Walking down 192nd Place near Oakwood Avenue in Lansing Tuesday afternoon meant dodging fallen trees and roofing remnants that littered sidewalks as public works crews sawed at wreckage that swallowed up residents’ front lawns.
Deniz Sidkey said the roof flew off the home he’s owned for more than 40 years only seconds after he received a severe weather alert on his phone.
“I was in shock,” he said. “Thinking of my wife, because she was in the hallway, and I didn’t know what happened to her.”
The 62-year-old said he was put at ease when his wife screamed his name, and he helped her across the hallway that on Tuesday was littered with 150-pound chunks of their home’s chimney. Sidkey showed off his only injury, a swollen red and purple bump on his wrist where he was hit by debris.
While the couple’s two vehicles remained in place in their backyard, Sidkey jokingly asked that people let him know if they found the missing structure where they were stored.
“If you see a garage around here somewhere, it might be mine,” he said.
Across the street, Bill Simon, 62, similarly saw his roof cave in while he and his son were at home Monday. After his family spent the previous night in a hotel, they spent Tuesday morning removing all valuables from the home, including Simon’s prized guitar collection.
“It’s weird because I drove out of here last night, and it’s like the rest of the world is OK,” he said. “It’s like you’re in this bubble of disaster, and the rest of the world is going on like nothing happened.”
Simon also said the roof was torn off of his family’s home within minutes of seeing severe weather alerts.
“I looked outside the window and it was like a cyclone — it was like the Wizard of Oz,” he said. “So I grabbed my son and we started running down the stairs.”
He said he felt the home’s foundation shake and heard the windows blow out seconds after they rushed into the basement. Afterward, the house’s cement driveway was cracked and his son’s car had spun around to face the street in the family’s front yard.
The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 tornado in Lansing with peak winds near 110 mph, which appeared to lift just east of the state line in Munster.
The weather service also confirmed a tornado went through Country Club Hills, Hazel Crest, Harvey and Homewood, with the survey team finding EF-1 damage around Hazel Crest, and an EF-0 tornado in western and northwest Orland Park.
Homewood resident Rich Matula said he was in the middle of making pancakes Monday afternoon when a tree went through the roof of his garage.
“Wind and rain kept picking up, picking up, picking up,” Matula said. “I started heading downstairs, because it was getting really weird out, and then — It really wasn’t that loud, surprisingly.”
One large branch pierced straight down through the garage roof, just barely missing his car, said Matula, who lives on Cedar Avenue. His neighborhood was badly battered by Monday’s storm.
“They’re saying it was 100 miles an hour,” Matula said. He pointed out a transformer hanging precariously from a utility pole behind his house. “All the wires just snapped.”
Hazel Crest resident Daniel Richmond was in Chicago when the storm hit, but his mother was home. Their house on Orchard Ridge doesn’t have a basement, he said.
“The house started shaking,” Richmond said. “Her and the dogs, they went and got in a closet, and just, she came out once everything had stopped.”
Richmond was out with his brother and a friend Tuesday, removing a fallen branch from the house so they could cover the damage with a tarp.
More Top Picks Best Smart Curtain Openers
“We literally had a tree branch hanging inside the bathroom of the house,” Richmond said.
Richmond said he anticipates it will take weeks before Hazel Crest is cleaned up.
“With no power being had, I just think, first we have to establish, get that going,” Richmond said. “And then from there, I don’t know how long. Like, you can’t even drive up and down the street because they have downed power lines and blockages and things like that.”
In Tinley Park, officials are investigating whether the death of a 30-year-old woman found in a car that went into a pond was related to the storm. Her body was recovered at the entrance to the Odyssey subdivision on Vollmer Road.
Emergency services were called at 6:30 p.m. Monday with reports of the car going off the road into the pond, Administrator Pat Carr said. At that time, the storm had passed Tinley Park, and it was no longer raining, he said.
“We received a lot of damage throughout town, mostly trees and downed power lines,” Carr said. “We had the biggest amount of damage out at the sports dome, where that newly installed sports dome collapsed.” Cleanup is ongoing, Carr said.
Carr said this storm hit harder than the July 3 storm that closed the inaugural Country Fest and led to three water rescues of people in cars.
Tinley Park resident Debbie Gonzalez said she took shelter in her basement about 2 p.m. Monday. As of Tuesday morning, the roads around her home on Valley View Drive were still piled with fallen branches.
“I usually don’t go in the basement, sometimes I think they overreact, right?” Gonzalez said. “We went in the basement, and we came out like 20 minutes later, and this is what it looked like. I mean, all this stuff was in the middle of the street. You couldn’t even walk.”
Debbie Bolek, who also lives on Valley View Drive, said she was visiting her daughter in Frankfort Square when the storm hit. Her daughter ended up with someone else’s trampoline in her yard, she said.
Gonzalez’s hot tub cover blew off in the high winds, and her roof was damaged by hail, which fell heavily enough that it “looked like snow,” she said.
“Even, like, three hours later, it was still there on the ground,” Bolek said. “It’s 87 degrees out! How can this still be here?”
Homewood resident Cosme Rios Monday afternoon reported marble-sized hail during the bout of severe weather near his home. He posted photos on Facebook at about 2 p.m. showing a large tree that ripped out of the ground and hit his neighbor’s home on 186th Street and May Street.
ComEd Senior communication manager John Schoen said 112,000 of the 170,000 customers who remained without power Tuesday afternoon were in the south metro region, which mainly consists of the south suburbs.
Schoen said the company expects power to be restored to about 80% of those customers by noon on Wednesday, while those in harder hit areas experiencing outages until Friday. Crews were working “around the clock” to restore power as quickly as possible, he said.
“We saw trees down, we saw poles down, entire stretches of the system that pretty much had to be rebuilt,” Schoen said. “We recognize this is really inconvenient — we appreciate people’s patience as we continue to work to get them restored as quickly and as safely as we can.”
Liz Varmecky, who lives on Cedar Avenue in Homewood, said three trees fell onto her house. Varmecky, an outspoken environmental activist and co-founder of South Suburbs for Greenspace, joked about the irony of her having to buy a chainsaw to clear out the debris.
“Once it got dark and a little green, the puppies and I went down to the basement,” Varmecky said. “I heard the house start to move a bit, and then I heard the really loud bang, which was the trees coming into the house.”
She absolutely believes a tornado came through, she said.
“It sounded like it,” Varmecky said. “I’ve been in tornadoes, because I’m from Oklahoma. It sounds like a train, and you hear that. And then after the crash, then the hail started.”
Homewood resident Dan Galen said he might have to get a new chain for his chainsaw in order to completely remove the massive pine tree that toppled over onto the house he owns on Sycamore Drive, just off Dixie Highway.
“Maybe I’ll have to call in backup,” said Galen, who is a volunteer at Homewood’s Izaak Walton Forest Preserve. He pointed to where the tree’s root system had come up out of the ground attached to a huge clump of sod. “This, I don’t know what to do.”
Galen has been planning on fixing up the house to sell it, he said.
“The awning I was going to take down anyway,” he said, indicating where the tree had clipped an awning off the house. “The outside needed to be fixed up anyways, so this is kind of getting me out motivated.”
Galen was driving back to Homewood from Tinley Park when the worst of the storm hit Monday, he said. He pulled into a parking lot and weathered it in his car.
“When the wind picked up,” he said, “you could really feel it shaking like it was going to take off.”
At the intersection of Poplar Avenue and Birch Road in Homewood, a fallen tree tore a large hole in the second floor of Ed and Barb Bryzgalski’s home, exposing the upstairs bathroom to the elements.
“You could feel it,” Ed Bryzgalski said. “I thought, this must be the tornado coming through, but it was the tree falling on the house.”
The fallen tree, which was still leaning up against the front of the Bryzgalskis’ home Tuesday, blocked light from getting into the windows, Barb Bryzgalski said. With the house’s power out, they were navigating with flashlights.
“When the rain was coming down, it came in through the hole, and then we were getting dripping,” Ed Bryzgalski said. “So, actually, I drilled some more holes in the ceiling just to let the water out.”
He said he wasn’t sure how to go about removing the tree, which he said was a parkway tree, making it the village’s responsibility.
“We gotta find out pretty soon. We’d like to get buttoned up before it gets too bad with rain and such,” Ed Bryzgalski said.
The Will County Forest Preserve District reported the Plum Creek Greenway Trail at Goodenow Grove Nature Preserve was closed Tuesday afternoon and will not reopen for several days due to downed trees and damage to the trail’s 267-foot-long Big Bridge. The Scout Trail also was closed at Goodenow Grove.
More Top Picks Bark
The visitor center at the district’s Monee Reservoir was closed due to a power outage, though the preserve was open. At the Raccoon Grove Nature Preserve, access was limited access due to downed trees. The preserve’s parking lot was open Tuesday, but the trail was closed.