“I did not feel prepared at all,” Shull said. She also received a call from Navajo County three minutes later advising her to move to an interior room. With cell service unavailable, she said, the family had no way to check whether the danger had passed. They waited more than 30 minutes before she could reach her mother and get an all-clear.

The National Weather Service in Phoenix issued the warning at 7:02 p.m., meteorologist Mark O’Malley said. Wireless carriers can take a few minutes to deliver alerts to phones. O’Malley said the warning was issued after radar detected the tornado, but tornadoes can form beneath thunderstorms with only a few minutes of warning.

The Heber-Overgaard Fire District placed the suspected touchdown between 7:15 and 7:25 p.m. Its first 911 call came at 7:18 p.m., reporting downed power lines; calls reporting a man down followed about 10 minutes later. The timeline suggests some residents may have had limited notice, though the precise touchdown time is difficult to establish.

Shull said her home was roughly a mile to a mile and a half from where the tornado was reported to have touched down. She said she has since prepared the bathroom as a shelter area.

The storm also disrupted a website used by first responders to view storm maps and other information. A National Weather Service meteorologist said the site had been decommissioned following a hack, an issue unrelated to the weather. Phone alerts for first responders continued, and the agency was working on a fix, the meteorologist said.