Forty tornadoes is a heavy haul for one June afternoon, and June 21st found them. Out of 153 reports nationwide, 40 were tornadoes — and the bulk of those stacked into one corridor, a swarm that rolled the length of Illinois.
Illinois alone confirmed 25 tornadoes, most of them clustered through the southern and central counties around Xenia — a genuine outbreak, not a stray spin-up. Indiana caught the eastern half of the same rotation with 11 more. A lot of these were short tracks, but a short track still walks a barn roof into the next field and snaps the power poles on the way.
While the corn belt was spinning, the southern Plains were getting shoved around by wind. Kansas ran up the day's biggest pile — 55 reports, 47 of them wind — as a line bulldozed west to east, and Oklahoma took the hardest gust of the day: 89 mph at Freedom. That's a roof-stripping wind, the kind that lifts shingle courses and folds carports, even where no funnel ever dropped.
The ice stayed out on the High Plains. Nebraska logged the biggest stone — 3.2 inches at Wauneta, hardball-plus hail that cracks shingle mats and dents anything metal it touches — with Colorado close behind at 2.75" near Fleming. If a core that size crossed your place, the roof didn't just get dinged, it got years older in one pass.
Here's the part homeowners miss on a tornado day: the damage isn't only where the warning polygons lit up. A storm that dropped a brief tornado two counties over was throwing 70–90 mph straight-line wind across a much wider strip — and that kind of wind creases shingles and pops seams without ever making the news. If the sirens went off anywhere across your part of Illinois, Indiana, or the Plains, don't take a clean-looking roof at face value until someone's been up on it.
For the crews, the confirmed Illinois–Indiana tornado tracks are the obvious first pass — narrow, documented, and fresh — with the Nebraska and Colorado hail towns worth the detour. The season's twister tally by state lives on the Top States for Tornadoes board. Everybody else — the county-by-county counts are in the table below; check the row for your area before you write the storm off as a miss.