Martin Dean walked through the parking lot and shined his small flashlight inside the jagged hole blown into his car’s window. Behind him, long white pillars that had been ripped off of an apartment building lay strewn across a pile of debris, the building’s roof among the wreckage.
It had just been a few hours since a tornado tore through Merrillville. The northwest Indiana town was one of multiple areas outside Chicago hit by tornadoes Thursday night, which came at the tail end of a two-day bout of severe weather that swept through the Midwest.
Weather officials planned to conduct storm surveys through the day Friday to gauge the extent of damage and strength of probable tornadoes, but the debris path through Merrillville indicates that a tornado likely swept through in and around the town, according to Kevin Doom, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chicago. Damage extends west of Merrillville towards St. John and northeast of the town by Hobart, Doom said early Friday morning.
Weather officials expect to have further details on how many tornadoes impacted Illinois and northwestern Indiana later Friday. Other likely tornadoes hit Streator and Dwight in north-central Illinois, as well as far southern Lake County in Indiana, Doom said.
Following days of repeated storms, clear skies are in the Friday forecast, offering people a chance to ascertain the full extent of the weather’s fallout.
On Wednesday alone, weather officials received more than a dozen reports of tornadoes across northern Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. The storms knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers and caused more than a thousand flight delays or cancellations at Chicago airports.
On Thursday, the storm clouds set in again. Weather officials issued a flurry of alerts for flooding, thunderstorms, high winds and tornadoes through the way. By early evening, the White Sox had canceled their game against the Atlanta Braves. A Mumford & Sons concert at Wrigley Field was delayed by hours.
Dean was getting off work when he got the alert that a storm was coming on his phone for Lake County. The 35-year-old man, who is from Chicago’s South Side, visits Merrillville weekly for his job as an independent contractor and happened to be in town Thursday.
As he was about to get in the shower at his friend’s apartment, where he was staying, he heard rumbling. When he looked out the window, Dean saw debris “flying everywhere.”
“I heard everything fall,” he said. He didn’t know what time it was. When the tornado moved though, he lost track.
By nearly 11 p.m. Thursday night, Dean began surveying the damage outside for himself. Plastic panels and tree branches littered parking spaces. A car’s back windshield gaped open, the glass long gone. A power line hung over the roof of Dean’s truck.
The power had been out for hours by then, Dean said. As he flashed his light around the dark, trying to get a gauge of what happened, Dean said, “This is terrible — it’s going to take a couple days to clean this up.”
“Everybody gotta deal with the aftermath,” he said. He had work again early Friday morning. He wasn’t sure where he was going to stay overnight.
Still, he was glad to hear that people were safe. “It’d be a little chaotic,” he said, “but it’ll be alright.”
As the sun started to rise early Friday morning, Maria Williams stood outside of her house in blue scrubs. Her front lawn was scattered with broken wood and foam insulation, while a large tree torn out from its roots rested in the grass. The roof of her house had been stripped down to reveal the wooden frame underneath.
“Four of my five kids have grown up in this house,” Williams said, her eyes pooling with tears. “So (I’m) just trying to figure out what it’s gonna look like again. If I can even rebuild it.”
Williams, who works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner in Chicago, was about to start her shift for the night Thursday when her daughter Kari called.
“She says, ‘Mom, I think a tornado hit our house,’” Williams remembered.
Kari Williams didn’t realize what had happened at first, the 20-year-old said. Not until she heard the wind. She and her 12-year-old brother were watching Netflix, and they didn’t know that storms were poised to sweep through Merrillville.
“Both me and my brother got blown back,” Kari Williams said. They tried to go down to their basement but there were cracks in the ceiling, so they fled upstairs and stayed with a neighbor for the night.
After she got the call from her daughter, Williams didn’t think about the long drive home or her pending shift — all she thought about was getting back. It was dark when she arrived, and they had no power, she said. She couldn’t make out just how hard they’d been hit.
In the morning though, the loss set in.
“I don’t even know what to say. Words can’t even,” she faltered.
“I worked so hard for the little bit I do … and it’s just, it’s just gone,” she said.
The Associated Press contributed.
