An employee for the city of Sycamore Public Works Department removes an uprooted tree on the corner of Home and South Main streets in Sycamore on Tuesday morning following Monday night’s heavy storms. KATE WEBER CARLSON | kcarlson@daily-chronicle.com
As Steven Wardlow's family headed for the basement Monday night, Wardlow stood at the front windows watching the wind whip around the family's Sycamore neighborhood. Then he watched a tree fall right onto his 1998 Ford Ranger.
“I said, ‘We have insurance on the car, right? I just watched a tree fall on it,'” he said Tuesday as his 12-year-old son, Anthony Deutsch, took photos of the damage.
Trees and utility poles fell throughout the county Monday night as a severe storm blew through the area with winds of 60 to 80 mph, Northern Illinois University meteorologist Gilbert Sebenste said. DeKalb received about an inch of rain in less than an hour, while Genoa received nearly 2 inches. The storm started near the Illinois-Iowa state line and blew all the way into Ohio, he said, spinning off some tornadoes along the way.
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE Images of the storm's aftermath
A cloud rotation spotted over Kirkland, however, was not a tornado.
“That has been officially downplayed as a microburst,” Sebenste said.
Despite the amount of property damage, no major damages or injuries were reported to the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, Sheriff Roger Scott said. The department handled 220 calls for service between 7-11 p.m., mostly for power outages, downed trees and wind damage, he said.
The storm knocked out power to more than 200,000 ComEd customers, 27,000 in DeKalb County, ComEd spokesman Paul Callighan said Tuesday. By 10:30 p.m, 1,500 customers remained without power. Callighan said it could be several days before power is fully restored.
“We know we're looking at a multiday restoration here. As we get big areas cleaned up, we're finding so many problems with individual customers, and it's going to take time to get crews to each spot and get it fixed,” he said. “We're asking for people's patience on that. We're working around the clock until we get everybody on.”
The largest areas with extended outages were near Shabbona, Waterman and the south county line near Earlville, Callighan said. Isolated areas of DeKalb and Sycamore also remained without power Tuesday afternoon. Pleasant Street resident John Salihoglu said his power was out for about 12 hours between Monday night and Tuesday morning, and he was frustrated when he called ComEd to report the outage.
“ComEd did not know that 22 homes between Peace Road and the airport on Pleasant Street did not have power. They have continuously said Pleasant Street was ‘restored, restored, restored,'” he said.
Callighan said there were reported outages in Salihoglu's area, but couldn't confirm if there was a mix-up in getting the power back on.
“Initially if someone is reporting an outage and we don't have history on it, people will get a message saying we don't have information on an outage in that area,” he said. “That actually is one of the reasons we encourage people to call in their own outage even if other people have outages around them.”
The area between Waterman and Sandwich sustained the worst damage in the county, Sebenste said, though the swath between Routes 72 and 64 was also heavily damaged.
“Sycamore was hard hit,” he said. “The west side of the city looks like a war zone; there are tree branches down all over the place.”
Sycamore Public Works Director Fred Busse said city crews planned to spend all day Tuesday and probably part of Wednesday just clearing blocked streets in the city. DeKalb Public Works employees are also working to clean up downed trees, assistant public works director Mark Espy said.
“We had over 50 trees that were either damaged or ... completely down, so it will take a few days to get the lists compiled and do a citywide sweep to clean it all,” he said Tuesday. The city is running two chipper trucks to handle the downed limbs, he said.
Espy asked that residents help with their own properties if they are able, hauling limbs to landscape waste sites or bundling them for Waste Management.
“People should not solely rely on the city to pick up everything. It will make it a faster process if anyone who can help does so,” he said.
Daily Chronicle staff members Benji Feldheim, Elena Grimm, Dana Herra and Kate Weber Carlson contributed to this report.
Local brush pickup
•In Sycamore, residents are asked to drag downed tree limbs to the curb, where city crews will pick them up throughout the week and possibly early next week.
•In DeKalb, residents are asked to cut branches three inches or less in diameter into four-foot or shorter lengths, bundle them with twine, and leave them on the parkway for pickup on their regular waste removal day. Bundles should not weigh more than 50 pounds.
•DeKalb residents can also dispose of branches at one of the city's three landscape waste collection sites, on Dresser Road, South Seventh Street, or the old feed mill site off North Seventh and Oak streets.
