A Little Excitement

This is a picture of the tornado as it cut through the neighborhood just to the north and west of my sister, before it got to her neighborhood. You can see how wide it is. This was a big'un. Luckily, this part of Monee is rural and largely undeveloped. Even the neighborhoods hardly qualify as actual neighborhoods, but are more like a handful of houses sprinkled in the fields.

A few seconds after this picture was taken, my sister looked out her front room window and lost her mind. She called me on her cell and screamed pretty incoherently. I heard lots of expletives plus the word tornado. I kept asking her, where are you, where are you. The answer, finally: standing by my living room window watching it.

We're lucky Darwin was on vacation last night.

I persuaded her to open the south-facing windows and go into the basement with the dog. That took some doing. Then I was about to suggest she crawl under the pool table -- that damn thing has got to be sturdy, right? plus, heavy -- because I had the news on by then and could see that the storm cell was still hovering over her neighborhood. You never know, when it's that big and powerful, whether it might not spawn some sista twistas.

But before I could suggest the pool table thing, she told me she was back upstairs and the power was out. She said she saw one of her neighbors in the street and wanted to go talk to him and try to call and check up on the kids. I muttered a lot about safety, but she went outside anyway. The cell was dumping a lot of water on them -- like, insane amounts of water, they were almost instantly flooded -- but as near as she could tell while standing in the middle of the monsoon, there was no damage to her house.












This is the gas station on the corner of my sister's neighborhood. This picture shows the tornado actually passing by her house. She and her family are safe and unharmed. The neighborhood sustained some big damage. You can see from the color of the tornado -- it's pretty dark -- that it has been on the ground and picking up dirt and lumber and stray mini-vans.

After this point, it picked up its toes and skipped across the suburbs toward the lake. This appears to be the point where it was on the ground longest -- this stretch between 45 and Cicero along Monee-Manhattan road.