Severe storms spawn tornadoes, powerful winds in Wisconsin
Interstate closures and numerous damage reports were just some of the effects felt by Wisconsin residents Wednesday after a host of tornadoes touched down in the state.
Severe thunderstorms that rumbled through Wisconsin, as well as parts of Iowa and Illinois, conjured up the first tornado in the late afternoon on Wednesday in Oakdale, Wisconsin; this was one of several that touched down in the eastern portion of the state.
Multiple tornadoes were reported between Oakdale and neighboring Tomah, Wisconsin, with a large tornado causing a partial closure of I-90 and I-94. Motorists on Interstate 90 were stuck in a standstill in the early evening hours Wednesday, with officials rerouting traffic due to multiple tipped-over semi-trucks.
Footage of the tornado that touched down near Oakdale and Tomah showed the massive severe event engulfing the entire sky:
@JohnZeiglerWX I took this video right off the interstate near oakdale and tomah. The photos in the next tweet are from the damage near the Mauston hospital pic.twitter.com/srS91cVUYy
— Tyler Hansen (@TheFroggyOneYT) June 15, 2022
In Mauston, Wisconsin, law enforcement confirmed tornado damage to a local hospital, with the severity of the damage unknown as of 6 p.m. CDT Wednesday. Another tornado popped up around the same time in Bowler, Wisconsin, in the central region of the state.
On Thursday afternoon, the National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 Tornado passed through sections of Mauston in Juneau County, Wisconsin, on Wednesday. The tornado had estimated peak winds of 90 mph and a path length of 8.4 miles.
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Later in the evening, a tornado was reported to be at least half a mile wide in the Wyeville, Wisconsin, area, with numerous hardwood trees snapped along the tornado's path. What was called a "significant" tornado event also destroyed several homes in the area.
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Tornado warnings were prevalent throughout the entire state Wednesday, with sirens heard in the Green Bay suburb of De Pere, Wisconsin:
Tornado 🌪 Sirens went off over the past half-hour in West DePere / Green Bay Wisconsin- 45 mph wind gusts, rain & lightning. Everything appears to have blown over. #wiwx pic.twitter.com/h0Vq6pnqsU
— Chris Knight (@ChrisKnight) June 16, 2022
As of 8:13 p.m. CDT Wednesday, over 122,000 Wisconsin residents were without power due to the swath of storms, according to PowerOutageUS. The highest concentration of outages was in the eastern part of the state, including a 70 percent outage (55,058 tracked customers) in Brown County. By 6 a.m. CDT Thursday, that number had dropped to just under 88,000.
The severe weather is likely to taper off slightly after the threats to the Upper Midwest Wednesday, but the Midwest got break from the severe weather on Thursday as the storms shifted east.
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