MITCHELL, SD (Mitchell Now) — Huron, about 45 minutes northwest of Mitchell, is still in the dark on Friday morning, better than 12 hours after a tornado and severe thunderstorms tore through the city.
A map from NorthWestern Energy still shows thousands of customers without power, with the damage particularly concentrated along Highway 37, just southeast of the state fairgrounds. While the bulk of the problems seem to center in the heart of the town, the outage map is peppered with problems from Gibbs Park to businesses and neighborhoods along Highway 14, even up towards Broadland Creek Golf Course.
As of 9:30 a.m. Friday, NorthWestern is still working to confirm most of the outages that have been reported. No timetable has been put forward yet on when the lights will be back on. Caught in the storm was Mitchell Mayor Jordan Hanson. He posted a harrowing note on Facebook Thursday evening.
“The entire city of Huron is dark
Other than 6-7 traffic lights and a few buildings with backup generators.
There are almost no traffic lights.
There are no street lights
Every house is dark, other than a few flickers of candles.
No gas stations are operating
No grocery stores are open
No restaurants
No stores at all are open.
Damage every where
I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”
Hours before he had posted photos from his property in Huron. A tree limb had fallen onto the roof and came crashing through an upper story window. The frame, warped from the force pushed onto the floor of the room with glass shards scattered everywhere. Another window on the next level down suffered the same fate. A third photo shows where the heavy branch pierced through the roof and ceiling. The final photo is from the outside of the building. It is easy to visualize from the damage how the branch careened down, snapping as it collided with the edge of the roof and breaking in two. The main column of the branch continued down the side of the building, going through the upper story window first, and then the second level. Hanson’s Facebook post is here.
In the coming days, the National Weather Service will have crews in the field surveying damage and giving a final assessment on whether it was a tornado or straight-line winds and estimating the ferocity of the storm.
Huron was not the only place that saw tornadoes on Thursday. The post below by Ryan Scholl on X shows a twister beginning to form between Wessington Springs and Gann Valley. It was this cell that would eventually move northeast into the Huron area as a line of thunderstorms coalesced around it, spawning several tornadoes in the process across Beadle, Buffalo, Jerauld, and Sanborn Counties.
A video of a second tornado that formed between Gann Valley and Wessington Springs, from Clint Hendricks.
