Missed Me by Just Sixty Feet and Six Years

 

Ever since watching The Wizard of Oz as a kid, I've wanted to see a real tornado. Tornados are such a (relatively) rare, deadly, yet whimsical phenomena, something larger than life, seemingly out of fantasy. They're vast, whirling Jinns, dancing destructively across the face of the earth, meteorological explanations be damned. They kill people, they level homes. Something you really don't want to meet. Nevertheless...

In July 2020 I did get to see a very small and brief tornado from the top of our hill, here in Eau Claire. Below is a photograph of the funnel cloud.

It lasted less than a minute, barely touching ground, and it could be viewed from  a nice safe distance. The place where you want to view one.

Fast forwarding to the present, or rather to 15 May of 2025. A line of storms swept across Wisconsin with a number of tornadoes embedded in it, fortunately they were fairly small ones that did not level towns like the ones elsewhere the following day. The sirens sounded here in Eau Claire twice. My son Jack was visiting us on his way to Nester Falls Canada for spring fishing with my brothers, brother-in-law and some other friends, guys who've been going up for opening week for the last 50 years. But I digress. Jack is also intrigued with tornados and follows all the storm trackers on YouTube as well as using the radar they use to identify tornados on his phone. So we stood in the parking lot and watched the sky and radar for the potential tornados that where heading our way. They missed Eau Claire, though the south side of town got battered with golf ball sized hail. And then, during the following weeks everyone in town was battered by calls from roofers who descend like locus where hail damaged roofs will need to be replaced. I digress yet again.

However, later that afternoon, a small F2 tornado with 120mph wind briefly touched down in Juneau Wisconsin, which is the town where we lived for over 30 years before we moved to Eau Claire six years ago. Below is the track of that tornado in relation to the little town. I have a couple of shots taken by the storm tracker's drone flying around where the "X" is on the map. All the little triangles are reports of various levels of damage. Most of the damage to the west (left) were trees down and windows broken. It was on the Main Street's north end where roofs were taken off and houses damaged. 

The photo below is the drone shot looking south. I have indicated where our old house is. It is hidden in the trees, but the street you can see turning towards the drone is Meadow Lane. On the left side of the photo you can get a glimpse of where the heaviest damage begins. If you want to see more pictures, the live stream on YouTube is still available HERE and  you will have to scroll to around the 5:15 hour section to find the footage.

Below is  map with a closer focus on the location of our house, the house in black, relative to the track of the tornado as determined by those who investigate such things. Meadow Lane is a bit off kilter to the houses, offset to the west (left).

The hardest hit area is just above this map along Main Street. I think the fact that those houses where on the ridge, and maybe 20 feet higher than our house meant that they were more exposed. I also think that because our house was tucked under the ridge, the wind hitting the ridge may've lifted the funnel just a little, as there don't seem to be trees down in our yard, and we had plenty of them.

And just to put the tornado track in scale, there is a photo of our house as it is today from Google Street View taken from the street in front of our house where the tornado is said to have traveled along. 

Below is a wider view (a screen shot, so the detail isn't very good) of the destruction along Main Street within half an hour of the tornado. There was a storm chaser following it and he sent up the drone. The big tan building is the nursing home. It lost a lot of windows. Beyond it was an ex-motel, now apartments which lost most of their roof, and the power line poles were down all along the road beyond.

I haven't run across any photos of the tornado itself. I gather that it was "rain-wrapped", i.e. the funnel was in the midst of the rain & hail, so it couldn't be seen. So I didn't actually miss much had we still been living there. The good think is that only one person was injured, and of course a number of people were left homeless and lost a lot of their property. Still it could've been far worse.

We have tornados in Wisconsin every year, though the ones that level large swaths of towns are a once in 30-40 year storms or so, unlike on the great plains and the deep south. But considering earthquakes, forest fires, flash floods, and hurricanes, I don't think we can kick too much about our tickets to Oz.