No one would ever dare call Chicagoans weather wimps, but Thursday was a day for nervous sky-watching as an otherwise sultry afternoon was spoiled by hard winds and forecasts of a monster storm bearing down on the region.
Nature being fickle, those predictions became a little less clear by the evening. But vicious weather, fueled by a barometric roller coaster more fitting of a winter blizzard than June, still was expected overnight.
“Instead of throwing gas on a fire, it’s like having a huge gas tanker drive into a fire,” said Geno Izzi, of the National Weather Service office in Romeoville. “The situation is potentially more explosive.”
Early predictions — later scaled back — of winds faster than a Bobby Jenks fastball put construction workers on edge, sent homeowners scurrying to tie down patio furniture, knocked out power in some places and ruined what otherwise should have been a glorious day for sailing on Lake Michigan.
“If you look out there now, you don’t even see the tour boats going out,” Rich Munson, the controller for the Chicago Park District’s nine marinas, said Thursday afternoon.
What was a scary possibility in the Chicago area was a reality farther west. Several tornadoes touched down in Iowa and western Wisconsin, where softball-sized hail also was reported, classes were canceled and part of the Bear Paw Resort near Langlade, Wis., was destroyed.
In Chicago, city officials reported by late afternoon that the winds had knocked down hundreds of tree limbs and wrecked dozens of traffic lights.
Construction workers continued projects in the city, often standing several stories up on the skeletons of buildings as the wind howled around them.
“It’s starting to pick up,” said Mike Kerr, the general foreman for the new media and retail complex going up at Block 37 in the Loop. The work will stop if the winds get faster than 35 mph, said Kerr, 50. Tower crane operators call it quits when they can’t maintain control of the equipment.
Conor O’Keeffe, the general manager at the Emerald Loop Bar and Grill, 216 N. Wabash Ave., said one of his customers had a close call sitting outside at a table with a large umbrella.
The customer’s plate was knocked to the ground by the wind, O’Keeffe said. Fortunately he was finished with his meal.
“The whole table tipped over, but it was the umbrella’s fault,” O’Keeffe said. The customer and another diner “were very cool about it.”
Tom Skilling, chief meteorologist at WGN-TV, said different computer models were giving varied predictions of the path and the intensity of the storms. “We’ve got models that suggest areas of Armageddon and others that suggest much less,” he said.
But Skilling said the storm still packed “explosive” potential as it headed toward the city.
“We’re going to get a vicious breed of weather,” he said.
