Fifteen years ago this week, a tornado touched down in Western Massachusetts, tearing through communities and scarring the landscape.
Outside Springfield City Hall Monday, bells tolled 15 times – the number of years that have passed since a 2011 EF-3 tornado killed two people in West Springfield and another in Brimfield. The storm was also believed to have caused another, indirect death in Monson.
Springfield was spared from any fatalities, but as Mayor Domenic Sarno recounted during the observance, dozens were injured while the cityscape was ravaged – leaving hundreds in need of shelter and multiple neighborhoods in need of repair.
“I don't know how it missed city hall. It ripped up Court Square Park, then it hooked a right … destroyed the South End – it destroyed my old South End Community Center,” the mayor said, recalling the tornado’s path. “The saves that first responders made… police and fire and the South End Community Center staff … [and] then it ripped up the South End area, and hooked a left and went all the way up Central Street, completely destroying Central Street and really hammering Maple Heights/Six Corners.”
Part of a broader storm system, the tornado started about 10 miles away in Westfield. It would ultimately span about 40 miles and make it as far as Charlton, to the east. But not before damaging hundreds of homes, businesses and stretches of forest.
Moving through Agawam and West Side, the tornado was still plenty powerful by the time it hit Springfield, clobbering buildings and parcels, including parts of Springfield College.
“The winds were so strong, it literally sucked the mattresses out of the dormitory,” Sarno said, referencing how numerous trees and roofing on campus were ripped out by the storm.
Speaking with reporters, both Sarno and Springfield Police Superintendent Larry Akers recalled how within hours, an all-hands effort was underway to start clearing debris, repairing utility poles and simply reopening streets.
At the time, Akers was still a patrolman, working in the police department’s motorcycle unit.
“I was shocked. What actually hit me the hardest is when I went up on Island Pond Road - I looked and there were no trees, there was no nothing,” said Akers. “I became very emotional - that was a route that I traveled all the time and to just look at it and see nothing there, homes destroyed and just no trees … that's when it really set in.”
Dozens of small businesses, Springfield’s Cathedral High School and a Square One daycare facility on Main Street would be among the buildings ravaged by the storm.
Capturing some of the storm as it happened was a WWLP-TV “skycam” in downtown Springfield. 22News Metrologist Brian Lapis and colleague Nick Bannin were in the midst of a live broadcast when they spotted the approaching tornado.
Repeatedly calling for residents to get inside, they continued to broadcast as the tornado made its way to the Connecticut River – terrifying drivers still on the roads an hour after a tornado warning had been issued.
Speaking with WAMC 15 years later, Lapis says the footage is no less disturbing than it was then. Sharing National Weather Service reports from that day, he recalled how his team knew severe weather was coming, but that at one point, it looked like the northern parts of the Pioneer Valley were likely to be walloped.
“We knew that there were conditions for tornadoes, and I would preface this by saying typically in New England, tornadoes are weak and short-lived, so we did not expect the June 1 tornado to be a 39-mile-long, EF-3,” he said. “That was not in the cards for us.”
And yet, Lapis says, as his colleague communicated with the National Weather Service, conditions took a turn for the worse early in the afternoon. By 4 p.m., a funnel cloud was spotted in Westfield, and within 40 minutes, a tornado was on the county seat’s doorstep.
“And in that moment… a couple of things that occurred to me was… ‘alright, so we just saw this thing on TV, and now that it's out of our view, it must be over, because New England tornadoes are typically short and weak,’ but no, this thing continued all the way to Charlton,” he said. “We realized, ‘Oh, this thing is still going’ - we could see it on radar. Candidly, I did not want to flip out over this. I did not want to become the screamy weather guy.”
In addition to scarring the landscape, Lapis posits the storm also scarred local psyches.
For many in Hampden County, images of torn trees, wrecked small businesses and debris as far as the eye could see cut against any notion that powerful tornadoes can’t come to hilly and mountainous western Massachusetts, he said – something residents in the southern Berkshires already knew after a tornado hit the area in 1995.
“Since the June 1, 2011 tornado - this is my anecdotal opinion - people in the valley take our severe weather warnings much more seriously. They are much more responsive and concerned about severe weather now than they were pre-June 1, 2011,” he said. “I think we collectively have learned a lesson that these phenomena can happen here in Western Massachusetts, and they can be very, very dangerous.”
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This story originally aired on Tuesday, June 2, 2026.
Some audio for this story was provided by WWLP-TV, 22News, a Nexstar Media Group news station.
