On wet, windy spring afternoons, the residents of the Imperial Mobile Homes Park in southwest suburban Shorewood collect their mail from the park’s centralized bank of post office boxes with wary eyes on the sky.
“I hate springtime,” said Ethel Shiffer, who has lived for the past 22 years in the mobile home park. “We don’t do anything special if the weather gets bad. We just go inside and hope it will be over as soon as possible.”
This is the kind of week that Shiffer, her neighbors and others in the southwest suburbs have come to dread: Dark skies, heavy rain, high winds and, most distressingly, tornado warnings and funnel cloud sightings.
Earlier this week, funnel clouds were sighted above Romeoville, Lemont, Lockport, and Shorewood and several other towns. There were no confirmed touch-downs, but the storm put a scare into Imperial Mobile Homes residents.
That’s because the mobile home park is in the center of what has become known as the Chicago area’s “tornado alley.”
The area has acquired that moniker, an unpopular one to some of the area’s residents, because two tornadoes apiece have landed on Plainfield and Lemont during the past 20 years.
“We don’t call it tornado alley,” said Plainfield Village President Mary Latta, who bristles when the words Plainfield and “tornado alley” are used in the same sentence. “We call it home.”
Jim Allsopp, meteorologist for the National Weather Service station based in Romeoville, said he doesn’t like to use that term to describe the southwest suburbs.
“Generally, that term is only used for very large areas like East Texas or Oklahoma,” he said.
Nevertheless, the region seems to get more than its fair share of twisters.
Although there is no widely accepted scientific explanation for violent storms southwest of Chicago, Allsopp said one theory is that the cold air from the north and warm air from the south clash there after getting pushed farther southwest by the lake effect.
“But we don’t know enough about it to really be sure,” he said. But, there is a new weapon against the weather-a state-of-the-art Doppler radar tornado warning system in Romeoville. The Doppler system can triple the length of warning times because it allows meteorologists to measure tornado-producing wind patterns before tornadoes actually form.
Another Doppler system is being placed on a water tower in Plainfield by WBBM-Ch. 2 for the station’s own weather-monitoring effort.
Despite the area’s Wizard of Oz reputation, most say the weather patterns do not discourage people from moving in.
“I think tornadoes are the last thing on people’s minds when they’re looking for homes,” Allsopp said.
That is Latta’s point. Any threat posed by tornadoes hasn’t discouraged the population boom in the southwest suburban area, where some say the biggest tornado to hit the area is not the weather, but the swarming mass of people descending on their formerly sleepy towns. In Plainfield, nine subdivisions are under construction.
“Controlling growth is our biggest problem,” said Latta, who said most of the residents stayed and rebuilt after the deadly August 1990 twister that claimed 29 lives.
And people continue to find that the area is a good place to call home.
“We moved into Lemont a year after the (1991) tornado hit,” said Janet Leadley, who lives with her husband and two toddlers in the McCarthy Park area that sustained some damage in the Lemont twister that was responsible for millions of dollars in property damage, but no deaths.
“We really liked the small-town atmosphere,” Leadley said. “We were initially concerned, but then we thought there probably was just as good of a chance of a tornado hitting us in Willow Springs, where we moved from. And I guess we thought it probably won’t hit the same spot twice.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Just ask Lee Daughters. Daughters’ home in Plainfield was leveled twice by tornadoes-in 1984 and 1990-and damaged by high winds in between.
Then there’s Ed O’Donnell.
He lost his Plainfield home in the August 1990 tornado. The next March, only a few weeks after O’Donnell, his wife and two daughters moved back into their rebuilt Plainfield home, O’Donnell was laid off because his employer, the Powell Duffryn anti-freeze plant in Lemont, was hit by the 1991 twister.
“It felt like I was a marked man and it was chasing me or something,” O’Donnell said. “Even my brother who lives up north told me to stay down there. It was really weird. But after the second tornado I started playing the lottery. I figured if I could get hit by two tornadoes in seven months, hitting six numbers should be a snap. But, of course, I didn’t win.”
O’Donnell said he is fairly confident his family is safe since the house has a basement. However, he admitted that heavy storms make him nervous and that, since the tornadoes, his family has slept in the basement on several occasions, including one period of bad weather when they slept there for three consecutive nights.
However, there are other Plainfield residents whose homes were destroyed yet who have opted to stay and rebuild even without the comfort of a basement.
“We have a crawl space,” said Sandra Myers, who added that a basement was not possible because of her home’s close proximity to the Du Page River.
“I wanted to move, but my husband is from Plainfield and he wanted to stay here because the garage was still standing and that’s where all his tools are,” she said.
In August 1990, Myers and her daughter Katie, then 2, were home when the sky went green and the high winds ripped through their house. Although others in the neighborhood-including a driver on a nearby bridge and a newspaper boy on his route-were killed, Myers and Katie managed to survive because Face, the family dog, crashed through the sliding-glass patio doors, herded them into the bathroom and crawled on top of them, she said.
Now, although the family’s one-story cottage has been transformed into a two-story structure, Myers still looks out across the street at the crumbling concrete foundations that once were home to her neighbors.
“The city wouldn’t let them rebuild because that’s on a flood plain,” she said, nodding to the empty lots. “So now the state is buying up all the land and will turn it over to the city for a park. Because we’re so close to the high school-down the block-that means all the kids are going to be hanging out here. And that’s when I’m really going to want to move. In a way I think that will be worse than the tornado.”
