Amy Borowski was hunkering down in the bottom floor of her parents’ Naperville apartment building Monday night when her mom walked in carrying a bag of food from Portillo’s.
That’s when Borowski saw the sky. She took out her phone to record what she was seeing.
In her video, which she later sent to her husband who posted it to X (formerly Twitter), flashes of lightning are seen illuminating a dark sky and what appears to be a tornado.
“Do you see this mom?” Borowski says in her video.
“What?” her mom replies.
“Do you see this? Mom, look behind you. …Look at my phone, look at that,” Borowski says.
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“Oh my god, it’s a tornado,” her mom is heard saying.
“It’s a tornado. Get inside,” Borowski replies.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Borowski said she didn’t know for certain that what she was recording was really a twister but that “it looked like one.”
“It was scary,” Borowski said.
Severe storms that swept through Illinois Monday night spurred reports of tornadoes across the Chicago metropolitan area — including Naperville and surrounding cities, according to the National Weather Service.
Zachary Yack, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Romeoville, said Tuesday that the agency was surveying 29 different paths of potential tornado damage in northern Illinois and northwest Indiana.
Near Naperville, areas the national weather service was investigating as possible tornado tracks included parts of western DuPage County between Naperville and Wheaton, north of Aurora running across Interstate 88, and spots near Romeoville and Joliet in Will County.
Yack also said the weather service was looking into a potential tornado track in south Naperville running from Lincoln Highway across Route 59 towards 95th Street.
Borowski’s parents live right off of Route 59 and North Aurora Road. She said when she saw what looked like a tornado Monday night, she was looking south towards Plainfield.
Storms seemed to come on “really fast,” Borowski said.
Borowski is originally from the Bolingbrook area but for the past 20 years has been living in Los Angeles, California, she said. She and her two children came to visit her parents in Naperville about a week ago, she said.
When she heard the unmistakable sound of tornado sirens Monday night, she “grabbed the kids and took them downstairs” from where her parents lived on a higher level and found a hallway, Borowski said. Meanwhile, her mom was out picking up some Portillo’s for dinner, Borowski said.
Despite the weather, her mother “wasn’t too fazed” by what was happening, Borowski said, but she and her family stayed downstairs until the brunt of the storms passed.
Afterwards, they shared some “lukewarm Portillo’s,” she said.
Confirming paths of potential damage as definitive tornado tracks will likely take a few days, according to Yack.
Whether or not storms wrought confirmed twisters, winds reached high speeds through DuPage and the larger Chicago metropolitan area, Yack said. Across DuPage, gusts were in the 60- to 70-miles per hour range. A maximum wind gust of 60 mph was reported at DuPage Airport in West Chicago, he said.
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In Naperville, about 20 roads were impacted by downed trees and storm debris, but there were no reports of major damage, city spokeswoman Linda LaCloche said. Public works employees were removing trees and tree branches in public areas Tuesday, and the city announced that residents will not need to use yard waste stickers between Wednesday and July 24 to help with the clean-up efforts.
High flow along the DuPage River left the Naperville Riverwalk closed, though LaCloche said the city was still in the “safe zone” as far as water flooding past riverbanks.
The east branch of the DuPage River at Bolingbrook was observed at 18.47 feet as of 1:40 p.m. Tuesday, about 1.5 feet short of reaching the minor flooding stage, according to the National Weather Service’s Office of Water Prediction.
The west branch of the DuPage River near Naperville was observed at 7.6 feet as of 1:15 p.m. Tuesday, 1.4 feet short of reaching its “action stage,” which the weather service defines as the stage of a rising stream where some sort of mitigation action is needed in preparation for possible significant hydrologic activity.
Weather service forecasts Tuesday afternoon showed water levels at both areas of the river declining.
LaCloche said that going into Monday night’s storms, city officials “had a feeling that if we hit two inches of rainfall,” the impact to DuPage River through Naperville “could be worrisome for our downtown and municipal center” but that rain totals did not end up reaching that high.
“We’re happy about that, obviously,” she said.
DuPage County generally received around 0.6 to 0.8 inches of rain from the storms, Yack said.
LaCloche said that downtown Naperville was not impacted by flooding nor was ongoing road construction in the city.