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EF1 tornado in Douglas County, Minnesota

Tornado August 7, 2010 · Douglas County, Minnesota

EF1

Rating

21.0 mi

Whole path

50 yd

Path width

$25K

Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Grant County → Douglas County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 50 yards (0.03 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF1 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF1 is moderate damage: roofs badly stripped, mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned, windows broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 86–110 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

A National Weather Service Storm Damage Survey from the Grand Forks, North Dakota Office determined that an EF-1 tornado touched down about one mile north of Wendell in Grant County, and had an intermittent track east-southeast through Grant County. It then moved east across northwestern Douglas County to the south side of Evansville, before lifting. Total path length from Grant County into Douglas County was about 21 miles. Damage was confined to large trees, but several power poles were blown down in Evansville, causing a city wide power outage.

The wider storm

Several short-lived supercell thunderstorms moved across portions of west-central and into east-central Minnesota during the mid to late evening hours of Saturday, August 7th. One of the severe thunderstorms produced a tornado near Evansville, Minnesota, with reports of straight-line wind damage as far east as the northern portions of the Twin Cities. These storms moved into west-central Wisconsin and produced more damaging winds.

Began near Evansville (45.9996, -95.7699).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 243408. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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