A tornado outbreak with several destructive twisters tore through the Midwest Wednesday evening, leveling buildings and sending debris swirling high into the sky.
The storms also brought hail bigger than baseballs and damaging wind gusts of nearly 80 mph.
The regions’s threat for damaging storms came to an end Thursday morning, allowing people in its wake to start picking up the pieces the chaotic storms left behind.
A powerful tornado tore through Illinois’ Effingham County for more than 20 miles Wednesday evening, damaging buildings and lofting debris. Footage obtained by CNN shows a home completely swept off its foundation and dumped into the road.
“You hear about it all the time, but it’s real devastation,” county resident Karl Jansen said, describing how the storm tossed a large commercial van into a field more than 400 yards away. “I couldn’t even tell what it was if I didn’t know,” he said of the mangled van.
