Blustery winds and a few flakes of snow slapped the Chicago area Thursday with a sneak preview of winter.
The previously coatless grimaced as they fought walls of wind downtown, wrapping scarves tightly around their heads and marking the air with white vapors.
It seemed too early for an official windchill reading, but there it was: about 12 degrees at 6 p.m.
With gusts in some areas reaching above 50 m.p.h., the winds toppled trees and power lines and forced the collapse of a brick wall in Buffalo Grove.
Temperatures hovered in the mid-30s for most of the day. There were snowflakes at O’Hare, the first of the season.
Coats, hats, gloves and boots flew off the racks. “It’s truly a sign of the cold weather,” said Andrea Schwartz, spokeswoman for Marshall Field’s.
After riding a weather roller coaster that took them from the mid-60s Wednesday to bitterly brisk figures 24 hours later, some Chicagoans reacted with resignation, others with defiance.
Pulling his suit coat tight around him, Rodrigo Merheb danced from foot to foot as he waited for a bus Thursday evening.
“This weather is bad news for me. I hate it,” he said, his face red from the cold.
But he won’t pull out his winter coat yet. “Not until it goes below zero and stays,” he said.
The weather caused more than shopping trips and attitude changes.
The winds knocked down a 40-by-40-foot section of a brick wall at Congregation Beth Am in Buffalo Grove about 1:30 p.m. Thursday.
“About 15 staff members were inside the building and they heard a long crash,” congregation president Richard Kushner said. No one was injured. The falling bricks heavily damaged four cars in the parking lot next to the temple, said Deputy Chief Pete Ciecko of the Buffalo Grove Fire Department.
About 20,000 homes were without power in the Chicago area Thursday evening, a Commonwealth Edison spokeswoman said. ComEd dispatched hundreds of crews to respond to reports of downed power lines and problems caused by tree limbs blown onto the lines.
By early evening, Chicago’s 311 city services center had fielded 320 calls for downed branches, split trees and a couple of uprooted trees, director Ted O’Keefe said. “With the kind of winds we had, that’s just a part of life,” he said.
The forecast for Friday held hope for a reprieve. With the strong low-pressure system moving out of the area, the National Weather Service forecast temperatures in the mid-40s, winds about 20 to 30 m.p.h. and mostly cloudy skies.
