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Monday, November 18, 2013
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Deadly storms sweep across state At least five people dead amid widespread damage By DAVID MERCER and DON BABWIN The Associated Press WASHINGTON – Dozens of tornadoes and intense thunderstorms swept across the Midwest on Sunday, leaving at least five people dead and unleashing powerful winds that flattened entire neighborhoods, flipped over cars and uprooted trees. Illinois took the brunt of the fury as the string of unusually powerful late-season tornadoes tore across the state, injuring dozens and even prompting officials at Chicago’s Soldier Field to evacuate the stands and delay the Bears game. “The whole neighborhood’s gone. The wall of my fireplace is all that is left of my house,” said Michael Perdun, speaking by cellphone from the hardhit central Illinois town of Washington, where he said his neighborhood was wiped out in a matter of seconds.
“I stepped outside and I heard it coming. My daughter was already in the basement, so I ran downstairs and grabbed her, crouched in the laundry room and all of a sudden I could see daylight up the stairway and my house was gone.” An elderly man and his sister were killed when a tornado hit their home in the rural southern Illinois community of New Minden, said coroner Mark Styninger. A third person died in Washington, while two others perished in Massac County in the far southern part of the state, said Patti Thompson of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. She did not provide details. With communications difficult and many roads impassable, it remained unclear how many people were killed or hurt. The Illinois National Guard said it had dispatched 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington to assist with immediate search and re-
AP photo
Pat Whitaker, 82, sits under a blanket in her nightgown outside her home waiting for help to come Sunday in Gifford. covery operations. In Washington, a rural community of 16,000, whole blocks of houses were erased from the landscape, and Illinois State Police Trooper Dustin Pierce said the tornado cut a path from one end of town to the other, knocking down power lines, rupturing gas lines and ripping off roofs.
An auto parts store with several people inside was reduced to a pile of bricks, metal and rebar; a battered car, its windshield impaled by a piece of lumber, was flung alongside it. Despite the devastation, all the employees managed to crawl out of the rubble unhurt, Pierce said. “I went over there immediately af-
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ter the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn’t even tell what street I was on,” Washington Alderman Tyler Gee told WLS-TV. “Just completely flattened – some of the neighborhoods here in town, hundreds of homes.” Among those who lost everything was Curt Zehr, who described the speed with which the tornado turned his farmhouse outside Washington into a mass of rubble scattered over hundreds of yards. His truck was sent flying and landed on an uprooted tree. “They heard the siren... and saw [the tornado] right there and got into the basement,” he said of his wife and adult son who were home at the time. Then, seconds later, when they looked out from their hiding place the house was gone and “the sun was out and right on top of them.” At OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, spokeswoman Amy Paul said 37 patients had been treated, eight with injuries ranging from broken bones to head injuries. Another hospital, Methodist Medical Center in Peoria, treated more than a dozen, but officials there said none of them were seriously injured.
See WEATHER, page A8
Minor damage in DeKalb County By JILLIAN DUCHNOWSKI jduchnowski@shawmedia.com
Monica Maschak - mmaschak@shawmedia.com
The Hernandez sisters (from left), Gloria, a toddler, Beatriz, 7, and Carla, 10, play together recently in their family’s home in Evergreen Village Mobile Home Park in Sycamore. The residents of the community will be forced to relocate in the coming year and some families, like the Hernandezes, are hoping to keep their children in their current schools. Both Carla, a fifth-grader, and Beatriz, a second-grader, attend North Grove Elementary School in Sycamore. Gloria is too young to attend school. The sisters also have a brother and a sister attending Sycamore High School.
Relocation of students from mobile home park draws closer By FELIX SARVER fsarver@shawmedia.com
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YCAMORE – Carla Hernandez doesn’t want to leave her friends and teachers at North Grove Elementary School. Hernandez, 10, is a fifth-grader but lives at Evergreen Village Mobile Home Park in Sycamore with her four siblings and her parents. The mobile home park has experienced two floods requiring federal assistance since 2007, so county officials are using a $4.2 million federal grant to relocate the park residents, buy the park and return it to open space.
It could mean Hernandez and about 100 other children living in the 129-unit park have to change schools or districts next fall if their parents can’t find affordable housing nearby. Residents without school-age children are expected to start moving next year, and the property will be acquired from the owner by the end of 2014. “I have more friends here that would be hard to make elsewhere,” Hernandez said. County officials are not planning to relocate families with school-age children until the current school year ends, said Paul Miller, county planning, zoning and building director. The county will make every effort to find them adequate housing
close to where they live but residents are not obligated to take what county officials offer them, he said. Meanwhile, Sycamore school district staff and and faculty will assist the students and their families. District Superintendent Kathy Countryman said there will be no disruptions of the student’s education. “We are staying the course because we feel that we have a good plan for the students in the district,” she said. “Even with the possibility of them leaving the district we are not doing anything different with regard to their academic learning.”
See MOVE, page A4
DeKALB – DeKalb County was spared the tornadoes that left a path a devastation from Peoria to the south Chicago suburbs Sunday, but strong winds downed trees and power lines here. By 4 p.m. Sunday, the storms with wind gusts between 50 and 80 mph had subsided, Northern Illinois University Meteorologist Gilbert Sebenste said. “There are telephone poles blown over on Route 23 just south of Gurler Road,” Sebenste said. “The poles are not broken, but they’re pushed almost to the ground.” About 14,000 customers in DeKalb County lost power Sunday, with about 9,800 customers remaining without power by 4:30 p.m., ComEd spokesman Paul Callighan said. The outages could be lengthy in areas where poles were damaged or upended, Callighan said. The hardest hit areas were DeKalb, Sycamore, Genoa and Sandwich. “If you do see a wire that is down, don’t go near it but call ComEd to report it,” Callighan said, adding customers should call 800-334-7661. Much of the damage was caused by microbursts, which are strong currents that crash down toward earth and spread in all directions after being cooled by rain high in the sky. In Genoa, siding had been ripped from a house and several trees were felled on the golf course, Sebenste said. Authorities closed South Fourth Street between Colonial Drive and Ball Avenue on Sunday because of downed power lines. “There were a couple of areas of weak rotation, but no tornadoes were seen or confirmed in the county,” Sebenste said. After Sunday night, county residents shouldn’t see any more rain until late this week, he said. “We could get hit with another significant system late in the week,” Sebenste said, “but that’s still several days away.”
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