms everywhere, but the state doesn't have the money to build them for all the districts in the state. He said, however, that he hoped that some of the hundreds of millions of dollars the state is putting into building new schools or fixing old ones will go into building the tornado-safe areas.
