The First EF5 in 12 Years Was Only Proven by a Train - Enderlin 2025

The First EF5 in 12 Years Was Only Proven by a Train - Enderlin 2025 At 11:02 p.m. on Friday, June 20, 2025, a tornado touched down in the dark south of Enderlin, North Dakota. Within minutes it was more than a mile wide. It slammed into a stopped freight train, tipped over all 19 fully loaded grain cars and threw an empty tank car about 476 feet. Scientists later calculated that the wind needed to do that was more than 266 mph. The Enderlin tornado was on the ground for 19 minutes and carved a path 12.1 miles long. It flattened a forest along the Maple River, destroyed farmsteads, and killed three people: Michael and Katherine Dehn, both 73, and 89-year-old Marc Lucio. Yet for more than three months the official rating was EF3 - because train cars are not on the list of objects used to rate a tornado. This is the full story: a forecast built on one word, "if"; a nighttime supercell racing ahead of a derecho; the train, the river and the three people in its path; and the forensic work by the National Weather Service in Grand Forks and the Northern Tornadoes Project that, on October 6, 2025, made Enderlin the first EF5 tornado in the United States in 12 years - and reopened the debate over how many EF5s the scale has missed. CHAPTERS 0:00 11:02 PM - A wall in the lightning 2:11 How rare is an EF5? 4:06 One word: if 6:00 Supercell, darkness and a derecho 7:08 The first tornadoes 8:13 Touchdown south of Enderlin 8:55 The train and the Maple River 11:09 Three people 13:58 The forensics: why it took three months 18:00 Next time SOURCES & ARCHIVE MATERIAL National Weather Service Grand Forks: NWS Damage Survey for 6/20/2025 Enderlin Tornadoes (June 23, 2025), Enderlin Tornado #1 Upgraded to EF-5 (Oct 6, 2025) and June 20, 2025 event summary; NOAA Damage Assessment Toolkit; NOAA Storm Prediction Center outlooks, mesoscale discussions and mesoanalysis; Northern Tornadoes Project, Western University; Miller, Kopp, Sills & Butt, "Estimating Wind Speeds in Tornadoes Using Debris Trajectories of Large Compact Objects," Monthly Weather Review (2024); Cass County Sheriff's Office; Associated Press, MPR News, Valley News Live, KFYR-TV, WDAY / Inforum, North Dakota Monitor. IMAGES NOAA / National Weather Service, NOAA Photo Library, FEMA (public domain). Train illustrations and data graphics: original. Additional photos via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licenses (CC BY 2.0 / 2.5 / 4.0, CC BY-SA 2.0 / 3.0 / 4.0): Enderlin, North Dakota (Flickr series); EnderlinNDlarge.jpeg; Enderlin EF5 tornado scar; Absaraka, Wheatland, Wild Rice, Michigan and North Almont, North Dakota; Landa Grain Elevator; Grain elevators.JPG; TrainTracks ND; FURX 7937 in Hannah Junction; BNSF train crosses bridge west of Luverne; Bridge at Valley City; DMVW 7505 Fullerton and DMVW Lehr (chief huddleston); Abandoned Farmstead / Abandoned homestead, North Dakota, May 2007; Fields - McKenzie County ND; 2021 December Tornado - Dresden, TN; May 20, 2013 Moore, Oklahoma tornado; TOR DAMAGE 2 27 24; Clouds02; Dunkler Cb mammatus; Huge cumulonimbus HK. Authors and licenses are listed on each file page at commons.wikimedia.org. MUSIC "Darkling" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Lightless Dawn" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Static Motion" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Ossuary 6 - Air" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Scissors" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http:/creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ In memory of Michael Dehn, Katherine Dehn and Marc Lucio. Subscribe for more true stories about the hidden forces behind America's worst disasters. This video is a documentary based on official damage surveys, peer-reviewed research, news reports and archival material. Some scenes use graphics, illustrations, sound design or representative images. #EnderlinTornado #EF5 #Documentary