As a kid I vaguely remember the being told that the proximity of Lake Michigan to Chicago decreased the probability of a tornado in Chicago. Is this true?
Secondly, when was the last time a tornado struck within the city limits?
Cecil actually addressed the general topic, to an extent, nearly 30 years ago.
In that column, the late Dr. Theodore Fujita (creator of the “Fujita scale” for determining tornado severity) of the University of Chicago indicated that he believed that large cities might block an inrush of cool air, which helps to intensify tornadoes. Dr. Fujita theorized that a city might reduce the severity of a tornado, though it would not make a city “tornado-proof”.
This article from Chicago Magazine in 2011 indicates that the last tornado to hit downtown Chicago did so in 1876 (and was apparently an F3 in intensity), and that the last tornado to enter any part of Chicago was in 1961; that one ran “from 91st and Western to 68th and Lake Michigan, causing seven million dollars in damage, injuring 115 people, and killing one.”
The last one I can remember hearing about in the “greater Chicago area” was the one in January (!) 2008. But that one was all the way out in Harvard, which barely counts as Chicagoland except in the sense of “Metra goes there.”
I thought that one was sighted over the north side of the city a few years ago (2010 maybe?), but didn’t touch the ground and didn’t do any major damage. Anyone remember the date of that one?
–Had to be late August. I had just got off of a plane from France and my brother came to pick us up from ORD. It was perfectly sunny but there was a wall of black closing in from the west. As we drove down the Kennedy, the storm hit with a fury. On the radio people were calling in with reports of “tornado like” occurrences - particularly in Edgewater were we live. By the time we got home, the storm had passed and there were trees down and significant other damage. I remember hearing the word “tornado” in some reports but I don’t remember if anyone positively identified it as such.
