I am in NO way an expert on the Fujita Scale but I after looking at hundreds of events I think I can make the following guess….I don’t believe this was an F3 tornado. I base this on the smattering of pictures found in newspapers and the descriptions of damage. There was some roof damage and trees downed. An older building had one wall blown down but the rest stayed in tact. Storm Data stated that there were cars overturned. I didn’t see picture evidence of that. There were damaged cars though. Storm Data also said that the path was erratic and the funnel was aloft part of the time. There were a lot of students on campus for several events, yet there were no injuries. This is awesome, but it makes me think that if the damage had been F3, there would have been more injuries.
This tornado is not found in Thomas Grazulis’ Significant Tornadoes. He didn’t think this tornado met the criteria as “significant”. He has a very detailed section of his book describing his approach to assigning an F-rating. I reviewed his notes and it would seem the damage here may be closer to an F1.