The tornado also smashed cars, spewed debris and downed power lines throughout cities including Naperville, Woodridge, Darien and Burr Ridge.
After the tornado passed, Jean-Phillipe Ducreux emerged from his Naperville home to find his neighbor’s home had collapsed and its owner was sifting through the rubble to find his wife — amid the smell and hiss of a gas leak.
“The husband was injured but good enough and said ‘my wife should be around here,’” said Ducreux, 51, who moved to the United States from France three years ago for work.
The men followed the sound of her screams.
“We unburied her,” said Ducreux, who worried about a gas explosion as the pair, aided by a firefighter who arrived on the scene, worked to free her. “I think she was pretty lucky because there was two sides and a top around her, two walls and a door; she was pretty protected, but she was hurt.”
The woman, Savita Patel, was taken to Edward Hospital in critical condition. She was one of at least five people who received treatment there.
The Patels’ home, near 75th Street and Ranchview Drive, lay in the path of a EF3 tornado that packed winds reaching 140 mph.
The twister touched down in Naperville about 11:02 p.m. in the area of the Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve and headed east nearly parallel to 75th Street and into the communities of Woodridge, Darien and Burr Ridge before petering out in Willow Springs, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Brett Borchardt.
It was on the ground for about 20 minutes, moved at a speed of about 45 to 50 mph and traveled about 10 miles, smashing cars, ripping roofs off homes, downing power lines, shearing off garage doors, uprooting large trees and spewing debris as high 19,000 feet, or 3.59 miles into the sky, Borchardt said.
In Naperville, at least 125 homes were damaged, 16 of them considered uninhabitable. In Woodridge, three adults were taken to hospitals, according to Lisle-Woodridge Fire District Deputy Fire Chief Steve Demas.
On Monday, the goodwill of neighbors who showed up in droves to help clean up the mess was in full display.
A platoon of community members, including dozens of high school athletes, descended on the site of the Patels’ home — the hardest hit in the area — to do whatever they could to help.
“I came over this morning after practice,” said Ayden Lutes, 17, a member of the Naperville Central High School wrestling team. “I felt terrible. It sucks when your fellow community members are in need. And then I saw the football guys come out so I texted a couple of wrestling guys to come out … we’ve decided to replace our weightlifting sessions with debris-moving sessions instead.”
A glass encased model of the Taj Mahal sat under the sun on the exposed floor of the Patels’ destroyed home near where the front door would have been.
Some volunteers removed heavy debris. Others sifted through the mess to recover family pictures and other precious items.
Anna Lindflott, 21, fished dozens of colorful bracelets from a neighbor’s above-ground pool that was reduced to a murky puddle when parts of the Patel home flew onto it.
“Anything we can do to help,” said Lindflott, who lives nearby.
The pool belongs to Katie Long Piper, who survived the tornado in her basement with her son and her 85-year-old mother as their home shifted on its foundation but remained standing.
“It didn’t sound like a freight train; it sounded like explosions,” said Long Piper, who runs Naperville Central High School’s in-school television network and coordinates school activities, like dances.
A piece of wood crashed through her basement window well as Long Piper laid on her belly with her mom and son.
“I’m so grateful I got everyone in the basement and that our house didn’t get sucked up,” she said while expressing love and concern for her less fortunate neighbors.
“They’re awesome, great people,” she said.
Photos on social media catalogued the damage across the affected suburbs.
“Unbelievable,” a homeowner said while staring at a home missing its roof and a wall in Woodridge. The “craziest 45 seconds of my life,” said another. “You could hear the metal literally ripping off of the buildings,” said a woman in Darien. Others said it sounded like a train went by — overhead.
And then, “as fast as it came, it was gone,” as Joseph Palacios, of Woodridge, recalled.
“It’s shocking to see the devastation — all the trees are just gone, [as well as] people’s houses,” Palacios said.
Palacios comforted his wife as she wiped tears from her eyes. “It’s hard seeing it in the daylight,” she said.
“It definitely is because it’s home,” her husband added. “Just to see it torn up, it’s obviously never going to look the same ever again.”
Earlier in Woodridge, Nate Casey, 16, strummed his guitar as he sat in a lawn chair with his mother, Bridget Casey, in their driveway around 4 a.m. Monday. The entire second floor of their house was gone, and their garage was destroyed.
The home is in the 7800 block of Woodridge Drive, one of the areas hit hardest by the storm.
Nate said he was watching TV when the storm rolled through. “I just heard a loud crash and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, what are my brothers up to?’ I go look and I see the sky, and then I hear my brothers screaming from the room.”
Nate, a student at Downers Grove South High School, helped his mother get his three younger siblings to the basement. He grabbed some of his camping equipment and scout gear just to be safe before going down himself.
“I just can’t believe it happened, you know? It’s not something that you see too often or at all, and it’s just scary that everything just comes crashing in,” Nate said. “Something that I was happy to see, that was not broken, was my dad’s ashes, but there’s really nothing else.”
Bridget Casey said she plans to live with her sister while their house gets repaired, though she doesn’t know how long that will take.
“I was just happy that everybody was OK,” she said.
A person who lives behind Casey brought her some personal items, including pictures and her children’s birth certificates, that he found in his backyard. “That means the world to me,” she said. “They didn’t have to do that.”
Down the street, Donna Suchecki joined a few of her neighbors in a driveway around 3:30 a.m. They sipped wine and moonshine out of blue plastic cups and talked about the damage.
“It’s overwhelming. All of us are like, ‘Oh my God, this really happened.’ It’s kind of a dream, you see it on TV, you see shows, you see stuff like that on tornados and … then you come out here and you see the cops, you see the fire trucks and stuff and you’re just like, ‘Wow,’” Suchecki said.
Heaps of trees covered Suchecki’s front lawn, but “luckily nothing hit” the house, she said. Her fence was smashed under a tree, though she said it needed to be replaced anyway.
Across the street, two cars sat on a slab of cement where the garage once was. Suchecki said it was uprooted and tossed into the backyard, where it hit a power line, leaving the block without power.
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Rich Hein/Sun-Times
“It’s crazy to go through this,” she said. “That’s a traumatic event.”
Crystal Porter was on her way home from her mother’s home in Joliet when she got a tornado warning alert. She said it took her five attempts to find a way to her home in the 2700 block of Everglade Avenue.
Ultimately, the retired military veteran had to move a tree to do so. After checking her dogs, Porter walked around the streets to assess the damage.
Porter, 27, noticed firefighters doing a search and rescue at a partially destroyed home and removing a cage filled with doves. With the owners not home, Porter grabbed a dog crate from her garage and rescued the birds.
“At least they’re not left out in the street,” she said.
Southwest suburbs hit, too
In Darien, Maureen Malloy recalls the lights going off around 11:15 p.m. Sunday as the winds picked up.
“You could hear the metal literally ripping off of the buildings,” Malloy said. “The wind was so strong that it was coming through the bottom and side of my door and it was blowing my hair back.”
She said that only lasted for about two minutes, but she waited until close to 1 a.m. to assess the damage. The entire street was blocked with trees, and a five-story weeping willow fell inches from her home.
“We are all very fortunate,” Malloy said. “These trees seriously could have killed somebody.”
Nicole Poletti was in the basement of her house in Burr Ridge with her husband and two kids when she heard a loud bang.
“It sounded like an explosion, and it happened in a split second,” she said. It was not until a bit later into the night that her husband was able to walk upstairs and see that noise was a tree falling onto their house.
She left with her kids to stay with her parents for the night, but Monday morning she saw the full extent of the damage.
“We have broken windows, damage to our roof, and actual branches going through our ceiling to our attic. A couple of trees fell onto our house,” she said. Their front yard and driveway were littered with so many broken branches it was hard to see the ground, she said. Her car was also completely destroyed.
Last year, a tornado touched down on Chicago’s North Side and traveled three miles into Lake Michigan. Winds of 110 mph took down trees and cut power to thousands, but no serious injuries were reported.
In 2015, five people were injured in a a tornado that hit Coal City, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago.
In 1990, the strongest tornado ever recorded in the Chicago area tore through Plainfield, killing 29 people and injuring more than 300. The twister cut a 15-mile swath on its way to Crest Hill.
