Daily Herald opinion: Warnings from Mother Nature: As records fall, it’s time to take tornadoes more seriously in northern Illinois
Illinoisans, like all Midwesterners, turn a wary eye to the sky when bad weather rolls in each spring and summer. We listen for the sirens, we calculate where the kids are, and turn up the TV and radio volume to not miss emergency reports.
We don’t really expect the worst, though, because many (most?) of us have never seen the worst. We don’t expect tornadoes to clobber heavily populated areas and vaguely assume there’s some scientific reason for that (spoiler: There isn’t). Even true catastrophes, like the F5 Plainfield tornado of Aug. 28, 1990 and the F4 that hit Oak Lawn on April 21, 1967, are becoming too long ago to leave a dent on younger consciousnesses.
In 2026, however, something unusual is happening in Illinois: Tornadoes are developing at an astonishing rate, forcing us to rethink the power of tornadoes and to question if we are truly prepared. As of Monday, agencies have documented 147 reports of tornadoes in Illinois so far in 2026, a ridiculous number. Our previous record was 142 tornadoes in 2024, but that was for the whole year. We haven’t even hit the halfway point of 2026 yet.
Meteorologists and other experts who spoke to Daily Herald reporter Marni Pyke last week said Illinois tornadoes are “outracing everybody” and that the next closest state is Mississippi, with 82 reports of tornadic activity so far. Closer to home, the National Weather Service’s Chicago forecast area, which covers 23 Illinois and Indiana counties, reports 47 tornadoes here so far, when there were 25 in all of 2025.
Climate scientists say among the reasons for the change is the ongoing dryness in the Plains states over the last 40 years, which is slowing tornado development in the traditional Tornado Alley states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas and pushing it to wetter places in the Midwest and Southeast.
And because of that, experts are saying these areas need to be as well-prepared as possible. Do suburban and urban families know how to shelter? Does each community’s sirens reach all parts of town? How much food and supplies should we stockpile? These and other questions should now be on everyone’s front burner.
We urge communities to share information with their citizens on what it means when they turn on their sirens, and how to respond in an emergency. We urge suburban families to pay attention, and to study their own best responses to bad weather and to plan accordingly.
It’s a long-persistent myth that tornadoes can’t happen in urban areas, or that Lake Michigan’s cooler waters can prevent them from forming in and around Chicago. Tornadoes have always been possible in high-density urban and suburban settings, and in fact, usually produce greater loss of life and greater damage than when they occur in rural areas.
In Oak Lawn on that dreadful April day, the F4 killed 33 people, including children at a roller rink; injured more than 1,000, leveled more than 150 homes and businesses and started fires. CTA buses were lifted clean off roadways and dropped onto residential streets. All told it caused more than $50 million in damage (about $285 million in today’s dollars).
The F5 that struck Plainfield killed 29 people and injured 353 and did an estimated $165 million in damage. It destroyed the high school, and entire neighborhoods of homes. Today, it remains the only F5 on record in the Chicago metropolitan area.
An F3 struck Naperville, Lisle and Woodridge on June 20, 2021. No one died, but 11 people were injured, thousands of trees were uprooted and hundreds of buildings were destroyed or damaged. And on June 11, 2026, an estimated 21 tornadoes hit Illinois, damaging Bartlett and touching down in Naperville and Lisle.
The point is, yes, it can happen here. We are generally well-prepared in this day and age, but how well we would survive a major disaster would depend on how well people stay alert. Mother Nature is firing a warning shot over our bow this season. Let’s pay attention to her.