We haven’t seen much severe weather recently in the U.S., but the country hasn’t been nearly that fortunate in past Augusts.
On Aug. 28, 1990, 35 years ago today, an F5 tornado raked through two northern Illinois counties on the far southwestern edge of Chicagoland.
The twister tore a 16-mile path through parts of the towns of Plainfield and Crystal Lawns that afternoon. Twenty-nine were killed and 350 were injured.
This violent tornado was up to a half-mile wide and inflicted $160 million in damage, with 470 homes destroyed and 1,000 damaged, according to the National Weather Service.
It’s one of only two known F5 or EF5 August tornadoes in the U.S., in addition to the Rochester “Mayo Clinic” twister of 1883.
Aside from its high-end intensity, this tornado was unique in two ways.
First, according to the NWS, it was cloaked in low clouds and rain, so no known video or photos of the actual tornado were taken.
Secondly, the lightning activity both with a weirdly high fraction of positively charged strikes, a reduction in cloud-to-ground lightning around the time the tornado was forming, then a clustering of lightning near the tornado at its maximum intensity, was the subject of a fascinating study published three years after the tornado.
Plainfield, Illinois, F5 tornado August 28 1990
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
