A violent storm descended on the metropolitan area Thursday, killing one person, injuring several dozen, and leaving behind toppled walls, roofless houses, overturned sailboats, uprooted trees, and plenty of jangled nerves.
Windspeeds as high as 86 m.p.h. snapped power lines and left 210,000 Commonwealth Edison customers across northern Illinois without electricity. Edison spokesman Jeff Ruffing said 600 crews were working to restore power.
Edison hoped to have power restored to half its affected customers by Friday morning and to have all its customers back in service by the end of the day, Ruffing said.
And what was supposed to have been the busiest day in the history of the world`s busiest airport became just another messed-up, frustrating day at O`Hare International Airport, where the control tower was evacuated for 10 minutes at 3 p.m. when the storm hit.
The brunt of the storm, which brought with it a torrential downpour, fell on the western and southern suburbs, no strangers to violent storms and tornadoes.
Several funnel clouds were reported around the area, with nine tornado strikes reported in Du Page, Will and southern Cook Counties, according to the Illinois Emergency Services and Disaster Agency. High winds or possibly a tornado tore the roof off of a condominium in Palos Hills.
In west suburban Woodridge, the difference between a tornado and high winds was only a technicality.
It was there that Diana Fierce, 36, was electrocuted in her back yard, apparently when she was hit by current from a downed power line at about 7 p.m.
Fierce, of the 8100 block of Carolwood Drive, was taken to Edward Hospital in Naperville, where she was pronounced dead at 8:11 p.m., said nursing supervisor Sharon Jamalpur. Jamalpur said Fierce was married and the mother of several children.
”The family was just devastated,” Jamalpur said.
Neighbor Frank Sterioti, 65, said he believed she may have been trying to rescue the family`s dog, which was in a fenced area of the yard, when she was electrocuted after touching the metal fence. A power line had fallen in the family`s back yard and was crackling, said Sterioti, who performned cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the woman. The dog was electrocuted, he said. Pierce was the mother of four daughters, ranging in age from a toddler to a 9- or 10-year-old, he said. ”She was a very pleasant woman,” he said.
”She was very active in the schools, the Girl Scouts, she was involved in anything to do with children.”
Ten construction workers also were injured, three seriously, when a brick wall that had been finished in the morning toppled over and buried them under as much as 4 feet of rubble.
The injuries occurred at the Centrepoint of Woodridge shopping center being built on Woodward Avenue between 71st and 75th Streets in the Du Page County suburb. Woodridge Police Chief Steven List said the winds slammed into two walls shortly after 2:30 p.m., blowing some of the workers off of the 15- foot-high scaffolding.
Both walls collapsed, but only one caught the workers when it went down. The most seriously injuried were Cesar Rodriguez, 22, of Eagle Pass, Texas, who was listed in critical condition at Edward Hospital in Naperville with severe head injuries; Pedro Gutierriez, 31, of Elgin, who was in serious condition in Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood with severe arm injuries; and John Posey, 56, of Elwood, who fell 25 feet from a scaffold and was listed in serious condition at Loyola with multiple fractures.
Sandy McGinnis, 23, and her friend Cheryl Brockschmidt, 21, could see the storm racing toward the construction site from McGinnis` apartment in the Maple Lakes complex east of the site.
”It was just like a huge dust storm that came up against the apartment,” said McGinnis, whose building was not damaged. ”It was funny because just before it happened, we looked out the window and said, `Geez, those guys shouldn`t even be out there.` ”
In Chicago Heights, lightning may have started a fire in a warehouse at the Riverdale Chemical Co., 220 E. 17th St. Thick, black, chemical-scented smoke from the fire was visible from 5 miles away.
As a precaution, police evacuated several hundred residents in a square-mile area around the plant. The fire was brought under control at about 8 p.m., according to the Chicago Heights Fire Department. Dozens of people exposed to the smoke were treated and released at area hospitals, then called back for overnight observation after it was learned that they had been exposed to a potentially dangerous chemical, said a hospital spokeswoman.
Bolingbrook resident Augusta Appiah, 41, rode out the storm with her 22-month-old daughter, Denise, in the basement of their apartment building, but when she returned to the family`s third-story apartment, part of the roof was missing. No sooner had she laid the little girl in her crib and returned to the living room than the rest of the roof collapsed on her.
”All I was thinking was that we had to get out,” Appiah said, describing how she picked up her daughter and struggled through the rubble. Appiah was treated for head, neck and arm injuries at Edward Hospital.
”I can`t describe it,” she said. ”I feel so grateful to God. I`m concerned about my belongings, but I`m grateful that I`m alive. You must live before you acquire.”
Chicago`s lakefront, seemingly immune in the past to violent storms, took its share of the fury this time. John Moore, 62, had a bird`s-eye view of the storm`s havoc from his hotel room window at 11th Street and South Michigan Avenue.
”I thought it was a tornado,” he said. ”I saw one guy trying to hold chairs down and the wind was lifting him off in the air.”
Nearly 100 windows were smashed at the 1130 S. Michigan Ave. apartment building, but desperate men, not the storm, broke some of the windows. When the high winds hit, some workers on a scaffolding had to break the panes to escape inside to safety.
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Broken windows also were reported at the Sears Tower.
And the storm overturned food booths and stages at Taste of Chicago and injured 33 people. None was seriously hurt, but the Grant Park carnival of food was closed for the day. City officials said it would reopen at 11 a.m. Friday.
The gale also uprooted a 40-foot tree at 11th and Michigan and felled others, blocking traffic on Lake Shore Drive near the Field Museum of Natural History.
In Lake Michigan outside Belmont Harbor, 12 to 17 small sailboats overturned at the end of the Chicago Fireworks Junior Regatta, dunking up to 30 teenagers in the water, said Vlad I. Kobal, chairman of the race committee for Chicago Yacht Club. All were pulled from the water without injury, he said.
”With hindsight, perhaps we should have called the race off about five minutes earlier,” he said.
A better-known sporting event, the Western Open golf tournament, also was disrupted when the storm blew through the Cog Hill course in Lemont. Play was called with only half of the field having completed the first round, and a crowd of about 20,000 was evacuated without mishap. The tourney will resume at 7:30 a.m. Friday.
As usual, the area`s airports came to a near standstill as winds and rain lashed the region.
At O`Hare, officials had expected to set a record of 228,000 passengers in one day as travelers with reduced-price tickets headed for their July 4th holiday destinations. Hundreds of flights were delayed or canceled, with American Airlines reporting delays of at least two hours.
The Federal Aviation Administration imposed ”flow controls” on flights because of bad weather across much of the country.
Midway Airport on the Southwest Side also was affected, leaving Monica Hampton, a systems analyst for General Motors in Detroit, to regret her reckless driving to reach the airport by the scheduled departure time of her flight.
”I can`t believe I risked my driver`s license to get here,” she said.
”We even called from the car and they promised our flight would be on time.”
She wiled away a two-hour delay by pulling out her laptop computer and doing some work. For some, even a violent storm is no excuse for calling it a day.