Cleanup Underway After Storms Bring Flooding, Tornado
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Severe weather left its mark on the Chicago area Friday night, from flooding to a tornado that touched down in southwest suburban Frankfort, and efforts to clean up and recuperate from the damage continued Saturday morning.
Strong rains and even stronger winds caught the attention of neighbors Friday night. The storms scattered debris, and cut off power to homes.
In Frankfort, several fences were bent by the force of the winds, and the debris tossed through the air.
Portions of roofs were ripped off, and some trees were snapped and toppled over. A 55-foot television antenna tower was knocked down when a large tree snapped in half.
The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado was responsible for some of the damage. The twister touched down near Frankfort and Monee around 4:45 p.m.
Green Gardens Golf courses lost more than a few valuable trees in the storm and some residents of the Golfview Estates subdivision lost more than that.
The Tuller family almost cried after their 17-year-old blue spruce was knocked down in the storm.
They were hosting a friend from Florida when they felt the power of the storm.
"It seemed like it gusted so bad, and then I said to my friend, 'In the basement now,' and away we went," Linda Tuller said.
Sandra Valentine said they weren't in the basement very long before they heard a sucking noise, and she could feel heavy pressure on her ears.
"It's something like I never felt before," she said.
The storm scattered roof shingles across the yard, tossed about lawn furniture, knocked over a decorative fence, and left a heavy metal fence around the swimming pool bent at a severe angle.
"It was torrential downpour, and then then the wind was just unreal. I mean, everything was blowing by. I could hear things in the back yard blowing away, and then probably 30 seconds it was over," Dennis Tuller said.
Valentine said she's ready to go back to Florida after all that.
"We only have hurricanes there," she joked.
Luckily, no one was injured in the storm.
Saturday morning, ComEd said about 6,300 customers were without power as a result of the storms. It was unclear when power would be restored.
A map of outages showed most of the damage clusters in Will and Cook Counties.
Meantime, flooded streets left drivers stranded from the northern suburbs to the southern suburbs.
In LakeCounty, firefighters helped rescue several people stranded in their cars.
Police shut down parts of Route 41 near Route 176 in Lake Bluff, after torrential downpours left pools of ankle-deep water on the road. At least six cars got stuck under a viaduct in that area, making it a busy night for rescue workers.
"A very, very nice person offered to have us stay in her car, and was a real Good Samaritan, and we're grateful for that, because it would have been a colder, wetter night," one woman said.
Lake County Sheriff's police kept those closures in place for hours as they waited for viaducts to drain.
