It started with hail the size of tennis balls in Iowa. It didn't stop there.
The carnage spread fast.
In Lena, Illinois, drone footage showed homes with their roofs ripped completely off, possessions scattered and exposed to the open sky. Stephenson County Sheriff Steve Stovall told CNN affiliate WIFR that no injuries had been reported there. Across the state line in Marathon County, Wisconsin, authorities confirmed "significant damage" following a tornado that passed through Friday afternoon, though it was not immediately clear whether anyone was hurt. And in Belton, Missouri, Police Chief Scott Lyons said during a news conference that the city had sustained widespread damage, with several minor injuries reported. Preparations made ahead of the storm, he noted, had helped.
According to a report by meteorologists Dakota Smith, Briana Waxman, and Kate S. Petersen at CNN, multiple destructive tornadoes struck the central United States on Friday afternoon, with the outbreak still actively unfolding as of publication. The storms wasted no time. At least two tornadoes carved through the greater Rochester, Minnesota, area — some captured live on traffic cameras — leaving widespread damage across Olmsted County, though the sheriff's office reported no injuries. Marion, Minnesota, bore some of the worst of it, with roughly 30 homes damaged in that town alone and another 10 elsewhere in the county.
Three rare "particularly dangerous situation" tornado warnings were issued Friday — the kind reserved for storms of exceptional intensity. The first two came within minutes of each other, near Cream, Wisconsin, and Lena, Illinois. A third followed roughly an hour later in Marathon County.
The week has been relentless. Jonathan Erdman, writing for The Weather Channel, reported that more than 750 severe weather reports had been logged from Monday through Thursday night alone, including nearly 50 tornado reports across the Plains and Midwest. The exact confirmed count is still being tallied by National Weather Service survey teams working through the damage zones.
The records falling along the way tell their own story. Milwaukee has already shattered its wettest April on record, logging 7.57 inches of rain with nearly two weeks still left in the month. Gaylord, Michigan, topped its record wet April before the month was even half over — 8.25 inches — and simultaneously broke its all-time record for a wet spring. The Manistee River near Sherman, Michigan, obliterated its previous flood crest by more than two feet, a record dating back to the Great Depression.
Tuesday was particularly violent. An EF3 tornado with estimated peak winds of 140 mph destroyed a home near Union City, Wisconsin — the strongest April tornado the state had seen in 15 years, according to The Weather Channel. An EF2 followed, tearing roofs off a commercial facility and damaging a church in the Milwaukee suburb of Sussex. That same day in Dane County, Wisconsin, softball-size hail pounded the city of Madison, damaging at least 1,700 vehicles. The only comparable hail on record there dated to July 1960.
The National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center, in its Friday afternoon forecast discussion, placed parts of the Middle Mississippi Valley and Central and Southern Plains under a Moderate Risk — level 4 out of 5 — for severe thunderstorms. A Slight Risk of excessive rainfall was issued for the Upper Great Lakes and surrounding regions. Forecaster Ziegenfelder noted that a strong front stretching from the Upper Mississippi Valley to the Southern Plains would push eastward through the weekend, dragging with it the threat of tornadoes, damaging winds, hail, flash flooding, and even late-season wet snow across parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Upper Midwest by Sunday.
There is, at least, an end in sight. Erdman reported that after Saturday's activity winds down across the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley, the nation should see a three-day break from severe weather as the cold front sweeps off the East Coast. That will be the first real pause in what has been, by any measure, an extraordinary and punishing week across the American heartland.
