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EF2 tornado in Will County, Illinois

Tornado June 22, 2015 · Will County, Illinois

EF2
Rating
17.0 mi
Whole path
1,320 yd
Path width
7
Injuries
$25.3M
Damage as recorded

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

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 1,320 yards (0.75 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF2 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF2 is considerable damage: roofs torn off well-built houses, mobile homes destroyed, large trees snapped or uprooted, consistent with estimated gusts of 111–135 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

This is a continuation of a tornado that begin in Grundy County. The tornado crossed into Will County near E Reed Road. The tornado crossed part of the property of the Braidwood Nuclear Generating Station producing tree damage. Wooden power poles were broken along Route 53, and again along Zilm Road. A garage was nearly completely destroyed along Ohlhues Road. (Tornado 8b of 10).

The wider storm

During the evening of June 22, twelve tornadoes occurred across northern Illinois, including ten in the WFO Chicago forecast area. Ten of the twelve were spawned from a single long-lived cyclic supercell, which tracked across Whiteside, Lee, LaSalle, Grundy, Will, and Kankakee Counties. The heaviest damage was in Coal City (Grundy County) and Braidwood (Will County) which was caused by an EF-3 tornado with maximum winds of 160 mph, and the Woodhaven Campground in Sublette (Lee County) caused by an EF-2 tornado with maximum winds of 130 mph. There were 14 injuries reported. There were no fatalities. The EF-3 Coal City to Braidwood tornado was the strongest tornado in Grundy County since an F3 tornado struck on July 17, 1972. The atmosphere was primed for severe weather, with very warm, humid conditions, low pressure moving north of the region, and a strong jet stream aloft. An outflow boundary from earlier storms during the late morning and early afternoon may have been key to where the long-lived tornado-producing storm tracked. In addition to tornado and wind damage, slow moving storms brought torrential rainfall of locally up to 3 to 5 inches to portions of Lee, Grundy, Will, and Kankakee counties, resulting in widespread flash flooding. This rain fell on top of soil already saturated from repeated heavy rains over the past few weeks.

Began near Braidwood (41.2641, -88.2462).

Other tornadoes from the same storm system

8 more tornadoes the National Weather Service filed under this storm episode.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 590649. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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