CHICAGO — The National Weather Service has confirmed that at least eight tornadoes have touched down in the Midwest over the past two days, including at least one EF-1 tornado in downtown Chicago.
Chicago and the surrounding region were hit by back-to-back severe storms on Sunday and Monday, with tornado sirens blaring across the city.
On Monday evening, the NWS issued at least 16 tornado warnings in the region, the most in a single day since April 2004. The agency estimates it will take several days to investigate the reported tornado areas and identify at least 29 possible paths.
The storms tore through the areas around O’Hare and Midway airports, sending hundreds of travelers to shelter in place. Some, like Justin Smolenski, were stuck in their planes, on the tarmac or at their gate as the control tower was evacuated after emergency reports warned of tornadoes, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
“It felt like turbulence on the ground,” Smolenski told NBC News. “I guess airplanes are built better than I thought, because I was just waiting for the thing to rip apart on the runway. My kids were terrified.”
According to ComEd, the utility, strong winds of up to 70 mph uprooted trees, overturned trucks and downed industrial power lines in Illinois. Some lines hung across the I-55 freeway, trapping cars and trucks in them and closing a section of the freeway.
In Cedar Lake, Indiana, a 44-year-old woman died after a tree fell on her home.
Power outages initially affected more than 400,000 people, and nearly 150,000 people were still without power Tuesday night. ComEd said it hopes to have much of the power restored by Wednesday, but warned some residents it could take until Friday.
Brett Schelane, of Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, said he’s never lost power in the three years he’s lived in the neighborhood. But after watching a neighbor’s car nearly get destroyed by a fallen tree during the storm Sunday night and spending two nights in a row in the basement with his children, he’s thankful the only damage to their home was a power outage.
“We’ve had some severe thunderstorms before, but nothing like this. I happened to look at my phone and saw a tornado warning, so we went down to the basement,” Schelane told NBC News. “We heard high winds and the sirens were going off, so we shut it down in the basement both nights.”
As cleanup efforts continued in the region Tuesday, a dam in Nashville, Illinois, collapsed under rising rainwater. Local officials ordered the immediate evacuation of about 300 people in the flood zone near the city’s reservoir.