Tuesday marks 45 years since the 1980 Kalamazoo tornado
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — May 13, 2025, marks the 45th anniversary of the 1980 Kalamazoo tornado.
The F3 tornado touched down just after 4 p.m. on a Tuesday. The tornado stayed on the ground for approximately 11 miles or right around 22 minutes. The path of damage was quite intense, leaving behind 47 destroyed homes and 216 damaged homes.
Lookback: The deadly Kalamazoo tornado of 1980
The National Weather Service out a tornado watch and warning with an approximately 10-minute lead time. Regardless, five people were killed and 79 injured, most of them in downtown Kalamazoo.
The damage in Kalamazoo County was estimated at $50 million. Adjusted for inflation, that's nearly $190 million in today's dollars.
The Enhanced Fujita scale took over as the tornado ranking system on Feb. 1, 2007. This replaced the former Fujita scale to help better assess the damage and correlate wind speeds to each level on the scale.
EF3 tornadoes are quite rare across the state of Michigan. The only EF3 tornado to touch down in the last decade was in . Before that, it was in March of 2021 in Washtenaw County.
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