This Was the Biggest Tornado of 2026 Why Was It Only EF3

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]So, here's something that's going to bother you once I tell you. On March 10th, 2026, a tornado spent 78 minutes on the ground in Illinois and Indiana.

[00:00:11]It carved a path 35 1/2 m long. At its widest, it was almost a mile across, like edge to edge, a mile of tornado. It crossed two states, killed three people, took out 460 buildings in one county alone. And here's the weird part. It had five smaller tornadoes spinning around it the whole time, like little moons around a planet. That actually happens. I'll come back to that. It was the longest tornado in the United States this year. It was the widest tornado in the United States this year. and the National Weather Service rated it EF3.

[00:00:56]Now, if that doesn't sound off to you yet, give me 10 minutes because once you understand what an EF3 rating actually measures, you're going to look at every tornado headline differently for the rest of your life. This is the story of the tornado that crossed Aroma Park, Lake Village, and Damat. The one nobody remembers. Even though by almost every measurement it should have been the storm of the year. Let me set the scene.

[00:01:25]So the morning of March 10th, the Storm Prediction Center down in Oklahoma puts out their daily forecast and they're worried. They issue what's called a moderate risk, which is level four out of five. That's not the rarest level they use, but it's rare enough that everyone in the weather world stops what they're doing and pays attention. And the ingredients that day are nasty. I won't bore you with the meteorology, but basically, you've got a warm front pushing into Illinois. You've got a wind setup that lets storms rotate, and you've got the atmosphere absolutely loaded with fuel. Forecasters look at the numbers and they're going, "Today is going to be bad. The only question is where." By late afternoon, storms start firing. And one of them is a monster. A single supercell that drops a small tornado north of Pontiac, Illinois just before 5:00 p.m. That tornado is weak.

[00:02:25]Only an EF0. No big deal. But here's the thing. The same storm is going to drop tornado after tornado for the next 4 hours, 12 total before the night is over. They call those cyclic supercells.

[00:02:42]One storm kept giving birth to new tornadoes as the old ones died. Like a horror movie that doesn't end. Around 6:15 p.m., the National Weather Service in Chicago looks at their radar and they go, "Oh no." They issue a tornado warning for Cana County and the warning text doesn't pull punches. Quote, "A large, extremely dangerous, and potentially deadly tornado is on the ground. To protect your life, take cover now." 6:21 p.m. Central Daylight Time.

[00:03:17]The tornado touches down in southern Cana County, Illinois.

[00:03:21]And this is where everything starts.

[00:03:24]Witnesses near the Cana airport see rotation. And within minutes, it's not some skinny rope tornado. It's a wedge.

[00:03:33]A wedge is basically a tornado that's wider than it is tall. Looks like a wall of black moving across the ground. A stormchaser named Freddy Bryant had been following this storm since Pontiac. And he told CBS Chicago, quote, "That's when it got really strong. Multiple vortex tornado." And then it turned into a big stove pipe and you could hear the roar.

[00:03:58]The tornado moves eastn northeast at about 27 mph. Not fast for a tornado, which is part of the problem. Slower tornado means more time over the same square foot of ground. It crosses the south side of Kanka Ki. It hits Aroma Park and on a country road called South Sandbar Road right on the west side of the Canank River, it reaches peak strength. Two houses on South Sandbar are completely destroyed. A two-story home gets the entire upper floor torn off. A pickup truck gets tossed 100 ft through the air. An SUV is rolled like a toy. Based on that level of damage, surveyors will later estimate the winds at 150 mph. That's high-end EF3. Hold that fact. We're coming back to it. In Aroma Park, sirens are screaming. And in a brick house on Oakwood Drive, a 65-year-old man named Maurice Norington is home. There's a guy you'd want to know. Army vet, one of five siblings, spent his whole life around horses, training and breeding them. He'd even worked at the old Arlington racetrack outside Chicago. Quiet guy by all accounts. His niece Mo'Nique told the local paper something that stuck with me. She said, "Sometimes the people you'd think are the quietest ones, the shy ones, they find a way to plant seeds and make an impact on people." He had a way of making little deposits in people's lives. He invested in people.

[00:05:31]He always showed up. Maurice's house took EF1 damage, which if you're keeping score, is the second weakest category.

[00:05:40]The bricks held. Most of the structure stayed up. Maurice didn't survive. And here's the part that I cannot get out of my head. His body wasn't found for 2 days. Two days. He was discovered on March 12th in the late afternoon by workers clearing debris off a neighbor's roof. Nobody had done a welfare check.

[00:06:05]Nobody had knocked on the door. The county coroner identified him at the scene. The tornado, meanwhile, keeps moving. It crosses the state line into Indiana right around 700 p.m. And this is where it gets uglier. Lake Village, Indiana is a town of about 770 people in Newton County. Flat farmland, lot of older manufactured homes, a few small sightbuilt houses, almost no basement because the water table sits too high to dig down. It's the kind of community tornado researchers lose sleep over.

[00:06:43]Now, the tornado warning had been active for over half an hour at this point.

[00:06:48]Sirens were going off outside town, but in the town of Lake Village itself, the siren did not go off. A resident named Jennifer Telford told the AP, quote, "The siren in town didn't go off. The sirens outside town did." The sheriff's department and Indiana State Police are still investigating why. As of right now, nobody's given a public answer. In a manufactured home on County Road 600 West lived a couple named Ed and Arlene Kazlowski. Ed was 89. Arlene was 84. Get this. Ed's 90th birthday party was being planned by the family for the following week. The cake was probably already ordered. When the tornado hit that stretch of County Road 600 West, three mobile homes were swept clean off their foundations.

[00:07:42]The Kazlowskis was one of them. A family member found the two of them in the yard behind where the house used to be. The county coroner gave the calls as multiple blunt force trauma. Their son-in-law went on TV and said, quote, "They were wonderful, just really wonderful human beings. Tough old guy and sweet old lady." Two of the three people who died that night were in a mobile home. And that is not a random fact. There's a study from 2018 by two researchers, Steven Strader and Walker Ashley, published in a journal called Weather, Climate, and Society. They looked at every housing related tornado death in America between 1985 and 2017.

[00:08:28]And the number they came back with is one I had to read twice. 54% of all tornado deaths in homes happened in mobile homes.

[00:08:40]54%.

[00:08:42]And get this, mobile homes only make up about 6% of American housing stock, 6% of houses, 54% of deaths. The risk of dying in a tornado in a mobile home is 15 to 20 times higher than in a regular permanent home. The tornado finally lifts at 7:39 p.m. near Forest City, Indiana. 78 minutes on the ground, 35.6 m in to end.

[00:09:15]Okay, so the obvious question, if this thing was big enough to wear an entire town like a hat, why was it rated EF3?

[00:09:24]Like, how does that math work? Here's where the rating system breaks your brain. The enhanced Fuja scale, the EF scale, went into use in February of 2007.

[00:09:36]It's the sixstep rating that goes from EF0 to EF5.

[00:09:42]And almost everybody, including me, when I first learned this, assumes those numbers measure how strong the winds were. They don't, not directly. And this is the part to remember. The EF scale uses 28 things called damage indicators, specific structures, basically. A single family house, a mobile home, a school, a barn, a tree. 28 categories total. And after a tornado, surveyors walk the path. They find the worst damaged building that matches one of those 28 categories. They figure out how badly it got messed up, and they work backwards from there to guess the wind speed. So, the rating isn't measuring how strong the tornado actually was. It's measuring how strong the tornado was at the worst thing it broke. Are you with me? Because this gets darker.

[00:10:40]Current National Weather Service policy says that if a violent tornado tracks through open farmland and only hits weakly built structures, it cannot be rated above EF3, no matter what the actual wind speed was. Cannot. Period. And before you say I'm making that up, here's the precedent. May 31st, 2013, El Reno, Oklahoma. A research team from the University of Oklahoma was out chasing tornadoes with a special radar truck called Rax Pole that can measure wind speeds inside a tornado in real time.

[00:11:18]While they were watching this thing, they clocked winds over 296 mph. One scan about 500 ft off the ground hit 313.

[00:11:30]313 mph.

[00:11:32]That's the strongest tornado winds ever measured on Earth. That tornado was initially rated EF5.

[00:11:40]Then about 3 months later in August 2013, the National Weather Service downgraded it to EF3.

[00:11:48]And their reasoning basically was, look, the damage on the ground doesn't support an EF5 rating. The tornado tracked over Oklahoma farmland. Nothing in its path was built well enough to be destroyed in the way an EF5 rating requires. So, a tornado with 300 mph winds, the strongest ever measured anywhere, became EF3 on paper because the system doesn't measure wind, it measures damage. That's the exact same mechanism that capped the Aroma Park tornado at EF3. Those mobile homes on County Road 600 West that got swept off their foundations, mobile homes can't anchor a higher rating under the current rules. To get above EF3, you basically need a really well-built sightbuilt house anchored to its foundation to be completely swept clean to a bare slab. And most of the Aroma Park path was farmland. There just wasn't anything in the way that the rating system was designed to notice.

[00:12:52]And if that makes you start wondering how many other tornadoes have been quietly underrated because they happen to hit rural America instead of a subdivision, the honest answer is we don't know. The system isn't designed to tell us. Real quick, if you're getting something out of this, hit subscribe. I cover weather disasters and the systems behind them, and I try to make the science actually make sense in plain English. Every video walks through a storm or a failure that didn't get the coverage it deserved.

[00:13:23]Okay, back to March 10th because this story isn't over yet. So, the same supercell that produced the Aroma Park EF3 is still alive. About 40 minutes after the first tornado lifts, the same storm drops another tornado near a town called Lommax in Stark County, Indiana.

[00:13:42]And this one becomes a wedge, too. At 8:33 p.m., a stormchaser photographs it bearing down on the town of Knox. The National Weather Service office in northern Indiana makes a call that almost never gets made. They issue something called a tornado emergency for Knox. A tornado emergency is the highest level warning the National Weather Service has. They invented it during a massive outbreak in Oklahoma in 1999.

[00:14:12]Only a couple hundred tornado emergencies have ever been issued nationwide in the 20some years since.

[00:14:19]This was only the third one ever from that office in northern Indiana and the first tornado emergency issued anywhere in the United States this year. The Knox tornado weakens and lifts at 8:43 p.m. 2 miles outside the city. The town itself isn't directly hit. Final rating EF2.

[00:14:40]Peak winds estimated around 115.

[00:14:44]No deaths in Stark County, which is honestly a miracle. Now, here's the kicker. While all of this is happening, the same general storm system is producing hail. And not normal hail, like comically large hail, 5 1/2 in across in one Illinois town. 6 in reported southeast of Cana around the same time the tornado is killing people.

[00:15:09]A week later, a family in Cana hands a hailstone they'd picked up to a guy named Dr. Victor Jenseni, who's a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University. His lab measures it 6.616 in across, 1.22 lb.

[00:15:28]Jinseni's actual quote was, "This is about the size of a mini Nerf football."

[00:15:35]Quite remarkable. Pending official certification, that's the largest hailstone ever measured in Illinois. And it's the largest hailstone ever measured east of the Mississippi River. That hailstone is what most people remember from March 10th, 2026. The science story, the record, the cool photo. Three people died in a tornado that same evening. The longest tornado in the country this year. And the hailstone got the headlines because here's the brutal truth about what gets remembered. In 1990, an F5 tornado hit the Chicago suburb of Planefield, killed 29 people.

[00:16:18]Everybody in the Chicago area still knows that name. The Aroma Park tornado was longer tracked than Planefield. It was wider than Planefield. It crossed two states, but it killed three people because most of its path was farmland and small communities. So, it doesn't live in your head the way Planefield does. It's forgotten. The damage numbers aren't small either. Almost 500 properties hit in Canaki County alone.

[00:16:47]Over a 100 buildings damaged in Newton County, about a third of them destroyed.

[00:16:52]Both governors showed up the next day.

[00:16:55]Indiana's governor signed a state disaster declaration. The Small Business Administration approved federal disaster loans for six Illinois counties a month later. And the insurance industry pegged the entire severe weather outbreak over those three days at $8.5 billion in insured losses. The most expensive single severe storm event in the world in the first 3 months of this year. and the public conversation about Aroma Park moved on inside a week. So, here's where I land on this whole thing. The EF3 rating isn't wrong. The surveyors did their job correctly. The damage they found was consistent with 150 mph winds.

[00:17:37]The rating reflects the system as designed. But the system was designed for a country that doesn't really exist anymore. A country where everybody who lives in tornado country lives in a normal frame house that the scale recognizes.

[00:17:53]Reality is millions of Americans live in mobile homes across rural Illinois, rural Indiana, the entire Southeast. And mobile homes basically don't get counted by the rating system because the rating system was built around damage to things that aren't mobile homes. There's actually a forensic meteorologist who served on the original panel that built the EF scale, and he's been publicly pushing for fixes since 2022.

[00:18:23]He's proposed adding new damage indicators for the stuff that actually exists in rural America. irrigation systems, vehicles, wind turbines, treating mobile homes more seriously.

[00:18:37]The work exists. It's just sitting there. In the meantime, Maurice Norington died alone in his brick house in Aroma Park and didn't get found for 2 days. Ed and Arlene Kuzlowski died in their manufactured home in Lake Village days before Ed's 90th birthday. Three people dead in the longest tornado of the year. A tornado that in the public memory was less interesting than a frozen ball of ice that landed in someone's yard. That's the story of an EF3 that should be remembered as the longest, widest, deadliest tornado of 2026. And it's the story of why the number EF3 should never make you feel safe again. If you got something out of this, subscribe. There's a video on screen now about the Elno tornado, the 300mour storm that became an EF3, and the chasers who didn't make it out. Click it. I'll see you in the next one.