- Winds reached 200mph in Washington, Illinois, when a tornado tore through the middle of town Sunday night
- Six people are dead and dozens of homes have been leveled
|
Aerial photos of
Washington, Illinois, show the heartbreaking scale of the description
visited on the town after tornadoes touched down there Sunday night.
Eighty
one separate twisters were reported across the Midwest. The devastating
storm outbreak brought winds of up to 200mph that flattened hundreds of
homes and killed six people.
Residents
of Washington, a downstate town of 15,000, were left to pick up the
pieces Monday and begin recovering from the disaster.
Bits
of American flags and insulation from destroyed houses clung to trees
that had been stripped of most of their branches and remaining leaves by
the twister.
Devastating: This quiet residential block was utterly destroyed by the tornado that touched down Sunday night
Devastated: Entire neighborhoods of Washington, Illinois have been reduced to rubble
Heartbreaking: Only from the air can the immense
scale of the destruction in Washington, Illinois, truly be seen.
Hundreds of homes were reduced to splinters by tornadoes that brought
200mph winds
Picking up the pieces: Some
residents returned home to survey the wreckage of their homes Monday and
retrieve what they could - though some had very, very little left
Picking up the pieces: Some
residents returned home to survey the wreckage of their homes Monday and
retrieve what they could - though some had very, very little left
Police
were keeping residents from returning to the storm-hit area, where
buildings were destroyed and cars turned upside down, out of concern
that people could be injured while attempting to retrieve possessions.
Ryan
Bowers, 33, and his wife Andrea, 32, briefly returned to retrieve a
family Bible and pink baby rattle that was their 2-1/2-year-old daughter
Sydney's favorite toy.
'We're
back here just to get any idea of what everything looks like,' Ryan
Bowers said. 'We have what's important. My wife and daughter are OK.
That's all I can ask for.'
The
couple, their daughter and the family's dogs, hid in their basement
when the storm roared through Washington. They emerged to find their
neighborhood destroyed.
As they picked through the wreckage of their home, a police officer approached and told them they had to leave.
Mayor
Gary Manier said authorities were keeping evacuated residents away out
of concern that the remaining structures were dangerously unstable.
'I
know it's frustrating for people,' Manier said amid piles of rubble.
'I'd be frustrated. I'd want to be looking for pictures.'
Manier
estimated that 250 to 500 homes had been destroyed by the tornado,
rated as the second-most powerful magnitude of twister, which hit the
city east of Peoria with winds of 166 to 200 miles per hour.
Leveled: Nothing could withstand the force of
the 200mph winds that the fast-moving storms brought to Washington,
Illinois, Sunday night
Not even trees were spared the devastating
winds. This wooded grove behind a neighborhood was left utterly
destroyed by the tornado
Nothing remains of this house except the foundation and concrete steps. The entire structure was swept away by the violent storm
Force of nature: A small, pink baby bed somehow
survived the winds. It was one of the few things this family could
salvage from their home
The storm killed three people
in Massac Country, two in Washington County and one in the city of
Washington, in Tazewell County, said Patti Thompson of the Illinois
Emergency Management Agency.
Illinois State Police spokesman Dustin Pierce said about 120 people were injured in Washington.
BASEMENT SAFE HAVENS
Survivors
of the storm said they rode it out in their basements, which are common
in homes in the affected area, a fact that may have helped hold down
the death toll, officials said. In May, a monster, top-category tornado
killed 24 people in Moore, Oklahoma, a part of the United States where
basements are less common.
Nancy Rampy, 62, said she fled to her basement when she heard the storm sirens blaring on Sunday.
'It
got real calm and I knew that was bad because I've been in a tornado
before. And then I heard what sounded like 12 trains, just roaring down
the tracks, and it just wouldn't stop. It just kept coming and coming,'
Rampy said. 'I ran to the basement, sat in the basement with my
flashlight in the dark and just prayed let it be over soon.'
Rampy's house was spared.
'The
good news is the tornado warning system worked, so there wasn't a lot
of loss of life,' said U.S. Representative Aaron Schock, a Republican
whose district includes Washington. 'These people knew what was coming,
and they were smart and took cover.'
Entire square blocks were wiped out by the
twister that tore through the downstate town Sunday. The death toll thus
far stands at six
Cars and SUV were flung around like kindling by
the storm. The white sedan and the blue SUV sit in what remains of tow
garages in a subdivision
This is what remains of an apartment building.
The roof has been torn entirely off the top floor units and several
walls have collapsed
Officials and residents have not even begun to calculate the cost of the devastation
Two people, an 80-year-old man
and his 78-year-old sister, were killed in Washington County, Illinois,
about 200 miles south of Peoria, county Coroner Mark Styninger said.
Three
others were killed in Massac County, Illinois, on the Kentucky border,
where a tornado devastated several neighborhoods, emergency officials
said.
The American Red Cross has worked with emergency management officials to set up shelters and provide assistance.
In
neighboring Kentucky, the storm system damaged several homes in the
western part of the state, ripping shingles and gutters from roofs,
scattering tree limbs and taking down power lines. But no one died and
no injuries were reported, according to Kentucky Emergency Management
spokesman Buddy Rogers.
'We
literally dodged a bullet,' he said. 'When you look across the river
(into Illinois), there are places that are just wiped out. But we're in
good shape.'
The unusual
late-season storms moved dangerously fast, tracking east at 60 miles per
hour, with the bulk of the damage spanning about five hours, Thompson
said. Remnants of the storm sent rain and wind to the northeastern
United States on Monday morning.
The
storm knocked down power lines across the Midwest and power companies
reported that some 786,600 homes and businesses were without electricity
on Monday. Michigan had the largest number of outages, with Illinois,
Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, West Virginia and Pennsylvania also feeling the
storm's aftermath.
Wreckage: A tattered American flag is tangled in
a tree as the sun sets on Washington Monday night. Officials estimate
the damage at many millions of dollars
Two residents sift through the rubble of their home after returning to find nothing but splinters on Monday
This three-quarter-ton Dodge Ram pickup truck was wrapped around a tree after it collided at high speed in the storm
No comments:
Post a Comment