Read More

Read More

The tornado appeared to start in Naperville, then cut a destructive path through Woodridge, Darien and Downers Grove.

A tornado ripped through the western suburbs late Sunday night, damaging more than a hundred homes and injuring several people, including a woman in critical condition.

The tornado touchdown was confirmed about 11:10 p.m. near Route 53 and 75th Street in Woodridge, the National Weather Service said. The tornado, with winds likely over 100 mph, also hit portions of Naperville, Downers Grove and Darien, smashing cars, ripping roofs off homes, downing power lines, shearing off garage doors, uprooting large trees and spewing debris in the streets.

Naperville reported that at least five people were taken to Edwards Hospital, one of them in critical condition. At least 130 homes were damaged, 10 of them considered uninhabitable.

Emergency crews continued going door to door checking on residents into the early morning. As the sun rose, more and more people came out of their homes, some walking their pets as they surveyed the damage, many taking photos and videos in disbelief.

“Unbelievable,” a woman said while staring at a home missing its roof and a wall.

Generators hummed, and a tractor began clearing streets and pushing away fallen trees in Woodridge. “We have no power at all,” Woodridge Mayor Gina Cunningham said. “I’m sitting in the dark waiting to hear back about what’s going on and gathering reports.”

Many people said they were already in bed when the sirens went off. Some recalled the moment of silence before the rain and wind picked up fiercely.

One neighbor called it the “craziest 45 seconds of my life.” Several others said it sounded like a train was passing over their homes and they could feel the vibrations. “As fast as it came, it was gone,” Joseph Palacios said.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

“This doesn’t happen around here,” Palacios said. “This is something totally new and it’ll probably never happen again… It’s shocking to see the devastation, all the trees are just gone, people’s houses — you don’t see this here.”

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.”

“It’s quiet, it’s peaceful here,” her husband added. “Just to see it torn up, it’s obviously never going to look the same ever again.”

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. The entire second floor of their house was gone, and their garage was partially destroyed.

The home is in the 7800 block of Woodridge Drive, believed to be 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, 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. It’s all material, I’m still worried about the bearded dragon that’s stuck up there but we’re going to get him in the morning.”

He said he was waiting for the streets to be cleared so his aunt could get them.

“It’s been long,” Bridget Casey said as she pulled a quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Just trying to make sure that we can get everything taken care of, we have all the important stuff and waiting for the roads to be cleared enough so my sisters can come.”

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, I think we’re … 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.’ … We got lucky, it could’ve been something really seriously,” 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.

“When I see this in the morning tomorrow, we’ll deal with it when we have to,” Suchecki, 45, said.

Across the street, two cars sat untouched 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.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

“It could be worse,” said Suchecki. “It’s crazy to go through this, that’s a traumatic event.”

In Naperville, officials said they were still assessing the damage and checking on residents.

“Our first priority was making sure that the families were OK, but now we are moving on to handling the damage,” said Linda LaCloche, Naperville communications director.

”We have power outages in the area and have electrical teams checking on that. We also had some gas leaks reported, so Nicor Gas is going door to door to shut off all the gas lines.”

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.

“I couldn’t believe it. I’ve lived here for 27 years and I’ve never seen trees come down here like this. Ever,” Porter said.

Porter 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.

This is a developing story, check back for details.

Read More

In acquiring All-Star center Nikola Vucevic at the March trade deadline, the Bulls also played a serious game of chicken with a talented 2021 draft class. Now they have just a 20.3% chance to land in the top four or the pick goes to the Magic. Come Tuesday night they find out their fate.

Arturas Karnisovas wasn’t going to hide from the obvious.

In less than a year on the job, the Bulls’ executive vice president of basketball operations has already shown a level of accountability that the old regime failed to display time and time again.

That’s why he had no reservations about admitting that in the vacuum of just last season’s goals, yes, the trade with Orlando for All-Star big man Nikola Vucevic did fail.

Priority No. 1 of that deal was to end a postseason drought that is now on Year 4 and counting. It didn’t.

“The disappointment is short term, which is we assume that if you add another All-Star to your roster, usually you get better and improve your record,’’ Karnisovas said last month. “It’s a results-driven business. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.’’

There are phases in assessing that deal that was completed at the March deadline, however, and the next one is a doozy.

In acquiring Vucevic and forward Al-Farouq Aminu, the Bulls sent out Wendell Carter Jr., Otto Porter Jr., and most importantly two first-round picks – in the 2021 draft and 2023.

The details on the ’21 pick are that it’s protected if the Bulls are smiled upon by lady luck in Tuesday night’s NBA Draft Lottery and land in the top four. Something they had a 31.9% chance to do with just 10 days left in the regular season, until that lowered to 20.3% when they went out and won five meaningless games to close the year.

The change in the organizational landscape if they can retain the ’21 pick will be monumental.

Not only would that deal have landed them an All-Star to go along with Zach LaVine, but the Bulls would come out of the other side of it with the likes of a Cade Cunningham or Jalen Suggs in the mix. Both point guards with potential generational-type skillsets.

That means a one-two punch of LaVine and Vucevic to immediately build around, but also a young wave of potential dominance if Patrick Williams and Cunningham/Suggs lives up to the high ceilings that have been built around them.

And while the draft lottery hasn’t been that kind to the Bulls in quite some time, it has offered up organizational-changers in the past.

The odds of hitting No. 1 in 2008 was just 1.7%, but it happened. And then the drafting of Derrick Rose happened.

Since the 2017 rebuild, however, it’s been an organization rolling No. 7 picks, until hitting on No. 4 last summer and selecting Williams.

It would be nice for another hit-by-lightening moment, especially with the talent at the top of this ’21 draft.

Not only do the Bulls – who currently sit in the No. 8 slot – have that 20.3% chance to land in the top four, but have a 4.5% chance to land the No. 1 pick.

In most mock drafts in which teams stay where they are currently slotted, Houston would be No. 1 and would likely target Cunningham, Detroit would get No. 2 and covet center Evan Mobley, Orlando would have their own pick at No. 3 and land Jalen Green, while Oklahoma City would grab Suggs with the fourth pick.

Since the NBA reworked the lottery process two years ago to dissuade teams from intentionally tanking, however, little has gone as expected.

In 2019, New Orleans jumped from the No. 7 slot to No. 1 and hit on Zion Williamson, while last season both the Bulls and Charlotte jumped up into the top four.

But there’s the other side to all of this. An almost 80% reality that there is no first-round pick for the Bulls on July 29.

Then how is the Vucevic trade to be assessed?

“It’s very, very early to judge the trade,’’ Vucevic said recently. “Sometimes things take longer to come together.’’

Read More

The Chicago Blackhawks are not a very good hockey team. They have a lot of issues all throughout the lineup and most of them aren’t going to get fixed any time soon. They have, however, been involved in some rumors so far this offseason. For one, they have been connected to both Seth Jones and […]

Blackhawks Rumors: Officially in the Jack Eichel sweepstakes – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & More

Read More

Chicago label Parlour Tapes recently released four experimental solo cassettes from its four founders.

Cassette tapes and the avant-garde are what I call “play cousins.”…Read More

Hyunhye Seo, also known as Angela Seo, has been a member of inscrutable experimental-rock band Xiu Xiu since 2009, providing synths, piano, and vocals to flesh out their consistently beguiling, unsettling sound. On her debut solo record, Strands (Room40), Seo conjures discomfort in new ways, trading in Xiu Xiu’s outré pop grotesqueries for two 18-minute pieces, one of ambience and the other of solo piano.…Read More

The tornado appeared to start in Naperville, then cut a destructive path through Woodridge, Darien and Downers Grove.

A tornado ripped through the western suburbs late Sunday night, damaging more than a hundred homes and injuring several people, including a woman in critical condition.

The tornado touchdown was confirmed about 11:10 p.m. near Route 53 and 75th Street in Woodridge, the National Weather Service said. It also hit portions of Naperville, Downers Grove and Darien, smashing cars, ripping roofs off homes, downing power lines, shearing off garage doors, uprooting large trees and spewing debris in the streets.

Naperville reported that at least five people were taken to Edwards Hospital, one of them in critical condition. At least 130 homes were damaged, 10 of them considered uninhabitable.

Emergency crews continued going door to door checking on residents into the early morning. As the sun rose, more and more people came out of their homes, some walking their pets as they surveyed the damage, many taking photos and videos in disbelief.

“Unbelievable,” a woman said while staring at a home missing its roof and a wall.

Generators hummed, and a tractor began clearing streets and pushing away fallen trees in Woodridge. “We have no power at all,” Woodridge Mayor Gina Cunningham said. “I’m sitting in the dark waiting to hear back about what’s going on and gathering reports.”

Many people said they were already in bed when the sirens went off. Some recalled the moment of silence before the rain and wind picked up fiercely.

One neighbor called it the “craziest 45 seconds of my life.” Several others said it sounded like a train was passing over their homes and they could feel the vibrations. “As fast as it came, it was gone,” Joseph Palacios said.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

“This doesn’t happen around here,” Palacios said. “This is something totally new and it’ll probably never happen again… It’s shocking to see the devastation, all the trees are just gone, people’s houses — you don’t see this here.”

Palacios comforted his wife as she wiped tears from her eyes. “It’s hard seeing it in the daylight,” he said. “It definitely is because it’s home. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful here… Just to see it torn up, it’s obviously never going to look the same ever again.’

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. The entire second floor of their house was gone, and their garage was partially destroyed.

The home is in the 7800 block of Woodridge Drive, believed to be 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, 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. It’s all material, I’m still worried about the bearded dragon that’s stuck up there but we’re going to get him in the morning.”

He said he was waiting for the streets to be cleared so his aunt could get them.

“It’s been long,” Bridget Casey said as she pulled a quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Just trying to make sure that we can get everything taken care of, we have all the important stuff and waiting for the roads to be cleared enough so my sisters can come.”

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. They sipped wine and moonshine out of blue plastic cups and talked about the damage.

“It’s overwhelming, I think we’re … 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.’ … We got lucky, it could’ve been something really seriously,” 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.

“When I see this in the morning tomorrow, we’ll deal with it when we have to,” Suchecki, 45, said.

Across the street, two cars sat untouched 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.

Tyler LaRiviere/Sun-Times

“It could be worse,” said Suchecki. “It’s crazy to go through this, that’s a traumatic event.”

In Naperville, officials said they were still assessing the damage and checking on residents.

“Our first priority was making sure that the families were OK, but now we are moving on to handling the damage,” said Linda LaCloche, Naperville communications director.

”We have power outages in the area and have electrical teams checking on that. We also had some gas leaks reported, so Nicor Gas is going door to door to shut off all the gas lines.”

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.

“I couldn’t believe it. I’ve lived here for 27 years and I’ve never seen trees come down here like this. Ever,” Porter said.

Porter 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.

This is a developing story, check back for details.

Read More

  With one month and six days to go before the start of Chicago Bears training camp (not that anyone is counting), fans are getting more eager by the minute. This year’s training camp features plenty of excitement and hype we haven’t seen around this team in quite some time. After what started out to […]

Chicago Bears: 5 bold predictions for the roster amidst training camp – Da Windy City – Da Windy City – A Chicago Sports Site – Bears, Bulls, Cubs, White Sox, Blackhawks, Fighting Illini & More

Read More

Read More