Storm in Joliet hits hard in Marycrest neighborhood, Inwood Golf Course

Trees fell, a few on top of houses, and at least two garages were blown down in the Monday night storm that appeared to intensify in the Marycrest subdivision of Joliet.

“It literally reminded me of the movie “Twister,” Yvette Barerra said. “It sounded like a bunch of sheet metal.”

That sound may have been Barerra’s garage and her neighbor’s garage, aluminum siding structures that were ripped up in the high winds that seemed to do their worse damage in just a few areas of the city.

Marycrest on the west side of the city sustained the most damage in Joliet, Fire Chief Jeff Carey said on Tuesday. But a couple of houses in Forest Park on the east side were damaged by fallen trees, too, he said.

“We had a lot of power lines down and small fires from the power lines down,” Carey said.

The high winds also ripped up trees across the Inwood Golf Course off on west Jefferson Street.

Joliet Park District Executive Director Brad Staab said park staff was assessing the damage Tuesday before deciding what to do next. But he acknowledged it was likely that new trees would have to be planted because of the extent of the damage.

“There are a significant number of experienced trees that are down,” Staab said. “We’re going to have to do something.”

Just what hit Inwood and Marycrest has yet to been defined.

That section of Joliet is one of 29 areas that the National Weather Service is assessing for potential tonradoes in an area that spans from Rockford to northwest Indiana.

“Not all of them are necessarily going to be tornadic,” NWS meteorologist Zachary Yack said.

On Tuesday, the National Weather Service determined that an EF-1 tornado did hit Channahon, an area where power lines were blown onto Interstate 55 and shut down a section of the interstate through at least most of Tuesday.

Yack said the Marycrest area will be assessed in the coming days, but it sure did seem like a tornado, some residents said.

“It sounded like a train coming through here,” said Norma Caldwell, whose house in on Benedict Avenue. “There was a roaring, and the trees were crackling. It was horrible, and it happened so fast. It seemed like everything was falling apart.”

Fortunately for Caldwell, the wind knocked down tree limbs but did not damage her house.

Across the street, a large fallen tree limb created a large dent in the roof of a house.

Elsewhere in Marycrest, large trees were uprooted, a street sign appeared to have been bent down by the wind, and tree limbs were being cut up and gathered by residents trying to recover from the storm.

Nathaniel Crider, like Caldwell, said the damage happened very fast.

“We heard the sirens go off,” Crider said. “I heard a big crack. I heard a whooshing against my house.”

That whooshing, Crider discovered later, was the sound of a neighbor’s large pine tree falling on his house. He was cutting up the tree on Tuesday.

Bill Kreis, who lives on Webster Avenue a few doors down from Crider and next door to the Barrera’s who lost their garage, said the winds knocked a chimney off his roof and moved his 7,000-pound travel trailer in his driveway about a foot. A car cover on a Ford Mustang in his driveway was blown off and cut up in the wind as if someone had taken shears to it.

The storm did damage in other neighborhoods do, including the Springwood and College Park subdivision along Houbolt Road.