Wisconsin may be due for a massive, ‘violent’ tornado
It’s been 22 years since an EF-5 with 200-plus mph winds hit state
We might be due.
Not for the twisters that hit every year — the ones that do little or no damage and fizzle out in some field. We’re talking the monster tornadoes, the ones that have obliterated entire towns and left unfathomable damage in their wake.
“One of our concerns is that it has kind of been a while since we have had a violent tornado in Wisconsin,” said Tim Halbach, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sullivan. “You have to go back to Oakfield (in Fond du Lac County) in 1996 since we’ve had an EF-4 or EF-5 tornado in Wisconsin.
“That was 22 years ago.”
While every tornado has the potential to cause damage and injuries, when Halbach says “violent,” he means winds upwards of 200 mph.
Now through June is prime time for the severe thunderstorms that generate tornadoes in the Badger state. And we haven’t had a monster in a while.
Wisconsin accounts for just a fraction of the 1,000 or so tornadoes that occur annually in the United States. The state averages about 23 tornadoes every year. The majority of those are considered EF-0 to EF-1 tornadoes; they skirt across open country before
dissipating.
Still, “Wisconsin has had a pretty storied tornado history,” said Halbach, whose official title is “warning coordination meteorologist.”
Tornadoes are classified using what’s known as the EF scale.
❚ EF-0: wind speeds 65 TO 85 mph
❚ EF-1: wind speeds 86 TO 110 mph
❚ EF-2: wind speeds 111 TO 135 mph
❚ EF-3: wind speeds 136 TO 165 mph
❚ EF-4: wind speeds 166 TO 200 mph
❚ EF-5: wind speeds greater than 200 mph “We do get a pretty healthy amount of what we consider to be strong tornadoes, EF-2, EF-3,” Halbach said.
An EF-5 tornado is rare. That category of storm can take a well-built house, sweep it completely off its foundation, shred the contents into small pieces and scatter the debris downwind.
‘Holy crap!’
Wayne Weis found himself facing an F-3 tornado near Stoughton in 2005. Considered a “strong” tornado, it was plenty big enough for Weis.
“I don’t care to see another tornado ever again in my life,” Weis said.
That evening, he was channel-surfing for some sports when he came upon a meteorologist from a Madison TV station talking about tornadoes in the area.
“I went to my back window and saw a huge cloud on the horizon that was obviously the tornado cloud and I said, ‘Holy crap!’ I was watching this thing coming at me.”
Weis saw the tornado wipe out two nearby houses. “I mean, when the tornado hit them, they exploded,” he said. “I high-tailed it to the basement.”
It seemed like 40 seconds as the tornado passed over. Weis said it sounded like a Boeing 747 revving its engines above him. He ended up buried under the rubble of what had been his house.
“I had to dig out,” Weis said. “I basically dug a hole to get out and when I stuck my head up, every single house (in the neighborhood) was leveled, including mine.”
Deciding to go to the basement saved his life. “If this would have happened in the middle of the night when everyone was sleeping, I can tell you I would not be talking to you right now,” he said.
His wedding photos ended up in Dousman, about 50 miles east of where the tornado damage was centered. His beds were “just gone,” he said, never to be found.
Storm watches and warnings still give him pause. “It always happens to somebody else. Now I’m that person,” Weis said. “It’s just amazing what that force of nature will do.”
The two benchmarks
While the “Stoughton tornado,” as it has come to be called, killed one person and injured 21, it isn’t categorized among the massive violent tornadoes that have struck Wisconsin.
“The benchmarks are Oakfield and Barneveld for the strongest and largest tornadoes,” Halbach said.
Wind speeds of those tornadoes — Oakfield in 1996 and Barneveld in 1984 — were estimated at above 200 mph, higher than a category 5 hurricane.
Oakfield, in Fond du Lac County, has a population of slightly more than 1,000 people. Barneveld, 30 miles west of Madison, has about 1,300 people.
Halbach credits the Oakfield tornado for setting him on his career path.
“I was 16 and watched the whole life cycle of the Oakfield tornado,” he said. “That was the seed for me to get into meteorology.” He went on to study at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In the Oakfield tornado, cars were tossed 400 yards and steel reinforcing bars (rebar) in home foundations were bent at 60-90 degree angles, according to the weather service. Striking around 7:05 p.m. on July 18, 1996, the storm injured 12 people.
In Barneveld, the tornado struck just before 1 a.m. on June 8, 1984, killing nine and injuring more than 200. Nearly 90 percent of the town was destroyed. The tornado was on the ground for 59 minutes.
No one knows precisely how strong winds in the strongest tornadoes are. That’s because the strongest tornadoes have always destroyed wind measuring equipment. Instead, the wind speeds are calculated by looking at the rubble left in the twister’s wake and then using math, physics and engineering to determine how strong of a wind would be required to create such damage.
Wisconsin will certainly see another monster tornado.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Halbach said. “It might not be this year or next year but some year from now, we will have one — if all the ingredients come together.
“While it’s been a colder spring, now’s the time to be talking about what your plans are for when severe weather does occur,” Halbach said. “Have a plan and then take action when we have a situation when a warning is out.”
Quick change
Ted Waskowski of Oregon, Wis., was chased off a golf course by the same tornado that clobbered Weis’s house near Stoughton in 2005.
A tornado watch was in effect and Waskowski and the other members of the fivesome playing that day had a plan to take cover at a friend’s house along the golf course if the weather turned bad.
Turn bad, it did. Waskowski said he was watching “a very, very distinctive black mass well to the north of us.”
Then the storm intensified, part of an outbreak of 27 tornadoes across Wisconsin — the most ever in a single day in the state, according to the weather service.
“We got to the 16th hole, which faces straight west, and we saw two identical tornadoes. I mean, it looked like a mirage. It didn’t look real — perfect cones, the same size,” Waskowski said. “Then those two merged into something that looked like the cooling tower for a nuclear reactor.”
The golfers took cover in the friend’s basement. “It really changed in a heartbeat,” Waskowski said. “One minute we were in sunshine, the next minute the wind shifted 90 degrees, and within a couple more minutes we were thinking, ‘We’ve got to go in.’
“When the tornado was 350 yards from us, it was sunny,” he added.
“That was a surreal memory. It was blue sky and then it was a black cloud.”
Hours later, one of the fivesome said, “You know, I really hit it good. Let’s go see if my ball is on the green,” Waskowski recalled. It was — surrounded by 2x4s and other debris deposited by the tornado.
“There was a pickup truck engine in the middle of the fairway we had been playing,” Waskowski said.
Since that day, he is wary of weather and storm warnings.
“We get a lot of warnings these days, and there is kind of warning fatigue,” Waskowski said.
Halbach said the weather service has tweaked the way it issues tornado warnings, including more specific language about a tornado’s location and including whether it has been indicated by radar or actually sighted by storm spotters or law enforcement.
“We get the jokes about being wrong half the time and keeping your job,” Halbach said. “We’re our harshest critics. We are continually looking at new research and ways to properly warn people and make sure we do the best that we can to let people know what is coming their way.”