Yellow police tape circled the Cedar Lake home, which is gray with a dark blue door, Tuesday morning. A large tree lay across the roof, and its branches rested on the Dodge Nitro parked outside the house.
Cedar Lake police and fire crews responded to a call at the home in the 8900 hundred block of West 141st Lane at 10 p.m. Monday. The caller stated a tree had fallen on the house and an occupant of the home had been injured, according to a police news release.
Officers found a woman, later identified as Laura Nagel, 44, inside a bedroom with fatal injuries. Nagle was pronounced deceased at 10:18 p.m. and her manner of death was ruled an accident, according to the Lake County Coroner’s Office. An autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday.
Nagel is the sole death after violent storms swept across the region and beyond late Monday night, spawning high winds, heavy rain and reports of a possible tornado in Crown Point. The storm was one of several to roll through the Midwest and greater Chicago area Monday night, leaving tens of thousands of people without power and surveying storm damage Tuesday.
At the height of the storm, NIPSCO reported around 103,000 people were without power, though that was down to 68,500 by early Tuesday afternoon, mostly in the northwest portion of the utility’s service area, including Lake County and the city of Valparaiso. The utility reported some of those outages could last for multiple days.
Josh Myers, 30, who lives across the street from the Cedar Lake home, said he was outside watching the storm and he saw the tree fall on the house. At the moment, Myers said he ran inside his house to take cover but he felt he should go help his neighbors.
“I thought it just fell on their car. Then all the police came and I didn’t want to be in their way,” Myers said.
The National Weather Service’s Chicago station said on social media that survey teams were “working hard to assess the damage” of 29 different paths of potential damage. By Tuesday afternoon, preliminary results showed that an EF-0 tornado touched down near Crown Point.
At the corner of Institute and Greenwich streets in Valparaiso’s Banta neighborhood, a crew with T&T Tree Service in Valparaiso worked to get a tree off of a home. The company’s owner, Steve Tatalovich, said his crews were handling three or four reports of trees toppling onto residences in Valparaiso.
Closer to downtown, in the 100 block of Washington Street, Steve and Pat Ingram sat on the porch of their 1912 Craftsman home, with a large maple leaning on the porch and roof. The couple took to their basement during the storm.
“I saw lightning, heard thunder, and then I heard a big boom. It was split seconds apart,” Pat Ingram said.
The Central and Banta neighborhoods near downtown were hit the hardest, said Katie Travis, public works manager for the city of Valparaiso. By Tuesday afternoon, crews had been working around the clock and would be working extended into the weekend.
Portage Mayor Austin Bonta was in his office Tuesday afternoon, watching traffic on Central Avenue, where traffic lights weren’t working. “I’m actually really impressed. People are being pretty courteous. People are I think following the rules” with four-way stop signs in place
Some city buildings were without power, and some were without internet and phones Tuesday afternoon. The fire department also assisted residents without power who are on oxygen; anyone needing the service can call the department’s non-emergency number.
The MAAC Foundation campus in Valparaiso was hit hard, said Peter Krivas, director of marketing and communications for the MAAC Foundation. The campus is a training ground for first responders.
“We had a couple of canopies in the canine area get taken out,” he said. “Most of the canine equipment, like the agility equipment and all that kind of stuff, was mostly destroyed.”
Porter County was dealing with “a lot of debris pickup, but we’re not reporting any injuries,” said Board of Commissioners President Jim Biggs, R-North, late Tuesday morning.
Lance Bella, director of Porter County’s Emergency Management Agency, requested the Indiana Department of Homeland Security set up its 211 Reporting System for Porter County residents to collect storm data. Residents can call 866-211-9966 or go to https://in211.communityos.org.
In Griffith, Traci Gleim and her daughters rode the storm out at a neighbor’s house after one of the girls — middle daughter Ghillian, 15 — spotted a kitten wandering around the 500 block of South Main Street, she said as she surveyed the trees blocking the road Tuesday morning.
“She saw it right before the storm hit. We weren’t going to just leave it out there alone, so I went out there with her, and (youngest daughter Ruthie, 9) wasn’t going to stay inside when there was a kitten, so she came out right after us,” Gleim said. “I felt a few raindrops and was like, ‘Ok,’ but then it just opened up.
In Hammond, the city’s south side and Woodmar and Hessville sections bore the brunt of the storm, Mayor Tom McDermott Jr. said Tuesday, with “lots of downed trees and blocked roads” but “thankfully, no basement backups reported.”
Scott Pelath, executive director of the Kankakee River Basin and Yellow River Basin Development Commission, was concerned about Monday’s heavy rainfall.
“During the month of July, the National Weather Service has recorded far more than the normal rainfall on the Kankakee River basin. Virtually the entire watershed has been hit with at least twice the usual amount of precipitation, with large portions of the upper watershed enduring triple and even quadruple the typical levels,” he said.
Staff reporters Alexandra Kukulka and Amy Lavalley, and freelance reporters Shelley Jones, Doug Ross, Jim Masters and Michelle L. Quinn contributed.
