Oak Brook office workers, others reeling from storm

Workers at an Oak Brook office building slammed by a vicious late-afternoon storm said Thursday they do not know if what they experienced was a tornado. But they do know that it was unlike anything they have seen or felt before.

Shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday, employees at the building, 900 Jorie Blvd., say the parking lot was engulfed by a deep gray cloud and a power surge was followed by several loud booms that shook the building. Some witnesses say they saw lightning strike multiple times in the parking lot.

As they scrambled for the basement, some smelled gas and shortly thereafter, firefighters arrived and evacuated the building. Fortunately, the storm had passed quickly, although it left flooded parking lots, knocked down light poles and uprooted oak trees in its wake. One of the building's large air conditioners was flung across the parking lot as was a large part of its roof.

"It was scary to see what had happened so fast," said David Paro, an employee of Deep Alliance Marketing, which is housed at the building. "We were all a little uneasy but everyone was calm and stayed in decent shape."

The storm wreaked havoc throughout the suburbs and was reported to have included several funnel clouds. However, National Weather Service officials said Thursday winds reached 90 miles per hour in Oak Brook, but that the aftermath did not indicate signs of a tornado. The same system, though, did produce a tornado in the Matteson and Park Forest area.

As the deep gray cloud descended on the parking lot in Oak Brook, Paro said visibility dropped to near zero.

"This was something that happened so fast and was more of a violent, quick thing," he said.

At one point on Wednesday, the storm system stretched from the northernmost part of the state in Lake County south past Joliet and west to Galesburg. In DuPage County, a Blockbuster storefront in Lombard had a window blown out, and many towns, most notably Oak Brook, Villa Park and Elmhurst, suffered heavy damage.

Aurora crews worked against power outages on Wednesday until 11 p.m. to clear the streets of debris the storm left behind. On Thursday, several street crews were starting to address large limbs hanging from trees on roadways. City officials say the clean up will last at least two weeks.

In Oak Brook, one employee said when she arrived at her office building Thursday it looked like a battlefield, with limbs and roofing material strewn about the parking lot and uprooted trees in the McDonald's campus across the street.

Some employees managed to leave Wednesday night but were stuck in floodwaters and behind tree limbs on the street.

Nosheen Rathore and her colleagues at Ahmad Sulaiman and Associates went to their boss's Hinsdale home to wait out the storm.

"It was a really scary experience," she said. "Clearly, no one is going to have a productive day (Thursday)."

With the roof torn off, water rushed into second-floor businesses, and standing water caused damage to the ceiling of many ground floor offices.

As office managers and insurance representatives assessed the damage Thursday morning, many employees were left to clean out their offices and wait for instructions on what to do next.

In one of the hardest-hit offices on the ground floor, Chuck Silver, Peter Schilling and Rob Egeland of People's Home Equity Inc. helped clean out debris as workers prepared to move to the company's Schaumburg office temporarily.

Roofing tiles littered the water-soaked carpets in the office, which sits in the westernmost part of the building.

Silver said he doubted reports that a tornado did not hit Oak Brook.

"If it wasn't then what was it?" he said. "It was crazy dark, there was really thick lightning in the parking lot, very ropelike. I heard what sounded like someone was dropping large kegs on the roof."

Schilling said the speed of the system set it apart from past storms.

"When it hit, you couldn't see an inch outside," Schilling said. "Everybody was running down the stairs but it was almost over by the time we got to the basement."