A tornado passed through Riverside and Brookfield Sunday, officials confirmed, leaving a trail of debris compounded by recent heavy storm winds throughout the area.
Brookfield Public Works Director Vincent Smith and Riverside Public Works Director Dan Tabb both said that each village has had public works crews out since Sunday night to clean up in the wake of the storms, although there was no substantial damage to buildings or cars in either village.
“The initial storm that came in on Sunday evening, we had crews on-site from 2 a.m. [Monday] till 3:30 p.m. yesterday,” Smith said in a phone call Tuesday afternoon. “Last night, at roughly around 11 p.m., we had crews come in again for a downed tree, and they were in for roughly around two hours.”
Smith said public works crews started cleaning up the Hollywood area of Brookfield, which sustained the most damage and debris, around 7 a.m. Tuesday morning and were expected to continue through 5 p.m.
Beginning Wednesday, he said, the village was expected to have cleaned the majority of Hollywood outside of one area where downed power lines had become intertwined with fallen tree limbs. Once Hollywood is fully cleaned up, the crews will move through Brookfield’s roadways to ensure there’s no leftover debris before completing a sweep of the village’s alleyways. He said the full cleanup effort could last through Friday.
Smith said the two storms uprooted three trees in Brookfield, though the majority of affected trees had large limbs break off.
In Riverside, Tabb said in a phone call Wednesday that public works crews hope to finish cleaning up debris left by the storms by the end of the day, but that work could continue into Thursday.
Tabb said no section of the village sustained more damage than another, but that most of the damage was focused around areas where the EF-0 tornado with peak wind speeds of 75 mph — which originated in LaGrange at 10:23 p.m. on Sunday and dissipated in Cicero 10 minutes later, according to the National Weather Service Chicago — touched down intermittently. He said Riverside “got lucky” that the tornado did not touch down the entire time it passed through the village, and that most of the damage that crews were cleaning up, even through Wednesday, was from Sunday night’s storm.
An EF-1 tornado with maximum wind speeds approaching 110 mph narrowly missed Brookfield and Riverside last July.
While progress on the cleanup efforts is steady, Smith emphasized how much effort and dedication the work takes from Brookfield’s public works department.
“A storm like this, it takes a lot of equipment and personnel resources. We have roughly around 10 [workers] dedicated just to storm damage pickup during this event, and there are two [wood chipper] trucks out, two dump trucks out, and we have a sweeper out picking up the smaller debris after we remove the large debris,” he said. “A majority — more than half — of our public works staff has been dedicated to this and will be dedicated to this pickup for the next four days.”
Minor flood warning
While a minor flood warning was issued Wednesday morning for Riverside and other villages along the Des Plaines River through 4 a.m. Saturday, Riverside Public Safety Director Matthew Buckley said the village is not anticipating “any issues” with flooding in the village.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the most recent reading of the National Water Prediction Service’s gauge of the Des Plaines River at Riverside said the river had reached a peak of 6.24 feet at 12:45 p.m. Wednesday. The river must reach a height of 7 feet in Riverside before mitigation action must be taken, according to the NWPS.
