# Enderlin tornado is upgraded to EF5 after experts review the damage

On event date 2025-10-06, the U.S. National Weather Service upgraded the tornado near Enderlin, North Dakota, to EF5, the highest rating on the Enhanced Fujita scale.

The evidence package is brief but clear. CNN says the storm was the most rare and extreme form of tornado to strike eastern North Dakota in June, and that experts only later determined how strong it really was. The key news is the reassessment itself: what had been understood as a major tornado was formally judged severe enough to reach the top category.

An EF5 rating matters because it is reserved for the most destructive tornadoes. In practical terms, it signals winds and damage so extreme that few storms receive the designation. The evidence notes that this was the first EF5 tornado to strike the United States in more than a decade, which underlines how unusual the classification is.

The source material does not provide a detailed damage survey, casualty count or exact path length. That limits how far the story can go without adding unsupported claims. What it does show is that expert review changed the official understanding of the event months after the storm occurred.

That timing is important. It demonstrates how tornado ratings can evolve after engineers and meteorologists review debris, building damage and field evidence. A storm is not always assigned its final status immediately, especially when the damage pattern needs deeper analysis.

The North Dakota reclassification also has a wider weather-history significance. EF5 storms are rare enough to become reference points in severe-weather reporting, and this one now joins that short list. The evidence package specifically calls it the first such tornado in the U.S. in over a decade, which makes the upgrade newsworthy beyond the local impact.

Because the provided source excerpt is short, caution is warranted. The article should not invent additional specifics about who was affected or exactly what was destroyed. Instead, the verified story is that the National Weather Service’s experts revisited the June tornado, concluded it met EF5 standards and gave it the most extreme rating available.

That official judgment changes the storm’s place in the historical record and signals just how violent the Enderlin tornado was. Even without a long damage description, the classification alone tells readers that this was not an ordinary severe storm, but one of the rarest and most destructive kinds of tornado the United States experiences.