A devastating tornado that tore through Washington, Ill., earlier this week was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube.
The video was taken from a Facebook page belonging to the man who uploaded the video to his page. “Here is what my oldest daughter Josie Taylor Wells And I experienced, I am so glad Kerry Gorman Wells and the other girls were out of town when this storm came through. Very thankful we were not injured,” it reads.
“Our house is freakin’ destroyed, Josie!” the man says in the video.
The video shows the sides of the walls and home torn out.
“The neighbors’ houses are gone,” the man then says before urging his daughter to come outside before the building collapsed.
When the camera pans outside, it shows the rest of the neighborhood in ruins.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — As federal storm damage assessors started working across Illinois on Thursday, state officials revised the number of homes destroyed or damaged by the weekend’stornadoes upward to at least 1,500.
Residents of hard-hit towns also started shuttling hundreds of tons of debris out of the neighborhoods Thursday. But there were small signs of normal life that emerged: Some schools in the small central Illinois city of Washington reopened Thursday.
Federal Emergency Management Agency workers fanned out in Washington, eastern Illinois’ Gifford, Brookport in southern Illinois along the Ohio River and Coal City south of Joliet, Illinois Emergency Management Agency Director Jonathon Monken said.
Four of the 22 tornadoes officials now say touched down across the state badly damaged those towns; six people died.
As Monken walked through one neighborhood in Washington, he said it’s safe to say thousands of tons of what used to be homes will eventually be hauled away.
“Looking all around me, the debris mission is going to go on for a very, very long time,” he said.
