There are not many exciting things that happen in Brownsburg, Indiana. We are landlocked, hundreds of miles away from an ocean and surrounded by flat land. The advantage of this, however, is our lack of potential risks for geohazards.
Although we are outside of tornado alley, tornados were something that were ingrained in me as a midwesterner at an early age. We had tornado drills in school and a practice siren every week, but there had been very few times the town of Brownsburg itself was impacted by such an event.
April 2nd 2025, however, was one of those few times. Our TV switched from the cable my dad was watching to an emergency weather report from the local news station, warning of the upcoming storms. It was raining, but lightly enough that we felt safe to disregard it and complain of the interruption. Minutes later, however, the rain, wind, and overall storm suddenly picked up. We could suddenly hear as our roof was absolutely pelted with rain and hail and as the 120mph winds slammed against our walls. Looking outside, you could see the street begin to flood as the rain came too quickly for the street to drain.
At this point, our phones began to buzz with the weather alerts, Yet initially, like many midwesterners experiencing this, we sat and watched and admired the storm instead of sheltering in place. However, when the tornado siren began to sound, we knew this meant that a tornado actually had touched down in our town, and we moved to shelter in the basement.
As we sheltered, the tornado ravished my town in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It wasn’t dramatic. It was an EF2 tornado, which is moderate as the third smallest kind, and caused only property damage with no loss to life and one reported injury. Several large warehouses were destroyed, a few stores and restaurants were damaged, and more than twenty houses suffered from damage that needed to be repaired.
in the following week and beyond, the community worked together to clean up the debris and neighborhoods. Though parts of our community, especially the affected neighborhoods were shaken, this tornado showed us what can happen in an instant and how to respond to it.
Works Cited
Adams, Matt. “Downed Trees, Power Outages, Tornado Damage: NWS Confirms EF2 Hit Brownsburg.” Fox59, fox59.com/weather/downed-trees-power-outages-tornado-damage-storms-batter-central-indiana/. Accessed 21 Oct. 2025.
Silva, Marina. “Brownsburg Neighbors Still Cleaning up from EF-2 Tornado | Wthr.Com.” WTHR, 9 Apr. 2025, www.wthr.com/article/news/local/brownsburg-indiana-neighbors-still-cleaning-up-from-ef-2-tornado-severe-weather-storms/531-088d09cf-89ff-463a-81d4-fcc80ca8fdef.
US Department of Commerce, NOAA. “The Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF Scale).” National Weather Service, NOAA’s National Weather Service, 31 Jan. 2024, www.weather.gov/oun/efscale.
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