Gusts of wind moving at highway speeds closed downtown Chicago streets, snapped telephone poles and yanked down power lines across northern Illinois Friday. Then, in Crestwood, the wind got greedy.
At 9:30 a.m. in the south suburb, it reached into an open ATM drawer full of money and flung $1,000 into the sky as a shocked United Armored Services guard watched the cash go, into the wind.
Chaos followed. Cars stopped and people ran out of stores to grab the money, which was flying in game-show fashion around the busy intersection of 135th Street and Cicero Avenue, Crestwood Police Chief Thomas Scully said.
Winds that never seemed to drop below 30 m.p.h. gusted into the upper 50s–including a monster 60-m.p.h. gust at Midway Airport Friday morning. It pried loose bricks, closed schools, turned downtown streets into wind tunnels and wreaked havoc with people’s hair.
To National Weather Service meteorologist Robin “Smitty” Smith, the windiest day so far in 2004 was contained on a computer screen bisected by a dense band of arrows between high- and low-pressure systems. But it was impressive, nonetheless.
Chicago’s midday low-pressure reading was “relative to some mild hurricane winds,” he said. “You could compare it to a mild hurricane.”
ComEd spokesman Trent Frager said hundreds of crews had been dealing with the wind’s not-so-minor real-world aftereffects: broken utility poles and downed electrical lines, and 115,000 customers whose power was cut off and restored before most of us got back from lunch.
For people downtown, the wind transformed the city into the set of a disaster movie.
One blast of wind lifted a stack of pink Styrofoam insulation sheets–up, up, up–12 stories beside the Sears Tower. It broke the door-size panels into chunks as big as beach towels and dinner plates, then flung them twisting and tumbling through Loop streets.
A hundred feet below, police officers with hands on their hats and streamers of yellow tape trailing behind them scrambled to block Wacker Drive in case something more substantial came down.
Within minutes, debris from a construction site at 71 S. Wacker Drive broke windows at 1 S. Wacker.
Downtown streets around the buildings were closed until the evening rush hour.
The scene was repeated at lunchtime in the 300 block of South State Street, this time below a broken window on the eighth floor of the Music Mart.
Again, no one was hurt, though many stopped to gape.
The wind took hats from those who weren’t careful and turned raincoats into parachutes. Flags snapped like gym towels, and tourists again were falsely led to believe that Chicago was nicknamed the Windy City for days like this.
“The wind is the best part,” Cristina Clotet, 22, of Barcelona, Spain. But her travelling companion, Cecilia Arias, also 22 and from Barcelona, grimaced as she tried to hold the hair out of her face.
Friday’s wind was born over prairies in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Smith said. It slipped over the Canadian border last night, urged on by weather systems straddling the Midwest.
One was a low-pressure system squatting over northern Michigan. The other, a high-pressure system over western Nebraska. The farther that people went from either, the harder the wind felt, Smith said.
It was blowing hard when Ann Haggerty, 30, of Chicago tipped herself into the wind at Peoria Street and Jackson Boulevard, fighting to feed a parking meter while the wind tried to knock her backward.
A block away, at 910 W. Van Buren St., winds worked at the seventh floor of the Kingsbaker Building, sending a hail of red bricks onto the sidewalk below, said building owner George Giannoulias.
“The upside is nobody got hurt,” he said, scanning the building for damage with contractor Dino Tsoros. “Not that bad,” Tsoros pronounced.
On the 2000 block of North Elston Avenue, where a crane and a bulldozer turned a three-story brick building into piles of rubble Friday, things were worse.
Each time the crane dipped into the building, a cloud of dust, insulation and brick chips blew onto the street, which was closed to everything but dead shrubs blowing like tumbleweeds.
By midday, crews from the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation had scrambled to 74 tree emergencies, 43 malfunctioning traffic lights, 48 damaged light poles and 25 downed streetlight wires, according to a department news release. Planes were delayed at O’Hare and Midway Airports.
In communities such as Elmhurst, Bloomingdale and Naperville, garbage collection was redefined as sanitation workers found cans blown over, their contents strewn on the street.
“We’ve had assorted debris and garbage cans blowing about the place,” said Skokie police Sgt. Mike Healy, though bigger problems included felled trees, power outages and at least one live wire dangling over a street.
“No sign of houses blowing out of the sky and landing on witches,” he concluded.
The wind may have been heavy all across the region, but it was downright harsh at the drive-up ATM outside First Midwest Bank in Crestwood.
At first glance, tellers working the bank’s drive-up thought the whoosh of cash came from a customer taking money from a pneumatic tube, but then realized it was coming from the ATM, the one with the armored truck parked next to it.
None of the money was recovered; no arrests were made, according to police.
Brian O’Meara, marketing director for the bank, said United Armored Services is contracted to service the ATM. It was the company’s money flying around, not the bank’s.
“There’s a little something extra in the air today,” said O’Meara, who found a silver lining under Friday’s clouds.
