NORTHWEST
HERALD Saturday, April 11, 2015 • NWHerald.com • $1.00
Neisner’s in the Crystal Lake Plaza was completely destroyed.
PALM SUNDAY TORNADO: 50 YEARS LATER
REMEMBERING THE
DEVASTATION
Photos provided by Crystal Lake Historical Society
The 1965 Palm Sunday tornado tossed cars around like toys. This location is near where the Crystal Lake Burger King is located today.
Residents look back on 1965 tornado that claimed 6 lives By EMILY K. COLEMAN • ecoleman@shawmedia.com
N
early every story about Palm Sunday 1965 starts with the humidi-
ty. The day was unseasonably warm, so much so that Rick Burman, then about 20 years old, remembered wearing shorts and a T-shirt while building a dog kennel with his brother-in-law Ed Ozoa at his grandparents’ farmhouse where he and his wife lived. Barbara Oehmke was escaping the humidity by taking her four children shopping for Easter clothes at the Meadowdale Shopping Center in Carpenters-
ville while her husband, Keith, was working an overtime shift for ComEd. “Everybody was happy to be outside,” said Mark Eckel, who was outdoors with his parents and little sister while his brother played at a friend’s house next door. But then the weather shifted. “It started to rain like crazy, so we went in the house,” Ozoa said. “Then it cleared up, and we went outside and were working again [on the dog kennel]. But the skies were really –” See TORNADO, pages 6-7
H. Rick Bamman – hbamman@shawmedia.com
Our car started rocking back and forth. My husband yelled for me to grab one of our sons by the hand and he grabbed the other one. A station wagon in front of us had a boat attached to it, and my oldest son yelled, ‘Mommy look at the boat, it’s flying!’ Then, our car started rolling over and over, north of the highway. It’s strange but I didn’t have time to be scared or even time to think.” — Mary Wolter Crystal Lake resident, who, along with her husband and two sons, was tossed by the Sunday, April 11, 1965, tornado more than 100 yards north of Route 14 in Crystal Lake
For more eyewitness accounts and videos, visit NWHerald.com/palmsundaytornado
Tornado that devastated tiny town stopped short of Marengo By KEVIN P. CRAVER kcraver@shawmedia.com The powerful supercell that produced a tornado that damaged one town and smashed another was most likely the one that triggered dire warnings for Marengo and central McHenry County that, fortunately, did not come to pass. That system produced a large tornado Thursday night that one of McHenry County’s trained spotters – one of the “most reliable” that Emergency Management Agency Director David Christensen said he has – reported about 7:40 p.m. near Route 20 and Johnson
SPORTS
Road between Marengo and Garden Prairie. Several minutes earlier, the National Weather Service had issued an immediate warning based on its Doppler radar data telling people in Marengo that, “You are in a life-threatening situation.” A local resident who chases storms as a hobby likewise told the Northwest Herald the tornado was a large wedge-shaped one. Earlier, the storm destroyed 30 homes and destroyed a restaurant in Rochelle in Ogle County, and went on to level unincorporated Fairdale in northwestern DeKalb County, killing two and injuring at least seven. The weather service has tentatively classified that
tornado as an EF4, the second-highest rating, packing winds between 166 and 200 mph. But for whatever reason, the tornado that was headed for Marengo petered out. Although the storm was one of at least two tornadoes that hit McHenry County, the other near Harvard, Christensen said damage reports have not amounted to much beyond some siding, a dead chicken and a handful of power outages. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Christensen said. Several disaster teams from the National Weather Service were moving Friday through
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north central Illinois to ascertain damage in two distinct tracks from Ogle and Lee counties through Winnebago, DeKalb, Boone and McHenry counties. The southern track produced the Fairdale tornado, while the northern one produced a tornado near Harvard. “The questions the teams are trying to focus on are, was [damage caused by] one tornado? Was it multiple? Did one lift and the storm dropped another?” National Weather Service forecaster Jamie Enderlen said. A helicopter survey conducted early Friday afternoon found no damage along either path
See MARENGO, page A5