The Kane County Office of Emergency Management and the U.S. National Weather Service Chicago were surveying damage Tuesday from two major storms that moved through the Elgin area Monday night.
“We have people out that are doing windshield surveys to identify where the worst damage is,” said Scott Buziecki, director of the Kane County Emergency Management Office. The data collected will be shared with the National Weather Service to “see if we had a tornado or multiple tornadoes. We’re also determining if there’s enough damage to justify a full damage assessment.”
Six National Weather Service teams are surveying damage in northern Illinois and northwest Indiana from a storm that brought with it massive lightning and winds of up to 70 miles per hour. There are 29 different paths of potential damage being examined, according to the agency’s Facebook page.
“Most of the damage right now is in Sugar Grove and North Aurora. We have some reports further north in the county, but no verification,” said Buziecki, who’s been with the county since October. “It all seems to be cosmetic, but there could be some exceptions to that.”
The data his office collects will help determine if a tornado or straight winds caused the damage.
The Office of Emergency Management is activated when a severe thunderstorm or tornado warning is issued, Buziecki said. The team was in the emergency operations center when a wall of storms came through Sunday night, triggering an F0 tornado in Elburn, he said.
Staff and volunteers were out until 3 a.m. early Monday, he said, and returned again Monday night for another line of storms.
Buziecki said his five staff members and 57 volunteers joined him about 6 p.m. Monday to monitor the weather and stay in contact with the weather service, which provided briefs every 30 minutes. All the information is passed along to the public and to local fire departments, he said, while Kane County Sheriff’s Office does the same for local police departments, he said.
Sixteen tornado warnings were announced Monday night throughout the suburbs and the Chicago area. In Elgin, tornado sirens were activated about 8:45 p.m., alerting people to take cover, but ultimately the city dodged the worst of the storm.
No major damage was reported, Assistant City Manager Karina Nava said.
About 450 ComEd customers without power in the city and there were 5,189 active outages in the entire Chicago area as of Tuesday afternoon, according to ComEd.
South Elgin had a downed power line on Walnut and Spring streets that caused the road to be closed Tuesday morning, village spokesman Craig Pierce said.
“We were able to avoid significant damage,” Pierce said. The biggest challenge will be cleaning up the debris from the two days of storms, he said.
Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
