Buildings, branches take brunt of storm

The Fox Valley spent much of Tuesday cleaning up trees downed and buildings damaged by storms that ripped through the area Monday night — and wondering when the power will be back on.

The high winds — with some gusts as 70 mph in the Aurora area — ripped through an exterior wall at the Dial Corp. soap factory in Montgomery around 7:30 p.m. Monday. No one was injured.

Some sheet metal and insulation had been torn away from Dial Corp.’s production building at 2000 Aucutt Road, causing “only cosmetic damage,” said Cindy Demers, a corporate spokesman calling from Scottsdale, Ariz.

The structure of the building was unharmed.

On Tuesday, construction workers covered the tattered wall with a plastic wrap.

“People didn’t even realize there was exterior damage until they viewed the outside of the building,” Demers said.

About 100 employees were inside the plant at the time. Many of them were on the other side of the damaged wall in the soap drying area.

Some Sandwich neighborhoods suffered substantial damage from the storm, with power and phone service out in parts of the community.

In front of the historic Dummer School at Hall and Wells streets in Sandwich a tall pine tree and a large shade tree fell victim to the storm. On East Hall Street, just west of The Open Door facility, an uprooted walnut tree pulled up part of the sidewalk in its fall.

The tree hit the porch of a home.

The winds even flipped over a small airplane parked at the Sandwich Airport.

In Aurora, a nearly 100-foot maple tree crashed into the home of Lowell Kelley in the 2200 block of Prairie street, ripping off parts of the gutter and shattering a first-floor picture window.

Kelley said Tuesday that he heard a deafening crack and dove to the floor to protect his 11-month-old son.

“I was like ‘Wow, this just fell on my house,’” he said. “I’ve never been through an experience like that before.”

“All that matters is that nobody got hurt,” said his wife, Marisa. “Everything else is replaceable.”

Tuesday afternoon, with the help of some friends, the Kelleys began chopping up the thick tree. After more than an hour, Lowell Kelly said, they still hadn’t made a dent.

At St. Charles North High School, air conditioning and ventilation units were torn off the roof and blown to the ground. Roof beams were damaged in the school, and water damage was evident in the front entrance and guidance areas. The football goalposts and scoreboards also were damaged.

A banquet was going on at the school when lightning hit the building. Firefighters evacuated the school and no one was injured.

The building will be closed until further notice, but officials expect to reopen on time for classes Aug. 27.

Parents will be contacted via telephone and e-mail messages about alternative arrangements for sports practices, photo retakes and materials pickups that had been scheduled for the campus over the next few days.

A ComEd spokesman reported that in total 473,000 Chicagoland customers lost power, including 69,000 in the southern suburbs and 34,000 in the west. About 250,000 customers had their power restored by Tuesday morning, while sporadic outages continued throughout the Fox Valley Tuesday night.

ComEd did not have statistics for individual cities, but in North Aurora alone, Fire Chief Steve Miller said 3,000 residents were without electricity.

All of the North Aurora nursing homes and senior centers had power Tuesday morning and fire crews were checking on other elderly residents as the power was restored, Miller said.

In Aurora, a circuit breaker blew and knocked out the computer system at City Hall. The impact on residents was minimal, as bill payments were recorded by hand, to be entered into the city’s computer system later.

A temporary breaker has been installed and the computer server was brought back online by the afternoon. The city’s Web site also was down for several hours.

Approximately 220 homes remained without power in Sugar Grove late Tuesday. Power may not be fully restored for three days because of the number of downed lines in the area, city officials said. The Sugar Grove Fire Station, at 25 S. Municipal Drive, will be open as a cooling center until power is restored.

In unincorporated Moecherville on Aurora’s East Side, Florence VanDuser decided to wait it out, even after being told that it could be several days before her power is returned. After more than 20 hours with no power, she was giving up on saving the food in her two freezers.

“Frozen dinners, butter... there had to be $200 to $300 worth of food,” she said. “I’ve been waiting any minute for it to come on, but it’s too late for the food.”

Power also was out Tuesday in the nearby Hometown subdivision in Aurora.

Staff writers Christine Moyer, Matt Hanley, Rowena Vergara and Dave Gathman contributed to this story