5 tornadoes touched down across Wisconsin during Tuesday night storm

A storm system swept across much of Wisconsin on Tuesday night, with five confirmed tornadoes touching down and reports of building damage and heavy rainfall.

According to the National Weather Service Milwaukee office in Sullivan, the five EF-1 tornadoes happened at the following locations:

• Unity (Clark and Marathon counties)

• Edgar (Marathon County)

• Merrick State Park (Buffalo County)

• Cochrane (Buffalo County)

• Arcadia (Trempealeau County)

The twister that touched down at Merrick State Park in Fountain City crossed over from Winona County in Minnesota. The locals in Unity were still cleaning up Wednesday afternoon following their tornado.

Tornadoes that are graded EF-1 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale could have wind gusts between 86 and 110 miles per hour.

Throughout the state, winds led to structure damages and trees falling into power lines as wind gusts reached more than 70 mph, according to the National Weather Service. A combined total of outages reported by utility providers in Wisconsin shows about 20,000 customers without power across the state as of 5:20 p.m.

Power outages in Madison were among the worst in a company's history, a utility company said on Wednesday morning.

The system also brought considerable rain, with 2-3 inches of rain falling in central Wisconsin. Milwaukee received about a quarter to a half inch of rain, the NWS reported.

“I can’t really say getting thunderstorms in the month of May is unusual,” said Taylor Patterson, a meteorologist at with the weather service. “I will say that the conditions were a little bit higher than what we usually see.”

Patterson said that parts of Wisconsin reaching a moderate risk level for a storm, or a four out of five risk rating, was something that occurs once every one to three years in the state. That rating came early on Tuesday, with a corner of southwest Wisconsin at that risk level.

In southeastern Wisconsin, the NWS ended its tornado watch alert at 12:50 a.m.

The storm system left other parts of southeastern Wisconsin, such as Kenosha, relatively untouched by its conditions. Patterson said the storm was a line system and began to break as it reached that portion of the state.

Tuesday’s evenings storm was part of a wider severe weather that impacted neighboring states and devastated parts of Iowa. In Iowa, a tornado flattened much of Greenfield, killed multiple residents and injured others, the Des Moines Register reported.

Milwaukee forecast

On Wednesday, winds remained high as Tuesday’s low pressure system leaves the area to the east and a high pressure system moves in, Pattterson said.

“The pressure gradient is very tight,” she said. “We’ll just be in this corridor of stronger, gustier winds.”

Milwaukee’s Wednesday forecast included a high of 74, with wind gusts as high as 30 miles per hour.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 5 tornadoes touched down across Wisconsin during storm