Wheaton woman glad she took shelter
The weather didn’t seem all that bad, but Alice Marks didn’t hesitate when the sirens went off about 9 p.m. Tuesday.
She herded her three children into the basement.
Good thing. While sequestered there, they heard a loud boom, which they thought was thunder. A short time later, when Marks went upstairs to look for her cat, she found a 5-foot-long tree branch had pierced through the ceiling of her bedroom.
A powerful burst of wind broke the top off a 60-foot maple tree in a neighbor’s backyard. Half of the tree section fell onto the roof of Marks’ house along East Willow Avenue. The rest damaged the corner of a neighbors’ garage and crushed part of a fence.
Marks said she was surprised by the damage because the storm didn’t seem very severe.
“There was no rain, no thunder, no lightning,” Marks said on Wednesday. “There was just this big boom at the back of the house, and we thought that was the storm starting.”
She’s glad she heeded the warning sirens.
“It made me realize that when the sirens go off, it doesn’t matter what you see outside,” she said. “You have to go downstairs.”