Is Illinois a tornado capital? ‘We need to start treating this like we are in Tornado Alley’

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**Mariah Wolfle** (0:41)
Hey, Chicago, I'm Mariah Wolfle in For SashaAnn Simons, and this is In the Loop.
Stick around till the end of this episode to get the latest on what's happening in and around Chicago. But first, Chicagoans are still picking up the pieces nearly two weeks after severe storms when derecho winds barreled through the city, taking down trees, flooding homes, and knocking out power. In this episode of The Pod, we check in on recovery efforts and what residents and businesses need to bounce back. Was this a freak downpour or is this the new normal? At the table, David Yeomans, meteorologist at CBS News here in Chicago, Marjorie Scott, a resident of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on the south side, and Shavon Francis, owner of Fleurish Chicago, a flower shop in Bronzeville. I started with David on what happened with the weather a week and a half ago in the Chicago area.

**David Yeomans** (1:35)
Right, back to back days of severe weather. June 10th was what we call a derecho. It's a long swath of thunderstorm wind damage. Not a tornado, but over 250-mile swath, covering multiple states, including much of Northern Illinois, of category one hurricane type of winds from the thunderstorm, 80 miles per hour, 85 miles per hour. So as the folks in this room know too well, that knocked out power for about a quarter million ComEd customers, probably more than a half a million people. And some of them are without power today.

**Mariah Wolfle** (2:04)
It was remarkable, I mean, to see it. You try to take videos, but the videos just don't do it justice, at least from inside your house. I mean, there were downed trees everywhere in my neighborhood of Humboldt Park as well. I mean, Marjorie, take us back a week and a half for you. What did you and your neighbors experience?

**Margery Scott** (2:18)
Absolutely. We experienced almost complete devastation. I woke up to a huge tree landed on my house, my garage. Yeah, it was a result of no power, no energy, no internet.
My entire backyard was barricaded. I couldn't get to my car in my garage. It was an extreme hazard as far as safety was.

**Mariah Wolfle** (2:43)
And what are you looking at in terms of damage to the structure of your garage, your car now?

**Margery Scott** (2:48)
Absolutely. The garage still to this day is caved in.
My insurance company has come out. The roof on my house is caved in. And we are still experiencing some leakage from the roof.

**Mariah Wolfle** (3:01)
And is your power restored? How long did that take?

**Margery Scott** (3:05)
Well, my power is partially restored. OK. Still to this day, we don't have full power. ComEd has done a great job to mitigate the issue. But now we're just dealing with internal electric problems in the home.

**Mariah Wolfle** (3:17)
OK. All right. Shavon, let's bring you in here. What about you?
What has been the effect on your home, your store, your business?

**Shavon Francis** (3:25)
Yeah. So we lost power immediately as soon as we got the alert on our phone that it was going to be a tornado. The shop completely went dark and we sheltered in place because we have a lot of windows, and we didn't know if they were just going to burst open from the wind.

**Mariah Wolfle** (3:37)
So you were at the shop?

**Shavon Francis** (3:38)
I was at the shop, yeah. And we just got in all of our inventory and it didn't last more than the night because the cooler actually went out. Yeah. And the cooler went out for about eight days. We just got it fixed. We had to have someone come out and repair it because the lightning or the storm, I don't know if it was the wind or the lightning, knocked out the circuit board on the actual condenser. So we were, even though we didn't have power, we were hoping that once it came back on, we would have some sort of coolage.

**Mariah Wolfle** (4:06)
So for people who aren't familiar with flower shops, tell us how important having coolage is for these plants and what's the status of the flowers in the plants now?

**Shavon Francis** (4:16)