“What I remember is it was insanely hot and muggy, but it had been a perfectly normal August day,” Benjamin Bennington recalled. “I was in the basement getting ready to deliver newspapers when my dad came barreling downstairs with my little sister.”

Bennington was 13 years old and planning to start freshman year at Plainfield High School on Aug. 28, 1990, the day an F5 tornado struck the community without warning.

“I think we were some of the first ones hit by it,” Bennington said in a recent interview.

The family lived at 127th, just past U.S. Route 30, in an area that was still a lot of farm land.

“Our house was a raised ranch, and I was downstairs folding newspapers for The Herald-News to do my paper route. My dad worked nights, so he was home, and he came down with my little sister, yelling for my mom and told us to get in the bathroom," Bennington said.

The storm hit the house only seconds after his family took shelter.

“It just rolled through really fast,” Bennington recalled. “It’s hard to know what’s going on in the moment. I just remember lots of sounds of high-pitched winds, glass breaking. Just an overwhelming roar of destruction.”

The violent August 1990 tornado destroyed parts of Plainfield, Oswego, Crest Hill and Joliet, killing 29 people and injuring 353.

Recovering and rebuilding

While Bennington and his family were physically unharmed, the tornado – the only recorded storm of its magnitude ever to hit Illinois – tore the roof and upper level of the house off, blocking the door with rubble.

“When it had passed, my dad really took charge,” Bennington said.

The top floor of their house was “totally destroyed, and we couldn’t get to the front door. My dad and me made it to a side door and got my mom and sister out from under the garage rubble,” he said.

Although pouring rain made it difficult to see, Bennington said he remembers looking around and seeing the destruction of the storm.

“Our neighbor’s house to the left side was fine, but the neighbor on the right’s house was gone,” he said. “We gathered at the houses that weren’t damaged, and a couple of the dads went around to help out the people who were trapped.”

Bennington recalled his dad working to help free a teenage daughter in the house on the right who had been home alone when she got trapped in the shower by the storm.

His dad also came to the aid of a pig farmer down the road who’d been stuck under a trailer, and a child who was pinned under the wreckage of a wall.

“Nobody knew what was going on,” Bennington said. “There hadn’t been any warnings before it happened. Later that day, people called asking why their newspapers hadn’t been delivered. Communication just wasn’t that good.”

Recovery

In the aftermath of the storm, Bennington’s family went to stay with his aunt and uncle in New Lenox before eventually renting a house in Crest Hill while rebuilding.

Although the destruction was significant throughout Bennington’s neighborhood, as well as the downtown Plainfield area, he said his family does not have pictures of the wreckage.

“It sounds crazy now, but we lost everything in the upstairs of the house,” he said. “That included my parents’ camera. I think my uncle took some pictures for the insurance company, but I don’t think any of them are still around.”

Among the destroyed buildings were both Bennington’s former grade school, St. Mary’s, and Plainfield High School, where students would have just been finishing their first day had the storm hit one day later.

“Nobody even thought of going back to school for a month,” he recalled. “When we did, they sent us to the Old Joliet Catholic High School campus, which was empty because they had just merged with St. Francis Academy to become [Joliet Catholic Academy]. It was insane. Some of us had two-hour bus rides every morning for over two years while they rebuilt.”

Bennington said he remembers the storm as an occasion where “the community really came together,” but said that for those who experienced it, some damage was permanent.

“For the people who went through it, it was a textbook case of [post-traumatic stress disorder],” he said. “A lot of my friends, we’re in our 50s now, and we still have issues on days when bad storms hit. I was lucky enough not to lose anyone really close to me, but I lost teachers, and I knew people who lost friends and family members in a situation nobody ever expected.”

Years later, while attending college in Georgia, Bennington experienced a hurricane, but he said nothing compared to the tornado.

“There were a lot of high winds and some flooding, but I’ve never been surprised by anything like that day with the tornado,” he said.

His sister almost became a storm chaser, he said.

“It’s like when kids who lost a parent grow up to be doctors,” Bennington said. “Sometimes you want to follow the thing that almost destroyed you.”