The Enderlin tornado of June 20, 2025

EF5  Ransom and Cass counties, North Dakota · surveyed by NWS Grand Forks with Tim Marshall, Jim LaDue and the Northern Tornadoes Project

For twelve years after Moore, Oklahoma no tornado in the United States was rated EF5, and by 2025 the question in the literature was whether one could be. The answer came from a wheatfield in southeast North Dakota, at eleven o'clock on a June night, where a tornado a mile wide crossed the railroad south of Enderlin and derailed 33 cars of a freight train. It tipped grain hoppers loaded to 286,000 pounds and threw an empty tanker car 475 feet. The survey rated the damage EF3, because nothing on the Enhanced Fujita scale's list of indicators is a freight train. Fifteen weeks later, after engineers had modeled what it takes to throw a tanker car that far, the National Weather Service rated it EF5. Three people died in farmhouses north of Highway 46.

A wide, dark tornado lit from behind by lightning, its base spanning the horizon beyond a line of trees and a gravel road, with one clump of trees lit bright green by headlights.
The tornado by lightning. The wedge as it neared the rail line, from a gravel road south of Enderlin. Photo: Alex Resel, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Rating
EF5 >210 mph; rated October 6, 2025
Path length
12.1 mi 5.4 in Ransom County, 6.7 in Cass
Max width
1,850 yd 1.05 mi
Touchdown
11:02 pm CDT 3 mi south of Enderlin
Forward speed
~25 mph
Deaths
3 all in Cass County farmhouses
Injuries
0
Damage
Not estimated in Storm Data
Radar
KMVX about 64 mi; dual-pol
Warning lead
20 min warned 10:42 pm; PDS statement 11:11
Watch
Tornado Watch 448 from 7:50 pm CDT
Initial rating
EF3 160 mph, June 23, 2025

The setup

The Storm Prediction Center's outlooks for June 20 carried an Enhanced risk across North Dakota, and their emphasis was wind. The morning outlook expected storms to "grow upscale into an organized convective line" with gusts over 75 mph; the afternoon update described "an extremely buoyant, and very strongly sheared air mass" held down by "warm 700 mb temperatures (13-16 C)," a cap that would delay storms until evening, with "a couple tornadoes" among the threats.[7] Tornado Watch 448 went up at 7:50 pm with a 40 percent chance of two or more tornadoes and a 20 percent chance of one of EF2 or stronger, against a greater than 95 percent chance of widespread damaging wind.[7]

By 8:15 pm the picture had sharpened. "A localized corridor of higher tornado and very large hail (2-3 inches) potential may be emerging across eastern North Dakota," the SPC wrote, as storms began "ingesting the strong low-level SRH within the frontal zone" and posed "an increasing tornado threat, including the potential for a strong tornado." At 10:08 pm, with CAPE around 4,000 J/kg, dewpoints in the low 70s and a strengthening nocturnal low-level jet: "A pair of long-lived supercells will reside within a favorable tornado environment for at least the next 1-2 hours. Strong (EF-2 to EF-3) tornadoes will remain possible." Behind them a derecho was crossing the state with gusts above 100 mph, and would catch up with the supercells after midnight.[4][7]

The warning

At 10:42 pm NWS Grand Forks issued a tornado warning for northern Ransom, southwestern Cass and southeastern Barnes counties, valid to 11:30: "a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado was located 7 miles north of Lisbon ... moving east at 25 mph. SOURCE...Radar indicated rotation." Enderlin, Sheldon and Anselm were among the locations listed, and the warning carried a line written for nights like this one: "Tornadoes are extremely difficult to see and confirm at night." The tornado touched down three miles south of Enderlin twenty minutes later.[6]

At 11:11 pm, with the tornado at the rail line, the office's statement changed register: "At 1110 PM CDT, a confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado was located near Sheldon ... This is a PARTICULARLY DANGEROUS SITUATION. TAKE COVER NOW! ... You are in a life-threatening situation. Flying debris may be deadly to those caught without shelter. Mobile homes will be destroyed. Considerable damage to homes, businesses, and vehicles is likely and complete destruction is possible." The source was spotters. No tornado emergency was declared that night; the "considerable" damage tag was the strongest used.[6]

Chronology

Times are CDT (UTC−5); the radar and the UTC record are June 21. Storm Data gives the tornado's times two minutes later than the survey statements.[2][5]

The track

The tornado ran north-northeast for five miles through Ransom County, then north, then curled northwest and back south before dying, 12.1 miles in nineteen minutes. In the Ransom County segment, the official narrative records, "the tornado derailed 33 train cars including 19 fully-loaded grain hopper cars and 14 empty tanker cars, mainly tipped from the track. Included in the derailed cars were one filled grain car (286,000 lbs) and four empty tanker cars (72,000 lbs) that were pulled into a field away from the track. One of the 4 tanker cars was tossed 600-1000 ft (183-305 m) from the track and an estimated 475.7 ft (145 m) from the distance of the previous tanker car it was attached to before being pulled off of the track; wheel sets detached near the point from which the cars were derailed from the track. It was in this train derailment location that EF-5 damage intensity was noted."[5]

Just south of the highway a free-standing cell tower collapsed. Along the Maple River east of Enderlin the survey found "extensive tree damage throughout the entire river valley with only stubs of large branches or trunks remaining and debarking with a 'sandpapering' effect prevalent. Trees with attached root ball displacements were noted, including one where the original location could not be determined."[2]

A large tree's root ball, a mass of soil and roots as tall as a person, lies on grass with its trunk snapped beside it and a valley of stubbed, debarked trees behind.
Root ball displacement, Maple River. A survey photograph from the reanalysis that raised the tree damage to EF4. Photo: NWS Grand Forks, Damage Assessment Toolkit, public domain.[3]
A false-color satellite image of green farm fields around Enderlin and Sheldon, North Dakota, with a pale scar running north-northeast across them marked by four red arrows.
The scar from orbit, July 2. Vegetation loss along the path, from Enderlin at lower left toward the north. Image: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

In Cass County, "EF-4 damage occurred just north of Highway 46 at two farmsteads where devastating damage occurred to both houses and seven outbuildings were destroyed. On the eastern farmstead, one farmhouse was leveled with the debris swept from its foundation and scattered downwind, leading to two fatalities. A lack of structural anchoring was noted at this location." The western house, built into a hillside with steel trusses over the garage, "was leveled for all portions above ground as well," and a large propane tank was moved across the property. Farther north another farmhouse was levelled with one death. The survey put the Cass County maximum at 180 mph, EF4.[5] Personal papers from both households were found in front yards in Moorhead, Minnesota, more than forty miles downwind.[23]

The radar record

The Grand Forks office's radar, KMVX, stands at Mayville, about 64 miles north-northeast of Enderlin, so its lowest beam passes well over a kilometer above the ground here. That is far for a tornado, and the official documents make one radar statement only: the estimated maximum wind "correlates to the maximum strength on the WSR-88D Storm-Relative Velocity data from KMVX." No rotational velocity value has been published.[2][5] What the archive holds is the full dual-polarisation record, which the older profiles on this site do not have: reflectivity, velocity and correlation coefficient, the last of which falls wherever the radar is seeing debris rather than rain.

Radar reflectivity from KMVX showing a supercell's red core over Cass County, North Dakota, with a hook echo wrapping south of Enderlin around Geske Airfield and a weak-echo notch between Enderlin and Sheldon.
Reflectivity, 11:08 pm CDT (04:08 UTC), KMVX, 0.5°. The hook wraps around the south side of Enderlin, with the tornado in the notch between the town and Sheldon, at the rail line. Highway 46 is the straight line through Enderlin; the county line runs with it.
Radar velocity from KMVX showing red and orange outbound returns just southeast of Enderlin beside blue and purple inbound returns toward Sheldon, the inbound colors at the scale's limit.
Velocity, 11:08 pm CDT, KMVX, 0.5°. The radar is to the north-northeast, so blue and purple are air rushing toward it and red and orange away. The purple gates northwest of Sheldon sit at the edge of the display's range, 144 mph, beside outbound flow on the Enderlin side: the tornado cyclone at the moment of the derailment, seen from 64 miles.
Correlation coefficient from KMVX, mostly pink for rain, with a blue patch of low values east of Enderlin toward Kraig Farms Airport where the radar is seeing lofted debris.
Correlation coefficient, 11:08 pm CDT, KMVX, 0.5°. Rain returns a coefficient near one, pink. The blue patch east of Enderlin, where the value collapses, is the debris signature: the radar seeing pieces of farms, trees and a train, more than a kilometer up.
Radar reflectivity from KMVX six minutes later, the hook now northeast of Enderlin with a pronounced notch near Kraig Farms Airport.
Reflectivity, 11:14 pm CDT, KMVX, 0.5°. Six minutes on, the hook has crossed the highway into Cass County and its notch sits over the farmsteads where the three people died.

Replay the tornado on KMVX with reflectivity, velocity and correlation coefficient side by side, from the approach to Enderlin to the second tornado's crossing of the first path.

Open in the archive

From EF3 to EF5

The first survey statement, on June 23, was careful: EF3, 160 mph, a path of 12 miles and a mile wide, "preliminary and subject to change pending further evaluation." It recorded the train but could not rate it: "While south of Highway 46, the tornado derailed several train cars and threw one train car approximately 300 feet."[1] The Enhanced Fujita scale rates tornadoes by what they do to 28 kinds of structure and vegetation. A rail car is not among them. As the Northern Tornadoes Project put it, "Initial assessments by NWS suggested high-end EF3 damage but lacked sufficient EF Scale damage indicators to justify a higher rating."[8]

EF3 → EF5 160 mph on June 23, 2025, from the houses and trees; greater than 210 mph on October 6, from what the tornado did to a 72,000-pound tanker car and a 286,000-pound grain hopper The first EF5 in the United States since May 20, 2013, and the first in North Dakota under the EF scale.[2][16]

The October statement gives the basis: "The estimated maximum wind speed of the Enderlin, ND tornado #1 is greater than 210 mph and occurred during the time of the train derailment south of Enderlin, ND. The analysis involved forensic damage wind speed estimates for tipping several fully-loaded grain hopper cars and lofting of tanker cars, including one empty tanker car that was tossed about 475.5 ft (145 m)." The office thanked Tim Marshall, Jim LaDue, Connell Miller, Greg Kopp, David Sills and the Northern Tornadoes Project at Western University.[2]

The method is a 2024 paper by Miller, Kopp, Sills and Butt, which runs Monte Carlo simulations of debris flight through a modeled tornado wind field until ten thousand trajectories match an object's observed displacement, and reports the median wind required. Its headline result: "a large compact object being lofted more than 50 m horizontally is an indicator of an EF5 tornado." Its stated limits: "modeling debris in tornadoes comes with considerable uncertainties since there are many parameters to determine," a possible "overestimation in wind speed" from how lofting is initiated, and no data on the lift coefficients of such objects in tornadic flow.[10] The heaviest object in the paper was a 9,800 kg combine thrown 80 to 100 m. The Enderlin tanker weighed more than three times that and traveled nearly three times the threshold distance.[8][10]

The numbers the analyses produced are larger than the rating. Storm Data records that "these analyses estimate potential wind speeds of approximately 230 mph are needed to completely overturn a fully loaded grain hopper car," and that the Northern Tornadoes Project "estimated a potential wind speed of >119 m/s (>266 mph) to loft the empty tanker car 475.7 ft." The official figure remains "greater than 210 mph," and its averaging is not stated; the paper's method reports an equivalent three-second gust. Connell Miller, whose method it was, told the Forum: "If this train car wouldn't have been there, I don't know if this would have been rated an EF-5 tornado."[5][17]

The houses, meanwhile, did what houses in the drought years had done. The reanalysis found farmstead 2 on Highway 46 "complete destruction with the foundation considered to be swept clean, and debris swept downwind and scattered. However, issues surrounding the lack of proper anchoring will limit the overall rating in this area."[2] That sentence is the whole argument of the 2025 review of the missing EF5s, which found the early EF5 ratings had rested on swept homes "without directly noting that these homes were built at standard construction codes," and asked whether the scale as now applied could reach its own top category.[11] Enderlin reached it by a route the scale's authors had not written down.

The victims

Michael Dalton Dehn and Katherine Ann Pfaff-Dehn, both 73, died at their home about a mile east of Enderlin on Highway 46. Marcario Machuca Lucio, 89 by the sheriff's release and 88 by the Forum's tribute, died in his home on a family farm to the northeast; his wife Roberta was at a family reunion in town.[12][13][15] "You don't recover from stuff like this, you just don't, not when you lose life," a family friend, Twyla Laufenberg, said. "He said it's getting kind of bad over here, maybe you better come home."[13]

"It's a close-knit community and everyone knows everyone. Those first responders knew those individuals, so it was very tough for them. This is by far the most severe, tragic storm we've worked through in our office."

Cass County Sheriff Jesse Jahner, to the Forum, June 21, 2025[14]

Aftermath

Governor Kelly Armstrong declared a disaster the next day, with about 25,000 customers without power across the region and the state's emergency operations plan activated: "Our hearts and sympathies go out to the family and friends of the three North Dakotans who tragically lost their lives."[19] Four days after the storm more than 150 volunteers, organized by the Enderlin FFA after a farmer called a loan officer to say "I don't want to ask for help," cleared metal and lumber from fields so they could be replanted.[22]

In July the governor asked for a presidential disaster declaration for 19 counties, citing $11.5 million in public damage and four deaths statewide from the June 20 and 21 storms, and by the time the rating was raised in October the federal money was on hold: the state's emergency services said North Dakota would not receive its expected $16 million in federal relief "until after the government shutdown ends."[20][21] The upgrade itself made national news on October 6. "This particular set of damage that we saw kind of stood out as unique," NWS Grand Forks meteorologist Carl Jones told Minnesota Public Radio.[18]

Videos

Footage and coverage, all via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embeds.

The chase. Aaron Rigsby's footage from Spiritwood to Enderlin.
Live from the road. Reed Timmer's coverage.
The damage analysis. June First on how the rating was made.
The upgrade. Bring Me The News on the October announcement.

The tornado that began the drought is Moore; the one that began the scale is Greensburg. For a rating argued the other way, an F5 that engineers thought needed only F3 winds, see Jarrell. The 2011 Hackleburg page discusses the same 2025 review of what an EF5 now requires.

All tornado profiles · Search the radar archive by date and time · How to read reflectivity and velocity

Sources

Figures in the vitals follow the October 6, 2025 survey statement; Storm Data's county segments and the June 23 preliminary figures are given in the text. Times are CDT (UTC−5).

  1. NWS Grand Forks, Public Information Statement, preliminary damage survey, 4:08 pm CDT, June 23, 2025, via the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
  2. NWS Grand Forks, Public Information Statement, Enderlin Tornado #1 upgraded to EF-5, 9:30 am CDT, October 6, 2025, and its correction to the end point.
  3. NWS Grand Forks, Enderlin Tornado #1 EF-5 release, October 6, 2025 (PDF), with survey photographs.
  4. NWS Grand Forks, June 20, 2025 Summary.
  5. NCEI Storm Events Database, 2025 bulk details file, events 1278899 (Ransom County) and 1278903 (Cass County), and 1278909, 1278912, 1279518 and 1281828 for the other tornadoes of the night, from ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/swdi/stormevents/csvfiles/.
  6. Iowa Environmental Mesonet, archived NWS Grand Forks products: tornado warning, 10:42 pm CDT, statement, 10:35 pm, PDS statement, 11:11 pm, and statement, 11:20 pm.
  7. Storm Prediction Center, Tornado Watch 448, Mesoscale Discussion 1386, Mesoscale Discussion 1390, and the Day 1 Convective Outlook, 2000 UTC, June 20, 2025.
  8. Northern Tornadoes Project, Western University, CSSL/NTP research assists with rating historic EF5 tornado in US, October 2025.
  9. J. Renaud, Western research helps confirm first EF5 tornado in U.S. in 12 years, Western News, October 6, 2025.
  10. C. S. Miller, G. A. Kopp, D. M. L. Sills and D. G. Butt, Estimating Wind Speeds in Tornadoes Using Debris Trajectories of Large Compact Objects, Monthly Weather Review 152(8), 2024.
  11. A. W. Lyza, H. E. Brooks and M. J. Krocak, Where Have the EF5s Gone? A Closer Look at the "Drought" of the Most Violent Tornadoes in the United States, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 106, 2025.
  12. A. Baumgarten, 3 who died in Enderlin tornado named, The Forum, June 22, 2025.
  13. M. Henson, 'We lost a good man': friends remember man killed in Enderlin tornado, The Forum, June 21, 2025.
  14. A. Baumgarten and A. Paige, Three killed as tornado strikes Cass County overnight, The Forum, June 21, 2025.
  15. C. Larson, Three dead after tornado near Enderlin, WDAY Radio, June 21, 2025.
  16. A. Baumgarten, Enderlin tornado that killed 3 people reclassified as EF-5, The Forum, October 6, 2025.
  17. The Forum, How the 2025 Enderlin tornado became an EF-5, republished June 2026.
  18. T. Ruiz Sandoval, Enderlin tornado earns rare EF5 category after derailing 33 train cars, MPR News, October 8, 2025.
  19. Office of the Governor of North Dakota, Armstrong declares disaster for tornado damage, extends sympathy to victims' families, June 21, 2025.
  20. Office of the Governor of North Dakota, Armstrong requests presidential disaster declaration for storm damage, July 21, 2025.
  21. M. Steurer, Government shutdown could stall disaster aid for North Dakota, North Dakota Monitor, October 7, 2025.
  22. R. McNamara, 'We all come together': over 150 volunteers clean up Enderlin farms after deadly tornadoes, The Forum, June 24, 2025.
  23. T. Briggs, Debris from Enderlin tornado victims lands in two Moorhead yards, The Forum, July 11, 2025; and Wikipedia, 2025 Enderlin tornado, consulted September 2026, used as a finding aid.

Radar imagery on this page was rendered by WeatherOverTime from NOAA Level II data recorded by KMVX. Where sources disagree on a figure, the difference is noted in the text. Corrections: contact@weatherovertime.com.