The 2015 tornado that walked through downtown Portland

On a Monday afternoon in June, a tornado came down two miles northwest of downtown Portland and headed straight for it. This was June 22, 2015, around 2:30, and the storm stayed on the ground only about ten minutes. In that span it crossed roughly six miles — right through the heart of town — with peak winds near 110 miles an hour, which puts it at the high end of an EF1.

It hit hard for a small place. Surveyors counted more than fifty damaged structures, including three churches and a dozen businesses; over seventy homes were heavily damaged or destroyed. People who rode it out in basements described the freight-train roar that everyone says they’ll never believe until they hear it. A Goodwill store on the edge of downtown was torn apart.

And then the part that still seems lucky: no one died. Injuries came to five, all minor. A high-end EF1 walking lengthwise through an occupied downtown in the middle of a weekday afternoon is the kind of thing that can go very badly, and here it didn’t.

What followed was the part Portland tends to talk about. Neighbors and volunteers turned out with chainsaws and trailers, and the town spent the next years replanting what the storm had stripped — block after block of canopy that a single ten-minute storm had snapped off. If you walk the older streets near the rivers and notice the trees come in two ages, the tall survivors and a younger cohort all about the same height, you’re reading the date right off the map: everything the same size went in after that June afternoon.