Oswego residents recall Plainfield tornado 25 years later

At first everyone thought it was just a severe thunderstorm passing through the Oswego area on the afternoon of Aug. 28, 1990, Heidi Coop remembers.

Like her fellow employees at the Oswegoland Park District’s Prairie Point Center that day 25 years ago, Coop watched and waited as the storm quickly descended upon the village and then the power went out.

Bert Gray, then the park district director, remembers watching in fascination as the storm passed, a move he said in retrospect was not the best.

“We stood like fools at the plate glass window,” Gray said. “There was no tornado to see. It just looked like a nasty storm. It was just one of those regular summer thunderstorms and then all of a sudden it was more than that.”

What Coop, Gray and others at Prairie Point Center could not see from the window was the start of the most powerful tornado on record to hit northeastern Illinois.

Gathering strength as it passed over Aurora and Montgomery en route to Oswego, the tornado took down countless trees and power lines in the village and upended cars and damaged buildings at Ill. Route 71 and U.S. Route 34.

From Routes 34 and 71 the tornado gained still more strength, cutting a swath of damage to farm fields between Oswego and Plainfield.

In Plainfield, the tornado damaged an elementary school and demolished Plainfield High School, along with hundreds of homes and businesses. From Plainfield the tornado continued on its destructive path into Joliet and Crest Hill.

A total of 29 people – none in Kendall County – were killed in the tornado and another 353 injured in Kendall and Will counties. Property damage was later estimated at $165 million, including $5 million in property damage in Kendall County.

After the tornado had passed in Oswego, Coop said she drove to her home about three miles from Prairie Point Center to check on her husband and three children.

“As I came over the hill I saw an ambulance,” she recalls.

Coop said her mother lived in a home next door to her with her sister and she first thought that the ambulance was for her mother.

“As I came closer I noticed that the ambulance was in front of my driveway and that my house was three-quarters gone,” she said.

Her three children – Heather, 13, Haley, 6, and Arty, 4 – had been in the home when the tornado hit.

Her husband, John, was off work at the time because he had dislocated his shoulder.

Coop said shortly before the storm hit John had gone out to feed the horses that the family kept at a barn on their property. He was in the barn when the tornado touched down. He laid down on the ground and held on to a hydrant as the storm struck.

“When they say it sounds like a freight train coming through, they’re not kidding,” John Coop recalled.

Heidi said John’s ears popped for weeks after the tornado from the noise and pressure.

After the tornado passed, John Coop went back to the house, which was partially destroyed, and had to kick in the front door.

“The two little ones were in the bathroom and the oldest one tried to get to the basement but didn’t make it there because the walls collapsed around her,” she said.

Coop said coming upon the house she first feared the worst.

“I thought they were dead,” she said.

Coop said she managed to locate Haley and Arty, but firefighters and a Good Samaritan had to lift the walls off of Heather, who had received minor injuries.

“We couldn’t tell how bad Heather was hurt because she was smashed [in the debris],” Coop said.

Injured and shaken up, the children were taken to Copley Hospital in Aurora as a precaution. They all fully recovered, though in the immediate, confusing aftermath of the storm their condition wasn’t clear, according to Coop.

“It was crazy with the hospital full of people. They had a priest come out and talk to me and I was raised strict Catholic so I freaked,” she said, adding, “He came to tell me he gave her the last rites.”

Coop said hearing that was the most devastating part of the day but, fortunately, her daughter was fine.

“She really was OK, they just kept her overnight to make sure there wasn’t any internal bleeding,” she said.

The experience was life changing, Coop says, and even today when there is a storm she has to make sure her children, now all adults, are accounted for.

“The other night when the sirens were going off I have to immediately be able to get ahold of my kids through text or a phone call,” she said.

It took about nine months for the Coops to have their home rebuilt. During that time, the family was able to rent a home from a friend nearby on Reservation Road, south of Oswego.

Coop remains grateful for all the support she and her family received from the community as they worked to recover. She said her co-workers at the park district and parishioners at St. Anne’s Catholic Church and Knights of Columbus were especially helpful.

She said their home had been underinsured so it took time for her family to get back on their feet financially, but that pales in comparison to having everyone alive and well.

“Our children are all alive and you can replace material things … but in the big picture I think we were very lucky,” she added.

Terry Tamblyn, who was then superintendent of the Oswego School District, remembered that the tornado struck about a day or two before school started for the year.

Tamblyn said school officials were ready to open the new wing of the high school, which included an auditorium, computer lab, library, learning center and field house.

“I remember the tornado came through and I was in the office attached to East View [Elementary School] across from the high school and I remember being outside and looking at the clouds and they were really green and ugly and terrible,” Tamblyn recalls.

He immediately told everyone in the office to get into a vault made out of cement blocks.

“As I went in there I remember looking out the window and watching trees go sideways,” he said.

Meanwhile, Tamblyn’s daughter was at the high school, participating in a tennis match that was scheduled that day. The students were hurried into the high school just before the storm hit. Surveying the damage, Tamblyn says he was grateful for the quick efforts of the staff to get students to safety.

“It took all the fencing and balled it up into a great big ball of fencing,” Tamblyn said. “We had one of our buses, and the hood of it is fiberglass … there was about a two-inch pipe that was driven through the hood without wrinkling it and through the engine block of the bus,” he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be in front of that.”

He said that path of destruction the tornado had caused was clear, and he estimated the damage to the high school at about $100,000.

“We went up on the fly area of the auditorium, which was the tallest part of the school, and we looked out to the south and the east and we could see the path of the tornado down through the corn fields,” he said. “Of course it was nothing like what happened with Plainfield. We were fortunate, no one was hurt.”

Reflecting back on that fateful day, Tamblyn says, it is one of the worst storms he has been in.

“If you live in this area sooner or later you’re probably going to see something like that,” he said. “I remember driving down [Route] 126 coming into Plainfield, just before the railroad tracks there, and looking up to the right which would have been right were the high school was located, and seeing those trees looking like stark images of no leaves or anything – they had just been stripped. If there is an image about that whole thing that I think of when I go by something it would be that.”

Now retired State Rep. Kay Hatcher, who was living in Boulder Hill when the tornado hit, recalled that scenic Violet Patch Park off Ill. Route 25 just north of Oswego was devastated.

“Violet Patch used to have over 100 trees and it was nothing but matchsticks when it was over,” she said. “It was a beautiful span of trees.”