Washington Strong: The EF-Four of November Two Thousand Thirteen

On the morning of November seventeenth, two thousand thirteen, a tornado formed near North Pekin, Illinois, and spent the next forty-eight minutes carving a path forty-six miles long across the heart of Tazewell County. By the time it lifted, the city of Washington, Illinois had been changed in ways that would take years to measure.

The storm was rated EF-Four, with peak winds of one hundred ninety miles per hour. That made it the strongest tornado ever recorded in Illinois during the month of November, in a record going back to nineteen fifty. It was also the first November violent tornado in the state's history, a category defined as EF-Four or stronger. November tornadoes can form when cold Arctic air masses collide with unusual warm moisture out of the Gulf, a combination that was not supposed to happen quite like this in central Illinois in mid-autumn.

In Washington alone, six hundred thirty-three homes were destroyed outright. Another two hundred eighty sustained major damage. Two thousand five hundred vehicles were gone. Three people died. One hundred twenty-five were injured. The storm also struck Pekin and East Peoria. Total damage from the single storm reached nine hundred thirty-five million dollars, and the wider outbreak that day, which spawned twenty-five tornadoes across twenty-six Illinois counties, caused upward of one billion dollars in losses.

What followed the destruction was the story the town chose to tell about itself. Families who had lost everything were photographed helping neighbors who had also lost everything. A recovery identity crystallized quickly around a phrase: Washington Strong. More than six hundred fifty building permits were issued within seven months. One in twenty of the rebuilt homes included a reinforced safe room. The state sent thirteen point four million dollars in assistance; a local foundation distributed one point six million more in donations.

The tornado reshaped not just a neighborhood but an entire community's understanding of itself, sitting alongside I-Seventy-Four as a reminder of the violence the Prairie can still summon from a clear November sky.