Pictured: The Chandler-Lake Wilson tornado initially touched down shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16, 1992, near Leota. This photo was taken as the tornado came upon the former Ron Vander Steen farm.

The following article is compiled from interviews (conducted 10 years ago ,at the time of the 20th anniversary) with Cal Tinklenberg, Al Vis, and Ed and Joyce Stoel, along with articles from the Buffalo Ridge Tornado book that was published after the tornado, and information from the National Weather Service website.

 By Jill Fennema –

The Chandler-Lake Wilson tornado initially touched down shortly after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 16, 1992, near Leota. It completely destroyed a two-house farmstead owned by Bud and Clara Rozeboom, just east of Leota. From there it strengthened and churned its way northeast toward Chandler and Lake Wilson. According to the National Weather Service, the tornado reached its greatest size and strength as it came over the hill immediately south of Chandler, as it plowed into Cal and Connie Tinklenberg’s home at 5:18 pm. 

The giant twister was on the ground for over an hour, traveling approximately 35 miles across southwest Minnesota. It had a maximum width of three-quarters of a mile in the Chandler-Lake Wilson area.

It was the only F5 tornado in the United States that year. 

At 5 p.m. that day, Chandler Fire Chief Cal Tinklenberg was just finishing up work for the day at the T & R Cabinet and Construction shop. It was his 44th birthday. Others in town were just returning home from the ballpark and work. Many were beginning to prepare supper.

A major spring storm had been developing in the western United States over the weekend of June 13-14. The weather that day was hot and humid. There were storms brewing in South Dakota earlier that day and the forecast was for storms.

There had been a window salesman in Cal’s office that afternoon. Shortly after the salesman left, he called back to the shop to tell Cal that he was headed south and that Cal should check out the weather because it looked like a tornado was headed their way.

Cal was listening to his two-way radio, and the Slayton dispatcher called to say a tornado had been spotted. Cal and other firemen and first responders headed to the firehall. It started hailing then, big jagged hailstones the size of a man’s fist. 

Betty Van Peursem was also a firefighter. She lived across the street from Cal. She arrived at the firehall to find Al Vis and Lonnie Clark already in the rescue truck. She climbed in and Doran Christoffels elected to stay behind at the firehall. Frank Vander Woude and Dennis Welgraven got into a fire truck. With Cal in his own pickup, the three vehicles set out to check the sky and warn people of the impending danger.

The rescue truck went south of town on Hwy 91, where they had report later. Thinking they were right in the path of the storm, they headed back into Chandler and out to the west side. Meanwhile, Betty was thinking about her two children who were home alone. She stayed in the rescue truck as it went back out of town, fighting the wind and storm all the way.

Cal instructed the firemen that were still at the fire hall to sound the siren. After telling people around town, who were still out and about, to take cover in a basement, Tinklenberg heeded his own advice and headed to his house to find some shelter from the storm, which was obviously bearing down on the town.

“By the time I drove in my garage, there were already tree limbs hitting my pickup,” he said. His daughter Lisa, who was 19 at the time, was at home. His wife Connie was working up at the Huisken Meat factory.

The Tinklenbergs had a walkout basement that faced south.  When Cal looked south out the windows, he could see a solid wall of black. He said later, “About a hundred feet away, we have a row of trees. Right up to that row of trees it was just solid black. Just ink black.  And it was moving back and forth. It was straight up and down. It wasn’t the classic taper with the tail.”

“It looked like a black, living thing. Right in front of that it looked like a mist of steam or fog coming out of the ground,” he said.

He and Lisa took shelter in the basement, Lisa under the stairs and Cal in the furnace room.

Cal recalls vividly the sound when the tornado hit the house. “It was such a loud bang,” he said. He describes the sound of the wind like the screaming of wind through a partially open window, amplified hundreds of times.  

Trying to protect himself and Lisa from flying glass, he closed the furnace room door and struggled to hold it shut. When he felt the center wall of the house shift, he knew things were bad. The door was thrown open and Cal recalled later that he tried to make a dive for Lisa, but the wind stopped him. It was pushing him around so that he couldn’t move himself. He felt like he was in a blender, spinning and crashing this way and that. 

“All of a sudden I saw the floor joists start to tip over one at a time. Bing, bing, bing. And the plywood was ripping off right behind it. That fast, the whole floor was gone and there was gray sky above. We were right in the hole of it. It quieted down for just a little bit,” he recalled.

The few moments of calm were shattered as the back side of the tornado came through. Cal was bounced around and picked up off the floor. 

“I would spin around and I could see things happening out there. I saw Brant Kreun’s house, the earth home. It looked like a hand grabbed that big overhang and ripped part of it, hesitated and then reached a third of the way into the house and ripped it all the way to the end. I saw that probably for only a couple of seconds, but it was so vivid.”

“I couldn’t shut my eyes,” he said. “They were held open.” 

Shale from their landscaping was flying around the room with him, beating him up. He was repeatedly lifted up off the floor and crashed back down. Sheetrock, trees, and doors were landing on him. At one point, he turned and saw a concrete block flying at him. He turned away and the block hit him in the hip and threw him into the debris again.

His daughter was somewhere in all that mess, too. She said later that it was like a hand pushed her out of the corner she was in and put her in another corner. That was good because the stairs she was hiding under were blown away. In her new location she was protected by the pillars of the family’s fireplace.

Across the street, ten-year-old Jaime and eight-year-old Brandon Van Peursem were hiding under Brandon’s bed. They had just seen the fire trucks go by and heard the siren’s blare. They went downstairs with blankets and a can of Pringles and crowded under a twin size bed. 

Jaime later recalled, “The carpet under us felt like someone was pulling on it. When the wall blew over, it felt like Brandon was getting sucked out with it. I grabbed onto him and held on tight.”

Brant and Julie Kreun were home when the tornado hit. They had no basement because their home was built into the side of the hill, facing south. Seeing the tornado coming from the southeast, they did not know where to go. They took meager shelter in an interior hallway, but were pelted with debris, when, as Cal described above, their home was ripped apart.

When everything was past, Cal found himself lying on railroad ties. He reached up with his arm and right there was his two-way radio.  He immediately started talking to Murray County dispatch and the other firemen. By then, Betty, Al, and Lonnie were heading back into town from the west. They were disoriented because all the houses on that side of town were gone.

Tinklenberg could hear Betty screaming for her children. He wanted to help her, but was trapped in his basement, unable to walk. From his radio he began giving instructions to the other firemen, telling them to call dispatch and get help. 

“We need ambulances. We need people. Tell them to call until they won’t come anymore,” he remembers saying.

Al Vis was the first to locate Cal. Soon other emergency workers were there to help get him out of the basement, carrying him across the street on a backboard. He was propped up on a rock in the front yard at Van Peursems.  From there he began directing the work of getting the injured people into ambulances, clearing the streets with payloaders, and finding supplies for the injured. 

The Van Peursem children were rescued from the wreckage. They were in shorts and had no shoes. Joyce Stoel came into town with her children and sat with them for a while. Joyce had been in Edgerton, on her way back to Chandler, when the tornado came through. Ed and Joyce’s house was also severely damaged. Betty continued to help rescue others. 

One severely injured person was Bertha Youngsma. She and her husband Peter lived right by Van Peursems and Tinklenbergs. They had taken cover in the southwest corner of their house, but Peter recalled later, “That was the wrong place for us.” Peter was pinned under the floor of the house and Bertha was hit by parts of the house or cement blocks. Bertha was airlifted to Sioux Valley Hospital.

The Chandler Reformed Church became the center point for the emergency operations. Cal was brought there first, but despite his protests, he was soon loaded on an ambulance and taken to the Slayton hospital where he spent the next two weeks. He was banged up and bruised and had a broken pelvis. He was also majorly dehydrated, the tornado having sucked moisture right out of his body, he thinks. “I couldn’t stop drinking water,” he recalls.

For days the nurses would find sand in his hospital bed as it worked out of his skin. Cal said he literally did not sleep for a week. He pulled small stones and matchstick-size  slivers of wood from his skin two years later. The Van Peursem children were plagued by nightmares for weeks. Bertha Youngsma eventually succumbed to the injuries she sustained in the tornado. She was on life support for several weeks, but passed away on July 30, 1992. She was 81.

In Leota, Chandler, and Lake Wilson, the weeks and months that followed the tornado were filled with trials and tears as people struggled to put their lives back together. Volunteers came from all over the area to help. They walked fields picking up debris, helped people search for lost items, and donated food and household items. 

For Al Vis, who was the city maintenance worker during that time, work had to begin right away. In the minutes following the tornado, the very first thing that had to be done was to shut off the LP tanks. He was very happy to have the help of Duane and Rod Spartz, who are well-diggers from Iona, within a half hour of the tornado. 

Al, along with folks like Lonnie Clark and Ed Stoel, were very involved in the clean-up process. They helped organize the hundreds of volunteers who showed up in the days and weeks following the tornado — sometimes by busloads.  

Many folks chose to rebuild their homes. Cal and Connie rebuilt their home in 1993. One of the things Cal missed the most was the trees. The west side of Chandler had to have all new trees planted the following summer. About 1,300 trees were planted that year. It took a few years, but Al says with the trees planted, the birds eventually came back, too.

People would talk about all the strange and mysterious things that happened during the tornado — sealed cans of pop found half empty, their contents sucked out by raging the storm; jars of canned vegetables with spirals of mud inside the sealed jars. Cora Kooiman, whose house was totally destroyed, could not find her refrigerator, but the dozen eggs she had bought, minus the three she had used that morning, were found safe and sound! 

One thing that the tornado left in its wake was thankfulness. Nearly all who wrote of the tornado in The Buffalo Ridge Tornado book commented on how thankful they were to have their lives, their families. They were so stunned by the outpouring of help and support from those around them.

“Looking back, it wasn’t all bad. There was a lot of good,” Cal said. He added that during those hard times, they learned patience and understanding and were blessed by their fellow community members.

“That’s what community does,” he said. “You look out for each other and help each other.”