Production funding for state of change is provided by the Backlund Charitable Trust.

This was a situation that escalated very quickly.

Unfortunately, in close proximity to Mattoon and Charleston, we saw.

The National Weather Service is still saying a confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado was located near Westfield east at 45 miles per hour.

This new warning is now in effect until 8:00 PM.

It's still being tagged as a particularly dangerous situation.

Currently sheltering on the north side of Charleston where a big tornado just spun up.

And I think this tornado has gone through part of Mattoon Charleston.

I'm right in the path of it, but I might try and square it up a little more strategically.

But we got destructive winds, 80 mile an hour winds, two inch hail, and maybe a tornado with this thing.

It's just getting worse.

Yeah, it's getting worse.

And it just came right through town.

There's damage everywhere.

I'm a trained meteorologist and storm spotter.

There's a tornado on the ground.

I need that relayed to the National Weather Service.

Welcome to State of Change.

I'm Tinisha Spain from Illinois Public Media.

2026 was a record year for tornadoes.

This map shows more than 200 touchdowns in Illinois, a new record and nearly four times the yearly average.

In a few minutes, you'll meet storm survivors, scientists who analyze these storms and get expert advice on how to survive a twister.

But first, let's get back on the road with an Illinois storm chaser who shot video of many of the tornadoes represented on this map.

In a matter of seconds, this tornado moved through at 50 miles an hour and just completely altered the landscape forever.

Andrew Pritchard is a meteorologist for Nutrien Ag Solutions, but he also provides forecasts and life-saving storm information on Illinois public media.

Born and raised in Champaign-Urbana, he grew up watching storms and studying severe weather threats.

In 2026, he captured some of the state's most destructive tornadoes on video and saw evidence of Tornado Alley's expansion.

One of the most active seasons ever, when you kind of look at tornadoes per square mile, there's been some research done here by scientists at the University of Illinois.

It's not uncommon to have a season where one geographic area is maybe being hit more often than the other.

The jet stream, it loves to fall into patterns where maybe you get a couple of months where the storm track is just favoring this kind of corridor multiple days this past year where it would get to the middle of the event and I would just be like, "I can't believe we're doing this again," where we have multiple storms producing tornadoes that are hitting communities and causing damage and lasting effects.

So yeah, Central Illinois most active tornado season may be on record, but certainly over the last couple of decades.

Tornado is due south of me.

I am in Charleston.

Yeah, I'm on the north side on Highway 130.

I watched this tornado develop to the west northwest of town.

It seemed to be a fairly large tornado, but quickly wrapped itself in rain as it made its way into, I believe, parts of the north side of Mattoon Charleston here.

After seeing that tornado develop, the storm was quickly coming upon me, so I had to kind of shift into a mode where I found some shelter from a large hail on the high winds as I watched, unfortunately, this tornado as it appeared to go to my south, which would've taken it through parts of Mattoon Charleston.

The Charleston tornado happened kind of right in the middle of a very long, severe weather day in central Illinois.

One of these that we're kind of accustomed to here where there's a morning round of storms and then a later afternoon and evening round of storms.

And so there was a morning line that came through that was severe, primarily had some straight line winds that marched through parts of central Illinois, and that led me down to Mattoon Charleston, just kind of pursuing those early storms.

It's 12:41.

I'm sitting in Mattoon.

Just had lunch at the original Burger King.

It's 2:15 PM.

This super strong storm system is kicking this low grunge out of here.

Round one moved through and Western Illinois is starting to clear out western into central.

We've got a new tornado watch in effect until 10:00 PM.

Storms are starting to develop off to our west-northwest right now.

And everything kind of says this Springfield to Charleston, Illinois, kind of right through the central part of Illinois corridor should be getting impacted by super cells.

I actually had a moment where I thought maybe the day was done.

I let this storm go.

I took a minute to exhale and kind of stop gripping the steering wheel and get out of the car and just kind of catch my breath.

And as I was doing that, I got a warning on my phone.

Watching these two storms organized to our west, I think these are going to be the game for us.

It's rapidly destabilizing out ahead of them.

78 over 76 in Jacksonville, 77 over 72.

We got these southerly, southeasterly winds out ahead of them.

There is a cell over here kind of north of Lincoln that is concerning me as it has a trajectory that would take it back towards home.

This kind of Springfield, Charleston, this zone here, Springfield, Taylorville, Shelbyville, Mattoon, Charleston, going to be primed for a big one this evening, I think.

I went through a little bit of a, all right, I got to get back, get my head right again and kind of get back into severe weather mode and made a bit of a plan to get into the path of that once.

I see the tornado right away.

Sometimes tornadoes, they'll be down, but they kind of change shape and maybe it starts as a narrow tornado and then grows into a big wide one.

And so this one seemed to, when it touched down, it came down where I could see the actual funnel as a more narrow concentrated tornado, and that's when it crossed Interstate 57, caused a very concentrated damage path through that area where it blew over some tractor trailers and trees and semis.

And then as it kind of racked in rain, it seemed like the tornado evolved to where it expanded.

So it just looked like this big mass coming into town.

And so someone could have been standing here and they would've just seen this huge storm front coming in and engulfing them.

And it went through this evolution where it was still this same tornado, but just kind of a wider, more sporadic damage path as it went through town.

The National Weather Service is still saying a confirmed large and extremely dangerous tornado was located near Westfield, moving east at 45 miles per hour.

This new warning is now in effect until 8:00 PM.

It's still being tagged as a particularly dangerous situation for the potential of seeing a damaging and destructive tornado.

So these new areas within these counties include Marshall, Kansas, Illinois, Westfield.

So anytime I see a tornado or a significant severe storm that goes through a populated area, I'm really concerned about the people and the impacts there.

And so as I started to see homes that are missing their roof or walls and broken windows and that kind of thing, you kind of just want to make sure everyone's okay.

So I'm looking, I'm being curious, trying to find the damage.

I'm reporting on it over the phone, which is going out over the airwave so people can hear at home where the damaged areas are.

But I'm also doing a lot of hollering out the window, "Are you okay?"

Or pulling in a driveway and is everyone all right?

One of the hallmark things that you'll see in a tornado damage path is trees really illustrate the wind patterns there, but you can kind of see that convergent path where everything wasn't blown down all facing the same direction.

You've got trees here on this side blown that way, and then if you were to go a little further north, they'd be blown down this way, all kind of facing in towards the center of that circulation.

It's interesting when you see an area that has a lot of trees because you can get a lot of tracers for the wind and look for some of the patterns.

Here you've got these really dense trees, trees really close together, and that helps kind of tell the story where you can literally put back together the flow of the wind and imagine what it was like as this tornado went through.

It's humbling for one thing to kind of walk through here and kind of feel the power.

You've got this huge grove of trees that's stood here for decades and it just takes a couple of seconds.

I'm watching from afar just this tornado in the distance, and the reality of it is the tornado in the distance is causing a lot of damage where it is.

And that was part of what led to that pit in your stomach feeling watching this storm go into Charleston.

You knew that it was impacting people.

In 2026, as a storm chaser and a severe weather journalist, I felt like I exercised a lot of those demons of years past where there were a lot of days where I was like something crazy is going to happen.

The forecast was right and I was in the exact right position to document some sort of big weather event.

This year brought a lot of things I haven't seen before, both from that's one of the biggest tornadoes I've ever seen, that's one of the strongest tornadoes I've ever seen.

This is three tornadoes that are on the ground at the same time that I'm seeing and all of it in central Illinois where I grew up just kind of watching storm clouds as a teenager to now be going out and seeing things I never imagined that I would see and then finishing documenting that, turning around and driving half an hour back home.

I don't know if I'll have any more like it, if this is kind of what I should get used to, but just kind of experiencing it as a meteorologist and a human who's living in an area being hit by a lot of bad storms.

In March of 2026, one of the strongest tornadoes in Illinois touched down in Kankakee.

It killed three people and damaged 500 buildings.

Then on June 11th, there were 24 tornadoes reported around the Chicago area.

One storm in Streator injured seven and destroyed dozens of homes.

Less than a week later, a powerful tornado crossed both I-57 and I-70 in Effingham.

A family-owned business took a direct hit.

Abigail Botar shows us the damage.

She also asked scientists if Illinois is now part of Tornado Alley.

Every day, thousands of drivers move through a city known as the heart of America along two busy highways, but a severe storm on a June evening caused many in the city of 12,000 to take cover.

Oh no.

Oh no.

Oh no.

Oh.

My God.

Here we go.

Tornado happening right now.

This is going to be northwest of Effingham.

Look at this big cone tornado.

That looks pretty violent.

It shows the moment a tornado ripped through a house in downstate Effingham.

After the storm moved through, you will see Trevor Krecky coming out of his home stunned as he looked around at the damage.

It took half a century to build Mid-American Motorworks in Effingham.

It only took seconds for an EF3 tornado on June 17th, 2026 to turn the business the size of a small shopping center into a pile of rubble.

Two people were hurt in the storm.

145 mile per hour winds flattened this family-owned Corvette Museum and parts store, leaving twisted metal, downed power lines and shredded trees.

I've run the gamut of emotions from sad and happy, depressed, just everything.

Michael Yeager's dad started the business more than 50 years ago with a loan of $500.

My dad started me as a little boy from mopping floors and doing every single job within the business.

The museum housed one of a kind cars.

More than a dozen were totaled.

Most of the company's inventory was lost to the tornado.

A lot of inventory they were able to save was then destroyed by rain in the days after.

The backside of the building is completely gone.

All of our racking, our inventory is completely gone.

The tornado stayed on the ground for 32 miles and was as wide as five football fields.

Around the same time, 100 miles away, meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Lincoln were tracking this storm.

It was one of seven tornado warnings they issued that day.

It's the job of Mike Albano and other meteorologists to issue forecasts and warnings when the skies turn stormy, and they've been busy this year.

It has been a historic tornado season across central Illinois.

We currently lead the nation by a factor of two.

We're over 200 tornadoes across the entire state.

This year alone, that is three to four times our normal average.

Historically, tornadoes have most frequently touched down in the Great Plains in a stretch of the country dubbed Tornado Alley that spans from Texas to South Dakota.

But research has found that pattern has been shifting since 1979, leading to more tornadoes in Illinois and other Midwest states as well as the Southeast.

The data is illuminating.

In 1996, Texas had 138 tornadoes.

117 were reported in 2006.

By September 2026, only 58 had been reported.

Compare that with Illinois, which reported 71 tornadoes in 1996, nearly doubling by 2016, and by fall of 2026, more than 200 tornadoes were reported.

Keep in mind, these are confirmed storms, not averages.

Albano says some of the increase can be chalked up to better reporting technology like our cell phones.

Meteorologists can track and confirm tornadoes better now than they could 20 years ago.

In the year 2000, if a weak tornado touched down in a farmer's field, there's a really good chance of wind undocumented.

But today we have the pocket meteorologist effect where we have a lot of storm chasers out in the field that will videotape, upload to TikTok and send to the National Weather Service.

But there's more to the story.

On the campus of Northern Illinois University, Professor Victor Gencini serves as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms.

But we also just look at the environment that these tornadoes form in, and those have becoming more frequent and more favorable for tornadoes as well too.

Like a recipe, tornadoes meet certain ingredients to form.

The first is humidity.

You go outside, right?

If you have long hair, your hair gets all curly and fray, very high humidity.

I mean, the humidity is really kind of like gasoline.

It's a fuel for a thunderstorm.

Then there has to be an unstable atmosphere.

Really warm, humid air down low and very cold air up above.

Those air masses basically want to switch place like oil and vinegar.

Their densities are different.

So if we have instability in the atmosphere, these thunderstorms can grow and create large storms that we call super cells.

Then the storm needs wind shear where winds strongly change direction and speed.

The last ingredient is lift or something to get that unstable air triggered upward.

If those ingredients are all present, then you at least have probably a watch scenario where the conditions are favorable for the development.

It doesn't guarantee that we're going to get an event, right?

But it does say conditions are favorable for the development of tornadoes or severe storms in your area, and we have had that on a lot of days this year.

We have had a lot of favorable days for severe storms and tornadoes.

And it's not only tornadoes.

This is the actual state record found by the Doris family.

And again, that was on March 10th, 2026 in Kankakee.

The same storm that produced this record hailstone produced a dozen tornadoes on March 10th.

Many people lost cars and entire roofs of homes.

Gencini says warmer temperatures and more humidity caused by the climate crisis are providing more favorable days for tornadoes to form.

Over the last 40 years, the number of tornadoes and strong tornadoes that we have had over that period have really been declining in places like Texas and Oklahoma and really increasing in places like Kentucky and Illinois and Indiana and portions of the Midwest.

The same June day a tornado touched down in Effingham, a tornado with peak winds of 116 miles per hour carved a path between Mattoon and Charleston in Coles County.

Downed power lines left thousands without power, large branches fell on houses and smashed cars.

Coles County Emergency Management Director Jim Hilgenberg says the community had just finished cleaning up debris from strong winds a few days prior when the tornado hit.

It seems like we get done with one incident and then another one follows up.

Hilgenberg has been busy this year, but he says not much else has changed about his job with the increase in tornadoes.

He's still watching weather radars and communicating with the community about severe weather.

There's more than just damaged.

There's people that are financially strapped because of it and the cleanup is not necessarily free when they hire contractors to come in to help them fix their houses and clean up their yard and take care of their trees and such.

Back in Effingham, Michael Yeager is still trying to get his company back on its feet too, months after the tornado.

They were able to start moving the Corvette parts store and museum into a new building just down the street the day after the tornado hit the business.

Employees are still working through what's left of their inventory.

Yeah, I mean everything that is this side right now is stuff that we were able to retain.

There's certain things, certain parts, once they got wet, they were completely ruined.

It's just the nature of the game and there's other stuff like that was in a box that was in a plastic wrapper.

So even though it got wet, you could still save it.

Jaeger is working with insurance to fix the totaled cars that were towed from their old site.

What was left of their old buildings was knocked down in August.

I told our staff, I was like, "Listen guys, I was like, this is going to be a marathon.

This is not going to be a sprint.

Some of us are going to make a lot of wrong decisions, but at the end of the day, as long as we're moving forward and the majority of the decisions are correct, then together we'll get through it.".

For now, he's taking it day by day as he rebuilds his family's business.

For State of Change, I'm Abigail Botar.

Also in June of 2026, a storm system produced a tornado that destroyed hundreds of trees at the Kickapoo State Recreation Area, then moved over to Danville near the Illinois-Indiana border.

It was a day one family we'll never forget.

A lot of life has been lived in this house.

We first came here in 79.

My parents were married in this house.

On the night of June 11th, 2026, Paula Young was making dinner when a severe storm brought a more than 100-year-old tree crashing through her roof.

I just hear this loud crash or this loud sound and then shaking.

It sounded like the biggest crack of thunder maybe that you had ever heard, and it's the loudest sound.

That massive tree and extensive damage to her home left her with few ways to get out safely.

And I can't go this way because I see tree and then insulation.

And then my husband's standing down this way, but I can see the tree behind him through the door.

So I know I can't go that way either.

Power lines snapped.

They had to ride out the rest of the storm in the dark.

It was raining inside.

All the rafters, boards were down, nails were up.

The office was destroyed, and when we visited in September, it was still sealed shut, too dangerous to enter.

The office is sealed because it took the brunt of the impact, so everything in there is destroyed.

According to the National Weather Service, it was 80 to 100 mile per hour straight line winds that damaged the Young's house.

Part of a system that minutes before produced a tornado that snapped 250 trees at Kickapoo State Recreation Area.

The next morning, Paula got to see the full extent of the destruction.

I walked the house, the outside, just looking up in devastation, and it's crazy what a tree can do to a home.

I had a kid down the street stand beside it as it was up, and they were about the same happy.

Then came hotel stays, boarding up their home, tree removal, and finding temporary housing to plan their next move.

It's my home, and it's been my home for as long as I can remember, so I am very attached to this place.

I've raised families in this place.

I've let others raise their families in this place.

So I am very attached, and it's been a home for a lot of people.

So to see it pretty destroyed like it was at the time, it was just devastating.

There's a tree in my living room.

Paula's grateful that her family made it out unharmed.

Her husband came close to being in the tree's path.

My husband usually giving him 10 minutes to find his spot, he would've been in his spot and he would've gotten a brunt of a lot.

Now, the family is beginning the long process of rebuilding with hopes of coming home soon.

It'll be a while.

It's not going to be anything easy, and I know it's going to be quite the process, but we are going to be able to rebuild and to come back home.

So that is an exciting part.

Since we're experiencing more tornadoes in Illinois, it's important to know what to do when one's reported in your area, so we grabbed some drawing paper and talked with a local meteorologist.

As the frequency and intensity of these severe weather events goes up, so too should your storm knowledge.

Uh-oh.

Having a plan can save your life in severe weather situations, yet many adults haven't participated in a storm drill since high school or maybe even grade school.

Here are some tips to stay safe when severe weather is happening.

If you're driving, don't park under a bridge.

This is an old myth and it does not keep you safe.

An overpass acts like a wind tunnel and puts you at even more risk of being hit with flying debris or worse, a collapse.

We've all heard the rhyme turn around, don't drown.

Sounds simple, but in summer 2026, there were local cases of people being washed away by flood waters in Illinois.

All it takes is just two feet of moving water to sweep away most large SUVs and even trucks.

Here's another one.

Tornadoes don't hit large cities.

Also not true.

Tornadoes have hit several large cities, including Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls, and St.

Louis.

In fact, more people means more stuff to throw around.

According to the Department of Commerce, the Joplin, Missouri tornado in 2011 is the most expensive tornado on record with repairs costing nearly $3 billion.

That included hundreds of businesses and thousands of homes.

And finally, what's the difference between a watch and a warning and what should I do?

Watch means conditions are favorable, so watch out for more information to come, have a plan, charge your devices, and be ready.

A warning means get moving.

This is your warning that severe weather is nearby.

That means go to your storm safe place, like a basement or an interior area of your home or building away from windows.

Sounds simple, but knowing the difference is vital as central Illinois continues to experience the effects of climate change.

Quad views look gray.

Some of us may even be looking at patchy frost.

And one more safety tip.

Depend on an actual scientist for your weather information.

Olivia Colon is a meteorologist at WAND TV in Decatur.

And when I'm on air and I'm covering it, I distinctly remember a couple times this past spring thinking to myself, somebody's house could be damaged.

There are some really strong winds.

This record storm season was her first in Illinois.

She was on the air during several warnings.

I had somebody come up to me and they said, "Olivia, you said on air, you know the Casey's on 121, this storm is going to be passing there in the next five minutes.

If you live next to that area, seek shelter."

They were like, "Oh, I know that Casey's," and they threw their kid in the closet and all was well.

During severe storms, Olivia advises you to always have a way to get information from a meteorologist an app or AI simply won't.

Do.This is experience that more of us are going through now, but we're going through it together, right?

So we'll get through it together, but you do have to do your part.

I'm going to do my part.

I'm going to be staying ready and get the knowledge and I'm never going to stop learning.

Our Saturday morning and Sunday morning in a few minutes.

Tornadoes are both fascinating and frightening.

While we're seeing more here in Illinois, the key to survival is knowing where to go when a warning is issued in your area.

Staying aware of storms will help you and your family survive our state of change.

I'm Tanisha Spain.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Production funding for state of change is provided by the Backlund Charitable Trust.