Tornado Rips Through Wisconsin Town, Injuring 17

A tornado that sounded like a “steady locomotive” ripped through this small community, injuring at least 17 people and leaving hundreds homeless.

Probably half of Oakfield was leveled by the twister Thursday evening, leaving an area that looked like a “bombed-out town,” Fond du Lac County Executive Allen Buechel said.

“There are dozens of homes down . . . a lot of damage,” he said.

The village, 50 miles northwest of Milwaukee, has about 1,000 residents.

Six people were hospitalized, but the nature of their injuries was not immediately available. Eleven others were treated and released.

The twister also tore through a canning factory and a school.

The tornado was part of a severe weather system in the Midwest that also dumped record rain on Illinois. The system had moved out of the Wisconsin area Friday and the forecast called for milder weather with partly cloudy skies.

In the tornado’s aftermath, residents walked up and down streets scattered with tree trunks, pieces of glass and sheets of metal.

Standing in front of what used to be his house, Tim Shady said he heard the tornado approaching “like a loud, steady locomotive.”

He and his family went to the basement and took refuge under a pool table. Debris shot through the windows and landed around them, he said.

“My boy was under the pool table in the basement, saying, ‘Please, God, take it away,’ ” Shady said.

In Illinois, the 16.91 inches of rain that fell in Aurora in a 24-hour period that ended Thursday broke the state record of 16.54 inches, set in East St. Louis in 1957.

Gov. Jim Edgar declared 13 counties to be state disaster areas and called out three units of the Illinois National Guard to help authorities cope with the high water that sent residents scurrying for higher ground.

In Grundy County, flood waters began to recede Friday morning.

In the western Chicago suburb of Naperville, about 300 homes were flooded and 200 vehicles submerged. Damage was estimated at $1.7 million.

“I would not be surprised if we were in the hundreds of millions of dollars in damage,” Edgar said in Chicago, after touring flooded areas. “It is definitely a disaster and the main thing we can hope for at this point is that the rain won’t come back.”

In Indiana, thunderstorms that began rolling through during the middle of the week have dumped as much as 6 inches of rain on the parched state.

In Huntington in northeast Indiana, where heavy rains sent the Little River over its banks, the mayor banned street traffic and evacuated some buildings. The National Guard guarded roadblocks and opened shelters for people stranded by the floods.