Tim Pinson and his wife, Karen, returned to their home in Kankakee County, Illinois, on Wednesday morning to see if they could salvage anything after a tornado the night before tore through their property.
The storm ripped the front door and several windows straight off their house, along with part of their roof. They had taken cover in a pantry closet, just off the attached garage, which was now gone. Pinson said it felt like the entire house had lifted and dropped.
“We didn’t think we’d make it through,” he said.
Homeowners and officials in Illinois and Indiana were assessing the fallout Wednesday after a storm that spawned as many as a dozen tornadoes in the Midwest and South killed at least two people and shredded many properties. At least four tornadoes ripped through Illinois and northwestern Indiana, the National Weather Service estimated Wednesday.
Officials from Kankakee County, on the eastern border of Illinois around 60 miles south of Chicago, added in a Wednesday morning news conference that nine people had reported minor injuries. Roughly 35 miles east in Newton County, Indiana, where the damage in the state might have been the worst, an elderly couple were found dead in their home, and more people had reported injuries, officials said.
Indiana officials said they were conducting search and rescue operations Wednesday morning.
Sgt. Glen Fifield, a public information officer for the Indiana State Police, said at a news conference that parts of the state had been “decimated” by the tornado.
“This was a long, slow progressing tornado storm that wreaked havoc in our area,” he said.
The storm system Tuesday, which included strong wind gusts and hail in some areas, affected a vast swath of the central United States. In Kankakee, Illinois, the county seat, one hailstone had a diameter of 6 inches, which is likely to be a state record, according to the Weather Service. One part of the storm system stretched across Texas and Oklahoma, and another part over areas of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.
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