A violent tornado that tore through part of North Dakota this past June was a monster – no one disputed that. It was a mile wide with whirling winds so strong it pushed more that 30 train cars off their track and caved in metal silos.
But the full power of that storm wasn’t known until this week, when the National Weather Service with the help of tornado researchers classified the twister as a deadly EF-5 with peak winds of 210 mph. The U.S. has not seen a tornado that strong since 2013.
The damage survey showed the tornado struck just after 11 p.m. on June 20 and was on the ground for less than 20 minutes. It traveled 12 miles and ripped through a river valley with such force that it debarked trees with a “sandpapering” effect.
“In the last … 12 years, there’s been several strong tornadoes that have come close, but there haven’t been known damage indicators at that time to support the EF-5 rating,” said Melinda Beerends, a meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, according to the Associated Press.
Many trees are stripped and uprooted on June 25, 2025 following the EF5 tornado in Enderlin, N.D. (North Dakota Governor’s Office via AP)AP
The June tornado killed three people outside of Enderlin, North Dakota. Initially, meteorologists thought the tornado would be classified as a high EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which is is used to measure how powerful a tornado is by its wind speed. But the wind speed of this storm was hard to determine at first.
The NWS worked with outside agencies to dig deeper on the damage that was caused – including the derailed train cars – and used that to determine what the wind level reached during that twister.
“The Enderlin tornado derailed 33 train cars, including multiple fully loaded grain hoppers weighing about 286,000 pounds each,” according to researchers at the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “One empty tanker car, weighing roughly 72,000 pounds, was lofted more than (475 feet) from the tracks.”
When researchers calculated the damage to the train cars, they were able to get a wind speed estimate exceeding the EF-5 threshold. Their work highlights new ways storm strength can be studied in the future.
“The National Weather Service’s use of this research underscores its significance for future tornado assessments, offering a powerful new tool for rating storms that produce extreme yet unconventional damage,” said Connell Miller, director of the Northern Mesonet Project and former NTP wind impacts researcher.
According to the AP, the last recorded EF-5 tornado struck on May 20, 2013, near Oklahoma City. That storm killed 24 people and left more than 200 others injured.
Tornado behavior in the U.S. has changed in recent years.
Victor Gensini, professor of atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University, said twisters have been spinning up more often east of the Mississippi River, according to the AP. This includes a spike in tornadoes in the Midwest states, including Michigan, which is now approaching a record year for tornadoes.
The most recent in the Mitten State were three tornadoes that touched down during a late September storm. That trio put the 2025 tally in Michigan at 33 tornadoes. This now ranks as having the fourth most tornadoes in a year here in Michigan.
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