1845 Montville tornado
1845 tornado in Normandy
The Montville tornado, also called the Montville waterspout at the time, was a tornado that struck Normandy in France in 1845. It is the deadliest tornado ever recorded in France with 75 deaths. Forming on 19 August, 1845, it caused significant damage in the industrial valley of Malaunay and Montville, in the Department of Seine-Maritime. The worst of the damage from the tornado was rated EF5 by the Tornadoes and Severe Storms French Observatory (KERAUNOS), with the European Severe Storms Laboratory acknowledging the EF5 rating as its "maximum intensity", though ESSL also rated the tornado F5. TORRO rated the tornado T10, later changed to IF5. This was the first of two tornados in French history to receive a rating of F5, EF5, or IF5, the other being a tornado that occurred in Pas-de-Calais in 1967.
Meteorological synopsis
Around midday, a storm broke out in the Rouen region, causing heavy rain. The tornado formed around 1 PM near the commune of Le Houlme and moved through the Cailly valley towards Malaunay, quickly acquiring gigantic force. On its path, it destroyed homes and uprooted hundreds of trees, some of which were swept away whole in the tornado. In the industrial valley, three large mills, at least one of which was newly built, were leveled and partly swept clean.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q86671201. Authority coordinates are 49.547, 1.076. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1845 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “1845 Montville tornado” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.