Shiva Patel joined family, friends and strangers Monday as they sifted through the wreckage of a two-story house that had been the Naperville home of his grandparents.
They were looking for anything that could be salvaged and saved from Arvind and Savita Patel’s house at 1809 Princeton Circle, which had been leveled Sunday night by a tornado with by winds in excess of 136 mph. The couple was pulled from the rubble by firefighters and miraculously survived.
The 15-year-old said he didn’t learn until Monday about what had happened to his grandparents or the home he has visited for as long as he’s been alive.
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“I’ve been coming here since I was a baby. To see it all destroyed, it hurts,” said Patel, who also lives in Naperville. “There’s a lot of great memories here and to see it gone is heartbreaking.”
His grandmother, Savita, had been listed in critical condition and in the intensive care unit at Edward Hospital in Naperville because of broken bones in her chest. She has improved since then, and is now in fair condition, a hospital spokesman said.
His grandfather’s injuries were minor, Patel said.
“It’s a miracle given what you’ve seen happened to their house,” neighbor Katie Long-Piper said.
The next-door neighbor feared the worst that night as she heard gas hissing and saw the destruction next door. But she was relieved when she saw Arvind Patel was alert as he was wheeled out on a stretcher, she said.
“They are the nicest, sweetest family in the world,” Long-Piper said. “My heart breaks that this is happening to them. My heart breaks for all my neighbors, it does, but their house is gone.”
Another neighbor, Miroslaw Sliwa, said he came out to assess the damage to his home Sunday night and discovered there was far more harm done to the house just east of his, where the couple was injured. He was able to give them some help, he said.
“(The wife) was trapped and (her husband) was wobbling,” Sliwa said. “He gave me some important papers of his like passports.”
Dennis Wenzel, a resident of Princeton Circle for 26 years, said the injured couple’s home — which is across the street from his own — took the brunt of the tornado’s hit on his street.
“It’s a miracle they survived,” Wenzel said.
Family members, friends, neighbors and strangers combed through an unrecognizable pile of debris and belongings Monday and Tuesday, gathering valuables that had survived the collapse.
Long-Piper was among those sifting through the debris of the Patels’ home to look for items of value that could be rescued.
“What is just amazing is how overwhelming the devastation is, about building back,” she said. “I’m not just talking about my house, their house, I’m talking about my neighborhood in general.”
She was one of the lucky ones. She was given the green light to return to her home Tuesday, even though damage still needs to be repaired. That’s not the case for many others in the city, where officials said Monday there were 20 uninhabitable houses and hundreds with property damage.
Patel said he was thankful so many neighbors and strangers were willing to pitch in. Among them were Naperville Central High School students who knew Long-Piper, a literacy/writing center assistant and Hawk TV faculty adviser at the school.
“Some people just asked me what had happened and they just jumped right in,” he said.
Naperville Sun reporter Suzanne Baker contributed.