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July 18, 1986 -- a Friday -- was a typically sultry Minnesota summer day, the kind we forget about a week later. But there would be no forgetting this afternoon because 25 years ago, the Twin Cities television audience -- and later the entire nation -- was able to view one of nature's most destructive phenomena: a F-2 tornado.
It all happened live on television -- start to finish, for half an hour -- in an unprecedented TV event that is still one of the most infamous, talked-about and vivid memories of a natural disaster in the Twin Cities area.
KARE's television coverage was historic for a number of reasons. It was the first live broadcast of the entire life-cycle of a tornado. The broadcast and the video captured by KARE's chopper pilot Max Messmer and photographer Tom Empey gave meteorologists invaluable new insights. And it was the watershed moment that turned a perennial third place station, KARE-TV, into a bona fide competitor to WCCO and KSTP.
Nature and luck had a hand in KARE's coverage. KARE's helicopter, branded "Sky 11" and piloted by Messmer, was up with Empey aboard to get aerial shots of the Minneapolis Aquatennial late that afternoon. The duo spotted what looked to be a funnel cloud forming over Brooklyn Park and decided to check it out. Within moments Messmer and Empey were making history.
Back at KARE, seeing what Messmer and Empey were chasing, the decision was made to cut into local programming minutes before the regular...