10/07/2025
Article credit- MyRadar-
FIRST EF5 TORNADO since 2013 CONFIRMED!
BREAKING: In a historic upgrade, the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, North Dakota has UPGRADED the June 20 Enderlin, N.D. tornado to EF5. Maximum winds were estimated to exceed 210 mph!
This is the first EF5 tornado confirmed in the United States since May 20, 2013, when Moore, Oklahoma was hit by an EF5.
This was one of several tornadoes near Enderin, N.D.; it was up to 1.05 miles wide, touched down at 11:02 p.m. and lifted 19 minutes later.
The upgrade stemmed from forensic analysis of damage to a train. The tornado derailed 33 train cars, including 19 fully-loaded hoppers and 14 empty tankers. One of the loaded grain cars, weighting 286,000 pounds, was moved into an adjacent field away from the track. One of four empty tankers, weighing 72,000 pounds, was tossed 600 to 1,000 feet away from the track!
Meteorologists at the Grand Forks office collaborated with wind damage experts, and found that "analyses estimate potential wind speeds of approximately 230 mph are needed completely overturn a fully loaded grain hopper car."
"Extensive collaboration with wind damage experts provided forensic analyses for the train damage that occurred with this tornado," wrote the agency.
The meteorologists also investigated tree damage near the Maple River east of Enderlin, as well as farmstead damage on Highway 46.
"Further analysis of the trees surrounding the Maple River show extensive tree damage throughout the entire river valley with only stubs of large branches or trunks remaining and debarking with a 'sandpapering' effect
prevalent," wrote the meteorologists. "Trees with attached root ball displacements were noted, including one where the original location could not be determined."
While complete destruction of the farmstead was observed, along with a foundation swept clean, the quality of the construction could not be determined – precluding that damage indicator to be upgraded to EF5.
This is the first EF5 rating assigned worldwide since the Moore, Oklahoma tornado of May 20, 2013. While countless other tornadoes have likely contained EF5-level winds, including many with winds over 200 mph measured by radar, the damage often cannot be used to determine an EF5 rating. Structures often fail in winds lower than EF5 strength; if a structure is determined to have failed in EF3 or EF4 winds, there's no way to know if EF5 winds occurred at its location.
As such, an EF5 rating requires considerable forensic meteorology.
Here's more on how the train wind speed was rated:
"Collaboration with the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University’s Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory estimated a potential wind speed of >119 m/s (>266 mph) to loft the empty tanker car 475.7 ft (145 m) using similar calculations performed in Estimating Wind Speeds in Tornadoes Using Debris Trajectories of Large Compact Objects (Miller et al. 2024). The study, published in the Monthly Weather Review, found that large compact objects lofted greater than 50 m indicate EF-5 intensity winds (greater than 200 mph). The Enderlin train cars were nearly 2× farther than the EF-5 threshold distance and ~4× heavier than the heaviest object modeled in the study."
