EFFINGHAM – It took half a century to build Mid America Motorworks in Effingham.
It took only seconds for an EF3 tornado on June 17, 2026, to turn the business the size of a small shopping center into a pile of rubble.
Two people were hurt in the storm. More than 100 mile per hour winds flattened the family-owned Corvette museum and parts store, leaving twisted metal, downed power lines and shredded trees.
“I’ve run the gambit of emotions from sad and happy, depressed, just everything,” owner Michael Yager said.
His father 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,” Yager said.
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,” Yager said. “All of our racking. Our inventory is completely gone.”
The tornado stayed on the ground for more than 25 miles and was as wide as five football fields.
It’s one of more than 200 tornadoes that have touched down in Illinois this year. Historically tornadoes have most frequently touched down in the Great Plains, hitting states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, but research has found since 1979 that pattern has been shifting, leading to more tornadoes in Illinois and the Midwest.
The data is illuminating. In 1996, Texas had 138 tornadoes. One hundred and seventeen were reported in 2006. By September 2026, only 58 had been reported.
In 1996, 71 tornadoes were reported in Illinois. That number nearly doubled in 2016 and by fall of 2026, more than 200 tornadoes were reported.
‘A historic tornado season’
Meteorologists at the National Weather Service were tracking the EF3 tornado that hit Effingham in June from their office in Lincoln 100 miles away. They issued seven tornado warnings that day.
Mike Albano and other meteorologists are responsible for issuing 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,” Albano said. “We’re over 200 tornadoes across the state. This year alone, that is three to four times our normal average.”
Some of this increase can be chalked up to better reporting technology, Albano added. 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 it went undocumented,” he said. “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, according to Victor Gensini, a professor at Northern Illinois University and director of the university’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Convective Storms.
“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,” he said.
A lot of favorable days
Like a recipe, tornadoes need certain ingredients to form. The first is humidity.
“You go outside. If you have long hair, your hair gets all curly and fray, very high humidity,” Gensini said. “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.
“So really warm, humid air down low and very cold air up above. Those air masses basically want to switch place like oil and vinegar,” Gensini said. “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,” Gensini said.
“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 a lot of favorable days for severe storms and tornadoes.”
Warmer temperatures and more humidity caused by the climate crisis are providing more favorable days for tornadoes to form, he explained.
And instead of Tornado Alley which includes states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, these storms are forming in states like Illinois.
“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,” Gensini said.
He published groundbreaking research in 2018 first showing that more tornadoes are occurring east of Tornado Alley.
“The trends that we’ve been following since that 2018 study have really only solidified since then,” Gensini said.
A marathon, not a sprint
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 powerlines left thousands without power. Large branches fell on houses and smashed cars.
The community had just finished cleaning up debris from strong winds a few days prior when this tornado hit, Coles County Emergency Management Agency Director Jim Hilgenberg said.
“It seems like we get done with one incident and then another one follows up,” he added.
Hilgenberg has been busy this year, but 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 damage,” Hilgenberg said. “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 Yager 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.
“Certain parts once they got wet were completely ruined. It’s just the nature of the game.,” Yager said. “Then there’s other stuff that was in a box that was in a plastic wrapper, so even though it got wet, you could still save it.”
Yager 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,’” Yager said. “‘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.