Manhattan sees over $11 million in storm damage and NWS confirms EF2 tornado

​After conducting a second survey, state meteorologists and the National Weather Service of Topeka determined that Manhattan did experience a tornado last Saturday east of K-states campus. After previously reporting the storm only produced straight line winds locally. The National Weather Service's of Topeka office announced on Thursday last week that an EF2 tornado with estimated peak winds of 115 miles per hour hit at 7:20pm on Saturday, June 11 2022. Officials who made the declaration after additional analysis and surveying described it as a small brief tornado with a path of 0.30 miles in the McCain neighborhood. Russell Stukey, the Director of Emergency Management and Riley county spoke with Wildcat 91.9 about the extent of the damage.

"The most recent updated assessment is just shy of $12 million and the upper $11 million range of damage and that is real estate type damage. So that wouldn't count any vehicles or personal property. It does count mobile homes but it doesn't count things such as trampolines blown out of the yard or other you know non-real estate type things. It includes houses, trees, mobile homes and structures basically" said Stukey.

But the amount of damage wasn't discovered until after Chris Craven a meteorologist from the National Weather Service joined Russell Stukey on analyzing other parts of Manhattan.

"She took pictures and took GPS locations and then she goes back uploaded to the National Weather Service their program that they use to assess damage and estimate winds then that's where their initial she said you know, I can't really rule out a tornado we didn't see when we walked around the the typical you know, twisted trees everything for the most part we saw was blown. In one direction. And so that's why I think their initial was straight line winds but then they came back I think a team of three from the speaker Weather Service office re-walk those areas reanalyzed some things and went back to the office and reanalyzed the radar recordings and came to the conclusion you know, we think there was a little smaller, short lived tornado in that area" said Stukey.

Short lived and yet over 60 properties sustained major damage and three homes were destroyed, making this the worst storm damage to hit Manhattan since 2008.