Tornado warnings that covered parts of Milwaukee, Waukesha and Washington counties expired Tuesday evening after severe storms moved through southeastern Wisconsin, closing the immediate threat from a weather system that had been capable of producing tornadoes.
By 10 p.m., 40,085 We Energies customers were still without power, a sign of how widely the storms hit. Of those outages, 22,578 were in Milwaukee County, 11,318 were in Waukesha County and 2,477 were in Washington County. Those figures show the damage was not limited to one neighborhood or one county line.
The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for central Milwaukee County until 7:30 p.m. and another for central and southern Waukesha County until 7:15 p.m. The warnings came with the agency’s standard advice that flying debris could be dangerous and that storms could damage roofs, windows, vehicles and trees. It also said a basement below ground level, or the lowest floor of a building, offers the greatest safety, and urged people to put as many walls as possible between themselves and the outside while avoiding windows.
That guidance matters because a tornado warning means a tornado is imminent or has already touched down, while a tornado watch only means the conditions are ready for one to form. The warnings expired, but the reporting did not say whether a tornado actually touched down anywhere in the warned areas, leaving the main question about the storms’ behavior unanswered even as the outages piled up.
For drivers caught in a warning area, the National Weather Service said not to try to outrun a tornado. It advised getting off the road and out of the vehicle if possible, preferably into a sturdy building, and said that as a last resort people should lie flat in the nearest depression, ditch or culvert and cover their heads with their arms. Adrienne Davis reported on the storms. Wisconsin tornado warnings were the immediate issue on Tuesday, but the power losses made the impact visible long after the warnings ended.
