EF5 drought

Since 2013, the United States has experienced a record lack of tornadoes that have been rated EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale by the National Weather Service.

The National Weather Service office in Little Rock noted that if this tornado occurred prior to the change to the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007, it likely would have been rated as an F5 due to numerous homes being swept clean from their foundations.

[17] The new scale accounts for homes that use cut nails instead of anchor bolts, which do not effectively provide resistance against violent tornadoes.

However, meteorologist and civil engineer Timothy P. Marshall noted in his survey of the damage that the rating assigned was "lower bound", and despite the presence of construction flaws, this doesn't rule out "the possibility that EF5 winds could have occurred.

However, an inspection of the context surrounding the house revealed that small trees in a ditch near the home were still standing, and that the residence had possibly been pummeled by heavy debris from downtown Vilonia, exacerbating the level of destruction.

And, the best answer to that is what didn't give it the 200 mark...The Green Apple Florist, essentially a single family home that was modified to built to be a floral shop and it is slabbed to the ground and swept clean.

A Doppler on Wheels truck measured wind speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour (480 km/h),[25][26] which made the tornado one of the strongest ever recorded and would classify it as an EF5.

At the end of the analysis, the researchers stated, "the lofting wind speeds given by this model are much higher than the rating based on the ground survey EF-scale assessment.

This may be due to the current tendency to bias strong EF5 tornadoes lower than reality, or limitations in conventional EF-scale assessments".

[6] The study also questioned the reliability of the scale as a whole, asking "should tornado ratings be more reflective of total impact, and not solely tied to wind speed estimates?"