Enderlin Tornado Upgraded to EF5; Three Dead

The National Weather Service has upgraded the June 20 Enderlin, North Dakota tornado to an EF5—the first U.S. EF5 since 2013—after extensive post-storm forensic surveys. The deadly twister killed three people, reached estimated peak winds of about 210 mph, widened to roughly 1.05 miles, and carved a path of just over 12 miles through Ransom and Cass Counties. Meteorologists cited extreme damage indicators that supported the upgrade, including a farmstead swept clean, trees debarked, toppled transmission towers, and a freight train incident in which an empty tanker car was lofted nearly 500 feet while several loaded grain hoppers were overturned. Investigators originally rated the storm an EF3 but, after working with engineers and wind-damage experts and analyzing unusual rail-car and infrastructure damage, upgraded it to EF5. The Enderlin tornado was one of more than 20 twisters during the June 20 North Dakota outbreak and is the first EF5 in 12 years, extending the longest gap between such ratings since record-keeping began in 1950 (about 60 EF5s recorded overall, ten under the Enhanced Fujita scale).