Forty Years Ago This Afternoon, A Tornado Swept Across Portions Of The Twin Cities
Note: This episode was recorded on Friday, June 11.
Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld and Jim du Bois discuss the June 14, 1981 tornado that struck Edina, Minneapolis, St. Paul and the Har Mar Mall in Roseville. Also, a look at the rapidly expanding drought conditions in Minnesota.
SPEAKERS
Jim du Bois, Kenny Blumenfeld
Jim du Bois 00:00
Edina, Lake Harriet, HarMar? Whatever you call it, it's the 40th anniversary of a significant tornado event in this area. This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld is a climatologist. Kenny, we'll get to the 40th anniversary discussion here momentarily, but, boy, just looking out the window at the garden in the yard, you can tell that something kind of turned the corner over the last few days.
Kenny Blumenfeld 00:34
Well, we were super hot, right? I mean, newsflash, it was hot as hell. And yeah, and we didn't get any precipitation or, you know, some people got a little downpour here and there, but there wasn't anything widespread and substantial. And our gardens, our grasses. Everyone is feeling the effect of that. It's become really dry. So I know we're going to talk about the tornado, but we can really quickly recap the heatwave, shall we?
Jim du Bois 01:05
That sounds good, Kenny.
Kenny Blumenfeld 01:06
All right. So we are speaking on Friday, June 11. This should be the last day of the consecutive run of 90 degree highs and 70 degree lows in the Twin Cities. So I think we can call it, the heat wave will break. today. Although if you look at the Weather Service forecast, it's not exactly cold next week. They've still got temperatures, you know, in the 80s and 90s in much of Minnesota through next week. It's just not as humid and not quite as persistent. I think there's going to be some ups and downs. But, so the main event heat wave will end at some point on Friday, probably before most people hear this. Maybe it'll end with a little pop, some thunder. But I think the strongest storms will be out in Wisconsin, and you know, before we recorded, overnight on Thursday night and into Friday morning there's monster thunderstorms in the Dakotas. I mean, just from eastern Montana, into especially North Dakota, but also parts of South Dakota, they had reports of wind driven tennis ball-sized hail. And the winds were were being clocked by I think it was one of the stations out of Williston, had a, a real weather station, had a 93 mile an hour wind gust. So there were some really strong winds. And these storms were producing pretty large hail. So, wind driven large hail can pack a punch and do a lot of damage. We don't have anything like that to worry about. It's just been hot. It's probably going to not rain very much until the next time we talk. And that's going to be over a week. And as we were talking about before we went on, yep, Minnesota has slipped or I should say lurched into drought. We've been kind of teetering on the edge of it. Now over 40% of the state is actually in an official drought designation of moderate drought. And the entire state is at least abnormally dry, which is kind of a pre-drought category. So, the majority of the state is either abnormally dry, or in that first level of drought, which is called moderate drought. And there's even some pockets of the next level, which is severe drought in parts of southern Minnesota. We've just, these precipitation deficits are catching up with us. We're spending too much time in between rainfall events, and when it rains is not enough to catch us up. And as we had happen, you know, then we have a scorching heat wave laying on top of that, and that just made it, it's been too much. So, we need to come out of this pattern or it's just going to escalate. But yeah, we're at the beginning of a drought officially now.
Jim du Bois 03:40
And Kenny, there's really no immediate relief in sight, correct? Even going out 6, 10 days.
Kenny Blumenfeld 03:46
I mean, you know, the Weather Service mentioned in their discussions last night and this morning, in some of the recent discussions, that it's not the same heatwave, for sure. It looks like there's going to be a couple hot days next week. But this sort of day after day run does not look like it's making a return. But it's gonna be a while before we're, you know, down in the low 50s at night. I hope that happens in the next week or so. But it doesn't look very likely at this point. But yeah, I wouldn't say the kind of relief that you're thinking of. On the other hand, Jim, when it's 95 degrees every day, and and the nights don't get below 70, you know, maybe, maybe high of 88 feels like relief.
Jim du Bois 04:33
It's all relative, isn't it?
Kenny Blumenfeld 04:35
Yeah, I think it is.
Jim du Bois 04:37
And I also assume no real relief in sight as well regarding precipitation.
Kenny Blumenfeld 04:44
Yeah, this isn't super promising. I was on a radio show this morning speaking with a host from the Two Harbors area, and we were just talking about how the weather models right now are very up optimistic as they have been for months, that it's going to start raining hard in about seven days, but it just never gets much closer than that. And so, it's hard to have now that we've had this multi month pattern where it looks wet, it looks like you're gonna get into a wet pattern, but it doesn't really materialize, maybe one out of four times that actually materialize, and so you end up with, you know, one week per month, it's actually getting decent precipitation. It's hard to trust that prognosis. There's nothing really in the forecast for the next week or so showing significant precipitation in Minnesota. Certainly nothing to start pulling us out of this major deficit that's building. But you know, the weather is not that easy to predict, once you get into, you know, that two-to-five-week period. And so, maybe Jim, maybe there's a pattern change coming that we don't see, maybe we're going to get, you know, we're expecting a really active tropical weather season. And maybe, maybe a couple of these are going to come up the zipper just right up the Mississippi and dump a bunch of rain on us or at least help export some of their moisture into our region. And, you know, imbue the next systems that come by after that with extra moisture, and we end up getting dumped. It's hard to know. But right now, we're in a drought pattern, and I don't see any strong signals of that changing soon.
Jim du Bois 06:22
Well, let's certainly hope that we get a pattern shift and get some of that much needed precipitation. It sounds like dry conditions and drought are fairly common in the western parts of the United States right now, hearing about very serious drought conditions in Colorado, concerns about water in California, wildfires in California, potentially also Washington State and Oregon. So, just a real need for precipitation in a rather substantial part of the country, it sounds like.
Kenny Blumenfeld 06:53
Yeah, yeah, basically, the western half or so of the country is running pretty dry, maybe the western 40%. And we're on the eastern edge of that. And then we're starting to get some signs of it. What's interesting is, you don't have to go too far to the east. You know, in the eastern US where I'm going to be next week. I mean, there've been Flash Flood Watches, and they've got precipitation surpluses. So, it's really, we're just on different sides of the same pattern where we're stuck in getting kind of dry air pulled into our region, there are other areas that are in that kind of non-stop conveyor belt moisture.
Jim du Bois 07:29
Well, as we had promised in the tease, we're going to talk about a tornado event that took place 40 years ago, this coming Monday, June 14, and it did depend where you were living in the Twin Cities at the time in terms of how you would probably describe the event. If you were in Minneapolis, it was the Lake Harriet tornado. If you were in Edina, the Edina tornado. It famously knocked down the marquee on the Edina Theater, which sadly has now apparently gone out of business in the wake of COVID. But then it could have been the HarMar tornado if you were in that area. And it was a rather significant event. Kenny, how did that particular event unfold?
Kenny Blumenfeld 08:15
Yes, so it was Father's Day weekend, and I actually did a fun run with my dad and my brother that weekend and it poured, poured, poured, poured in the morning. And it was just, you know, we think of this event, and I've, you know, done research on severe weather, and we remember there's a tornado that went across the Twin Cities, and that was a big deal. But that whole weekend was very stormy and even in the morning, the morning of the tornado, a violent thunderstorm complex moved across the southern Twin Cities metro and into kind of the Rice County area, Northfield area, and it produced estimated winds of 80 to 120 miles an hour. This was a completely separate storm, Sunday morning, June 14, 1981. It was demolishing outbuildings in rural parts of the southern Twin Cities area. So, that was, we just had a, you know, meteorologically we had strong winds aloft, we had a moist, very humid airmass moving in, and a low-pressure area approaching from the west bringing in a cold front, and that's just a really good recipe for severe weather. And so, later that day as the air became quite muggy in the Twin Cities area, a thunderstorm blossomed over the southwestern Twin Cities metropolitan area, started producing hail in the Lake Minnetonka areas. There were a couple thunderstorm cells, but the main one moved into the Edina area in the late afternoon and produced a tornado not too far, just a little bit southwest of 50th and France, and that tornado tracked right over the Edina movie theater, twisted and then bent down, I don't know if you remember the old pictures, but it bent that marquee and then kind of twisted it to the ground, and then it tracked from that point over essentially western and northern Lake Harriet. I mean it crossed about half of the lake and hit particularly hard the pavilion at Beard's Plaisance. It threw that, lifted it off its structure and threw it into the lake, picked up a bunch of water from the lake, picked up some fish from the lake, which is something that tornadoes like to do occasionally. Knocked down almost every tree in the Roberts Bird Sanctuary, pretty much every tree in the Rose Gardens and the old park commissioner house by Lyndale Farmstead was damaged pretty extensively. And then the tornado just tracked over the Chicago-Lake area past, went and damaged old Agassiz School. Mercifully, it actually appeared to briefly lift off the ground and miss the area between the University of Minnesota and downtown Minneapolis, and then it went back down near St. Anthony Park in St. Paul, tracked into the HarMar area where it actually deposited some of those fish from Lake Harriet into the parking lot.
Jim du Bois 11:05
Wow.
Kenny Blumenfeld 11:06
Neat little sight. Did a lot of residential and tree damage at the time, and then moved into Roseville where it finally dissipated after doing extensive damage. I think officially it was 83 injuries and one fatality near Lake Harriet, was rated an F3 tornado, I guess retroactively, we would call it an EF3, pretty damaging winds probably in the, you know, it's always an estimate, in 50 mile an hour range. And it was not enormous, but it was a good size tornado occasionally up to a half a mile wide at the base. And yeah, I mean it was, and then we were a little slow to pick up on it. So, the original warnings, I lived not too far from Lake Harriet. That's where I grew up. So, we had the winds pass our house, I mean, big gusts of wind and you can see the trees kind of bending and, but we didn't know that there was a tornado, there was no warning yet. It was about three or four minutes after the wind subsided that the first report officially came in and the sirens went off. And so, there was a little bit of a catch-up game going on between the warnings and where the tornado actually was. And that led to some confusion. Initially, it was assumed that there were three separate tornadoes: one in Edina, and one in Minneapolis, and one in Roseville. And it wasn't until a couple days later that it was confirmed to be a single track. The former State Climatologist Earl Kuehnast walked the entire length of the tornado path and was able to confirm a pretty much continuous track.
Jim du Bois 12:43
Well, Kenny, we all have memories of that day. I remember I had worked an early shift, 5:30am at a radio station in the Twin Cities. I was living over by the University of Minnesota at the time, it was Father's Day, as you mentioned, and we were having dinner for my dad. So, I had gone home about 2:30 or so and caught a brief nap until I was roused by the Civil Defense sirens and walked down to our front porch where my mom and dad were sitting and my mom who grew up on a farm said oh, we already heard the tornado pass by. We were living, or my parents were living at that time by Bde, Bde Maka Ska. So, it crossed rather close to my childhood home. So that was my memory. But then of course, I went back to work and drove down to the site around, it would have been 38th and Bryant and phoned in from something quaint called a telephone booth to the radio station and described what had happened. Talked to a couple of people whose houses had been in the path. But what are your memories, Kenny, of that day?
Kenny Blumenfeld 13:52
Oh, I mean, it was, I was you know, playing soccer in the backyard. The sky turned kind of green, and I was already, so I was already a huge weather fan even though I was seven, I was only seven years old. But I loved storms. I was terrified of them. I remember we were playing soccer outside, there was a brief kind of a sun shower, and then it got muggier and within about 15 minutes or a half an hour of that, you can see this much darker and more ominous clouds on the horizon. And our horizon, we're south Minneapolis, so we could basically see, you know, maybe 10 miles or something because it was, there's lots of trees and I was sort of looking up because of very dark clouds not too far away. And my mom told my friend he had to go home. And I went into the house and then kind of watched as the winds picked up. And you know, they were pushing the trees almost to the point of snapping and bending but you know, almost uprooting and almost snapping but they never did. But I did remember very distinctly that the trees were kind of pointed down the street to the north at the beginning of the storm, at the beginning of this gust, and then about a minute later, they were pointing kind of almost, not quite the opposite direction. I didn't know what that meant at the time. It was only years later I figured out oh, that was you know, we were about a mile away from the tornado that was the circulation of the tornado passing. The winds would have been, as it's to our northwest, the winds would have come, you know, essentially, kind of out of the west or southwest initially. And then as the tornado passed, they would have been basically coming out of the northeast. So, that sort of made sense. I would say 50 to 70 mile an hour winds, 50 to 60 mile an hour winds in our neighborhood. But you only had to go a few blocks to the north, and you can see trees down, trees down on houses, and then the more significant damage as you got into the area where you were 38th, you know, the Lyndale Farmstead area, Agassiz School I think it was 38th and Grand and then that whole area up into Chicago-Lake, they were hit very hard.
Jim du Bois 15:53
Well, Kenny, we will chat again in about two week’s time, you and your family are going to be riding roller coasters throughout the eastern and southeastern part of the country, correct?
Kenny Blumenfeld 16:04
That is correct. Guilty pleasure we have. We've always been roller coaster enthusiasts. It's something I've done with the kids for several years. So, got a little road trip planned to go visit some of the good ones.
Jim du Bois 16:18
Well, Kenny, make sure you enjoy, and everybody stay safe over the next 48 hours or so probably, especially the next 12 hours, it'll still be pretty hot. Stay hydrated. Don't work too hard outside. Pay attention to your body's signs. And Kenny, we'll look forward to checking in with you when you're back on terra firma, and not somewhere up on a roller coaster.
Kenny Blumenfeld 16:44
Yeah, losing my mind going down a big steep drop. Alright, well, thanks, Jim. You have a great weekend, and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.
Jim du Bois 16:52
This is Way Over Our Heads. It's a weather and climate podcast. I'm Jim du Bois. Kenny Blumenfeld’s a climatologist. We'll talk to you soon.