Powerful storms carve a trail of damage through the Midwest

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Aaron Rigsby reports from Jacksonville, Illinois, where a tornado has caused extensive damage to the area.

Transcript

00:00We've been tracking the ongoing setup here into Illinois. Here is storm chaser Aaron Rigsby

00:05joining us live from Jacksonville, Illinois. Aaron? Yeah, good evening guys. So this is the

00:11site where that tornado unfortunately did do some damage in the town of Jacksonville. Now I will say

00:16if there's any good news, I will say that this could have been a whole lot worse. It appears

00:20that this tornado was more of what we call a multi-vortex tornado. So instead of one centralized

00:25circulation kind of sitting down and doing widespread damage like we see with a lot of

00:29the tornadoes that we cover. This one has been very sporadic where you can see that some of those

00:34vortices that were likely dancing around a bigger circulation would hit one building lift and then

00:39miss the other and then sit back down and then hit the building next to it. Now the bad news is is that

00:44just off frame here is one of their main power grids and it did sustain damage and pretty much

00:50the entire town is without power currently. There are a few exceptions a little bit closer on the south

00:55side of town just off of 72 where they do have power and that's when everyone has been flooding

01:00to refuel their vehicles because it's the only two gas stations that are open with power at this

01:05current time. Now I don't have any estimated time on when they're expecting the power to be back on

01:10but the crews are just off frame here hard at work getting those power lines back up and those new

01:14poles installed to get these folks out of the dark tonight. Now we're showing some of the drone

01:19videography you shot here. Kind of interesting to see what appeared to be insulation kind of just

01:24stuck in the fencing here. Baseball fields damaged as well. What kinds of structures did you find

01:31that damaged or destroyed? Yeah so it looks like one of the structures that took an exceptionally

01:37bad hit by likely one of those vortices that I was talking about was a little bar and restaurant

01:42that sits just off of the baseball field a little bit southwest of there. That one there was a big hole

01:49cut right through one of the buildings through there with a large section of the roof that had

01:53been completely displaced and that's where a lot of the insulation has come from. Now there is a

01:57building right behind me that is hosting a lot of looks like either electrical vehicles or some kind

02:03of work vehicles. Their entire roof is missing and this damage behind me is actually from where the

02:09roof of this building was torn off thrown into the trees with the insulation and some of that was even

02:14carried into the nearby neighborhood and the houses across the street from it took some damage

02:19from that flying debris. There's several broken windows multiple trees have been knocked down

02:23here and some of that debris has continued to have been scattered across this roadway here with tons

02:27of insulation that almost looks like snow just scattered anywhere from the fence line all the way

02:32across the street and into the nearby buildings. So that's what's so unique about these type of

02:36tornadoes. This could have been a whole lot worse if this would have been one whole circulation

02:39that sat down and went through town. We would have been talking about very different results here.

02:44Now most of the damage I'm no expert we got to wait for them to do the damage surveys.

02:47I would say that a lot of this is probably in the EF1 category maybe some spots of very low end EF2

02:54but we're going to have to wait a little bit later in the week to find out those final results

02:57of what this tornado will officially be rated. All right Aaron Rigsby reporting for us live from

03:04Jacksonville in Illinois. We'll check in with you coming up because yeah we've had some pretty

03:08significant damage there across that community and that tree that's behind Aaron one of the indicators

03:13whenever it comes to the strength of a tornado can actually be with how wide in diameter that tree

03:18was and if the tree was snapped or if it was uprooted. So those are going to be the things that the

03:23National Weather Service looks at whenever it comes to being able to determine the strength of

03:27the winds that that tornado actually produced.

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