Fact Check

Tornado Carries Mobile Home 130 Miles, Family Inside Unharmed?

Reports that a tornado carried a mobile home for 130 miles and left the residents inside unharmed are fake news.

Published Aug. 22, 2016

 (Wikipedia)
Image Via Wikipedia
Claim:
A tornado carried a mobile home for 130 miles and left its occupants unharmed.

A purported news article reporting that a tornado carried a mobile home for 130 miles from Oklahoma to Kansas, leaving the occupying family (one of whom was amusingly named "Dorothy") unharmed, was circulated on social media in August 2016:

tornado facebook

This article was originally published by World News Daily Report (WNDR) in May 2015, and opened as follows:

A family from Tulsa, Oklahoma, underwent the scariest experience of their life yesterday, when their mobile home was carried over 130 miles by a tornado, landing in a rural Kansas area. Five members of the same family were inside the building during its “flight”, and all of them have miraculously survived without injuries.

41-year old Dorothy Williams, was at home with her husband, her son, and her two brothers, when their mobile home was lifted off the ground by an F4 tornado.

While the World News Daily Report article featured real photographs of tornado damage, the accompanying story about a mobile home being carried for over 130 miles was a fabricated one.

The World News Daily Report web site is a well-known purveyor of fake news and states in its disclaimer that all of the site's content is of "fictional nature":

WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website – even those based on real people –  are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any persons, living, dead, or undead is purely a miracle.

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.