Although Jennifer Saari was not in Plainfield when an F5 tornado hit the village Aug. 28, 1990, her memories of the destruction it wrought on her relatives’ homes shaped the rest of her life.

She was living just a town over that also was not spared from destruction.

“I was about 2 and a half at the time, so I was pretty tiny, but I still remember it,” Saari said. “We were living in Joliet, and my mom had us down in the basement because of the bad storms, but the tornado didn’t hit us. My great-grandparents and great-aunt lived in Plainfield though. When the worst passed, my mom tried to call them, and all she heard was, ‘Hello?’ and a click.”

After the failed phone call, Saari said her mother took her in the car to go check on their relatives.

“I remember getting there and trying to get around all the downed power lines,” Saari said. “They were just laying crumpled on the ground like a giant had torn through them.”

When they reached the house, Saari and her mother found her great-grandparents in their basement with some minor injuries. A few doors down, they found her great-aunt and uncle in a similar condition in their home.

“My Nana said she had been outside collecting hail and that the sky was ‘green like she’d never seen,’” Saari recalled. “They had a walk-in basement, and she said that her dog started barking and ran into the house. She said he was acting weird, but that a minute later, the tornado came through. It ripped the roof off of the house. My great-grandpa got lucky because he’d just gotten up out of his chair to check a lamp that was flickering, and part of the wall fell on top of him. He was stuck under it, but it ended up protecting him from other debris.”

That August 1990 violent tornado leveled parts of Plainfield, Oswego, Crest Hill and Joliet, killing 29 people and injuring 353. It remains the only F5 tornado to strike in August in the U.S.

When the damage was evaluated on Saari’s family’s homes, it was determined that her great-grandparents’ house had sustained F3-level damage, while her great-aunt and uncle’s house sustained F2-level damage.

Other land between the homes had been almost completely cleared, and Saari said her parents bought it and built a home there for the family while the neighborhood was being rebuilt.

“Growing up on that tornado-scarred land and hearing the stories from my family, I decided that one day I wanted to grow up and be a meteorologist,” Saari said. “I wanted to do something that could make a difference for people the next time.”

Her career mission

In 2011, Saari moved to Huntsville, Alabama, to take a job as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

“My family still lives in Will County, and it was really hard to leave, but I knew I could make a difference here,” she said.

In a sad turn of events, her orientation day at the NWS was delayed several days due to a series of violent tornadoes that left more than 250 people dead across Alabama and the southeastern U.S.

“The week before I started, they’d had a series of tornadoes,” she said. “It was like a marching band of Plainfield tornadoes came through one right after the other. My boss had to drive to find a phone to call me and tell me not to come down yet. I wanted to be there, but I was not ready for how bad it was. After walking into the aftermath of that, it just reinforced my eagerness to work with community preparedness efforts.”

In addition to being a meteorologist, Saari also serves as the team lead for the NWS’ National Deaf and Hard of Hearing Outreach Team, an effort she became part of after meeting with deaf survivors of the tornadoes.

“I was at a meet-and-greet outreach event with a local meteorologist talking to people about weather radios, and they told me they need more options,” Saari said.

In the subsequent weeks, she contacted statewide disability services organizations and worked to put together storm preparedness materials for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and helped people access “bed shaker” weather radios, which flash and vibrate a user’s pillow to alert them to a severe weather warnings in the night.

Over the years, Saari has played a part in spreading those efforts to other NWS offices across the country and even contributed to new slogans being created for weather preparedness that are inclusive of deaf people, something she received an award for in 2017.

“You need to be weather ready,” she said. “Technology and communication have improved a lot since 1990, but even a perfect warning is no good if people don’t know what to do.”

She noted that nationally, schools, weather services and emergency management agencies have “leaned in” to teaching weather preparedness more since the Plainfield tornado.

“My Nana didn’t know what to do or who to call when she found giant hail on the ground,” she said. “Now, we put that information out there so people can report it so we can see where stuff is hitting the fan.”

Saari said that her work with the deaf community through the NWS has helped her feel like she’d fulfilled her promise to her family and community to make a difference.

“My family had no warning in Plainfield, and we were really lucky that our relatives were OK,” Saari said. ” I’m trying my best to make sure everyone is ready for that next Plainfield tornado, no matter where it happens. That storm is what made me who I am today. Even if it makes me feel a little old to look back 35 years later, I want to make sure it’s never forgotten."