5 days ago
Storms hit Batavia, Illinois, leaving downed trees and power lines
Sunday's storms in Batavia left trees and power lines down, with street after street without power.
Some work has already begun, but other cleanup will take longer. One home is bearing the brunt of a fallen tree.
After the storm cleared out, the air in Batavia hummed with the sound of resilience.
"He sent me a text and he said go to your nearest Menards or Home Depot and grab a generator because it's gonna fly off all the shelves in Batavia," Ruth Boone said.
Her cleanup includes a tarp over the empty hole in her roof after winds ripped off the chimney that now lies on the curb. Parts of her tree and her neighbors' fell into the pool she planned to fill this week.
"The hail was so heavy you couldn't see across the street, and there was a noise like the wind that was just coming down and coming down and coming down for two or three minutes. He said it didn't seem like a tornado to him, it seemed more like a microburst," she said.
A few streets over, not only can the storm's wreckage be found in the front yard of a home, but hear it.
"Disbelief and a little bit of like what we do now," Kyle Lange said.
Lange came home to the damage and a group of willing volunteers.
"Most of them I've never even met to be honest with you," he said. "It's just super friendly. My son wants to be acknowledged, but yeah, it's just awesome neighbors."
The storm brought heavy rain, thunder, and handfuls of hail. But amid all the disastrous dissonance, something softer
Mike Farrell and his guitar passing the time with the power outage on his front porch.
"It was very windy, lots of hail, and the wind just came through very very hard," he said.
Thankful for the advance notice on what could be a long cleanup
"We were watching Channel 2 news, and they kept saying over and over again that the storm would hit about three o'clock, and they were dead on," he said.
Roof and tree crews came through the neighborhoods and got to work. That work will begin again when the sun comes up.
