CHICAGO — National Weather Service teams were surveying storm damage Thursday in the Chicago area and northeast Illinois, where fierce winds from tornadoes ripped roofs from buildings, downed trees and sent residents scrambling for safety as sirens sounded.
Four teams from the weather service headed out Thursday morning to inspect storm damage reported Wednesday across numerous areas of the Chicago metropolitan area and points farther west to determine if tornadoes caused that damage, said Zachary Yack, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Chicago area office.
As of Thursday afternoon, the weather service confirmed at least seven low-grade tornadoes, including one that touched down in the Cicero area, near O’Hare International Airport. The twister sent passengers dashing for shelter at the airport and disrupted hundreds of flights, but no injuries were reported.
Teams continue to examine damage, the weather service’s Chicago-area office said on Twitter.
Ty Carr, a resident of the Skyline Motel in McCook, Illinois, said a tornado tore off its roof.
“Just chaos,” Carr said, cradling a toddler as he spoke to reporters. “It was really fast, and the noises and the crackling and the wind — it was just something I’ve never seen or been through, you know?”
Rajan Patel, whose family owns the motel, said his family came to the Chicago area in the 1990s with nothing, and now their motel is severely damaged.
“The entire place is ruined,” Patel said. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know how to recover anything. I don’t know.”
The weather service posted a map on social media highlighting nine yellow-shaded areas, including the Cicero area, where there were either reports of storm damage or indications from radar of possible tornadoes, Yack said. The teams will determine if tornadoes hit those areas.
The weather service said the suspected tornadoes were spawned by rotating thunderstorms known as supercells. Meteorologist Victor Gensini estimated that most of the tornadoes on Wednesday “were rather short-lived and rather weak.”
Morning rainfall and cloud cover dampened the amount of instability that could build up in the atmosphere, and the storm system was vertically shorter — and less deadly — than a typical tornado, said Gensini, who is a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University.
