Utica, Illinois
<>The Chicago Tribune ran a major special about Utica, Illinois and the tornado. The article was on the front page for three days, and covered the disaster and recovery in depth. I
chicagotribune.com >> Special reports
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UTICA, ILLINOIS
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Part 1: A wicked wind takes aim
How do you outrun the sky? On a fateful day in April, the people of Utica bore the brunt of the awesome power of a tornado.
By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 5, 2004
Ten seconds. Count it: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Ten seconds was roughly how long it lasted. Nobody had a stopwatch, nothing can be proven definitively, but that's the consensus. The tornado that swooped through Utica at 6:09 p.m. April 20 took some 10 seconds to do what it did. Ten seconds is barely a flicker. It's a long, deep breath. It's no time at all. It's an eternity.
If the sky could hold a grudge, it would look the way the sky looked over northern Illinois that day. Low, gray clouds stretched to the edges in a thin veneer of menace. Rain came and went, came and went, came and went.
The technical name for what gathered up there was stratiform cloud cover, but Albert Pietrycha had a better way to describe it: "murk." It was a Gothic-sounding word for a Gothic-looking sky. A sky that, in its own oblique way, was sending a message.
Pietrycha is a meteorologist in the Chicago forecast office of the National Weather Service, a tidy, buttoned-down building in Romeoville, about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. It's a setting that seems a bit too ordinary for its role, too bland for the place where the first act of a tragedy already was being recorded. Where the sky's bad intentions were just becoming visible, simmering in the low-slung clouds.
Where a short distance away, disparate elements--air, water and old sandstone blocks--soon would slam into each other like cars in a freeway pileup, ending eight lives and changing other lives forever.
The survivors would henceforth be haunted by the oldest, most vexing question of all: whether there is a destiny that shapes our fates or whether it is simply a matter of chance, of luck, of the way the wind blows.
It was a busy day for Pietrycha and his colleagues. The classic ingredients for a tornado--warm air to the south, cooler air north and a hint of wind shear--had seemed imminent most of the morning. Spring and early summer are boom times for tornadoes, the most violent storms on Earth.
What bothered Pietrycha was a warm front that loitered ominously across southern Illinois. If the front's moist, humid air moved north too quickly in the daylight hours, clashing with cooler air, the instability could create thunderstorms liable to split off into tornadoes.
But by early afternoon, it seemed that maybe, just maybe, northern Illinois would escape. If the front waited until after sunset to arrive, its impact would be negligible because the air near the ground--with no sunshine to warm it--would cool off. Nope, a relieved Pietrycha said to himself. Probably not today.
It was only a hunch. Meteorologists know a lot about tornadoes, but with all they know, they still can't say why some thunderstorms generate tornadoes and some don't. Or why tornadoes, once unleashed, do what they do and go where they go.
That's why forecasting is as much art as science. Too many warnings not followed by actual tornadoes make people skeptical and careless. Too many warnings can be as dangerous as too few. And while meteorologists can spot an approaching hurricane days in advance, the average warning time for a tornado is 11 minutes.
What she was thinking was, Gotta beat that rain.
Frowning up at a sky as flat and gray as a cookie sheet, Shelba Bimm, 65, figured she just might be able to outrun the next downpour. Worth a try, anyway.
Bimm was standing in the driveway of her house at 238 W. Church St. in Utica, population 977, just outside Starved Rock State Park.
It was precisely 5:15 p.m. She had her schedule figured down to the minute. Busy people do that. But this ornery rain--will it or won't it, and if it starts up again, how long will it last?--was irksome.
She was due in Oglesby at 6 p.m. for the weekly class she was taking for her certification as an EMT Intermediate, the next level up from EMT, a rank Bimm had held since 1980, answering the frequent summons from the Utica volunteer fire department. Folks in town were accustomed to the sight of the white-haired Bimm in the driver's seat of her black Honda CRV, yanking on the wheel with one hand and gripping her dispatch radio with the other.
Shelba Bimm had been a 1st-grade teacher for 42 years. She was retired now--if that's what you want to call it, even though she was at least as busy these days as she'd ever been when running a classroom, what with her EMT work and the dollhouse business she operated out of the front room of her home. And now she and Dave Edgcomb, Utica's fire chief, were taking classes to upgrade their credentials.
Oglesby is a 15-minute drive from Utica, so normally Bimm didn't hit the road until 5:30 p.m. But then again, she thought, just look at that sky.
If she left now, she might be able to get there and dash from the parking lot at Illinois Valley Community College and into class without getting soaked. It's gonna be, she thought, one hell of a storm.
So she scooted into her car--the one with the can't-miss-it license plate BIMM 2--and took off, backing out of her driveway and heading east on Church Street.
At the four-way stop a few yards from her house she turned south on Mill Street. Near the corner was a bar called Milestone. A block later, at the corner of Mill and Canal Street, she passed Duffy's Tavern.
Bimm turned west on Illinois Highway 71 and then headed on into Oglesby, pulling into the campus parking lot at 5:30 p.m. The western sky was getting blacker and blacker, as if something had been spilled on the other side of it and was seeping through.
All told, it took her less than a minute to cross Utica. Had she happened to lift her pale blue eyes to the rear view mirror as she left the city limits, she would have seen, poised there like a tableau in a snow globe just before it's shaken up, her last intact view of the little town she loved.
Pietrycha and his colleagues work in a big square room with a central ring of linked desks and a computer monitor perched on just about every flat surface.
Across Pietrycha's work station, six computer screens glowed with radar information that told him, through tiny pixels of perky green and hot red and bold yellow, about hail and rain, about wind rotation and velocity.
To check the screens, Pietrycha, a slender man with short sandy hair and the preoccupied air of someone who's always working out a math problem in his head, quickly rolled his chair back and forth, back and forth, screen to screen to screen, taking frequent swigs from a Coke can.
As 4 p.m. approached, the end of his shift, the warm front was still dawdling in southern Illinois. Looking good. So Pietrycha got ready to go. He lives in Oswego, some 13 miles northwest of Romeoville.
To Mark Ratzer, a fellow meteorologist with a neat blond crew cut who was in charge of the office that day, Pietrycha said, "Hey, if things get out of hand, call me."
The specials at Duffy's Tavern that night, according to the green felt-tip lettering on the white board above the bar, were: "All You Can Eat Spaghetti w/garlic breadsticks, $4.99" and "Cajun NY Strip w/onions and peppers and potato salad, $16.99" and "2 stuffed walleye, $13.99." The soup was cheesy broccoli.
Lisle Elsbury, 56, had bought Duffy's a year ago. Buying it meant leaving behind the life he knew as a heating and air conditioning repairman in Lyons, and slapping down all his chips right here in Utica.
Elsbury was a compact man with a nervous energy that seemed to oscillate just beneath his skin. His small gray mustache dipped at either end, curling around his upper lip like a parenthesis.
He liked to stand behind the long bar, its rich brown wood so ancient and polished by innumerable elbows that it looked sumptuous, almost liquid. It shimmered in the light.
If he'd glanced out the big front window just then, he might have seen Bimm's black Honda going south on Mill as she headed to class. But Elsbury was too busy to be gazing out windows. When you owned a bar and grill, there was always something to do. Always a ledger to balance, a glass to rinse, a burger to turn.
After a rocky start--Utica is a tough town to break into, with friendships stretching back decades--Elsbury was feeling pretty good. Things were looking up, even though there were four other taverns in town--Skoog's Pub, Joy & Ed's, Canal Port and Milestone--all within a stone's throw.
Duffy's and Milestone were the new kids on the block. Not literally--the buildings were each more than a century old, two-story structures that anchored either end of Utica's roughly one-block business district. The proprietors, not the properties, were new. Elsbury and his wife, Pat, had bought Duffy's; Larry Ventrice and his wife, Marian, were running Milestone.
They were alike in a lot of ways, the Elsburys and the Ventrices. They were two couples trying to make a go of it in a new business in a new town. Money was tight. Hours were long. You worked as hard as you could work, and you still weren't sure sometimes if you were going to survive.
At this time of day, though, with the sun going down and the room filling up, Elsbury was reminded of the reasons he loved running a bar. Toughest work he'd ever done, but Lord, he just loved the feel of the place. The laughter. The talk. The scrape of chair legs on the red-painted plywood floor. A kind of benign, peppy chaos.
Two TV sets were angled on small platforms extending from the wall at both ends of the bar, their screens busy with maps sprouting wavy lines and harsh-looking arrows. Bartender Chris Rochelle, 23, a skinny, good-looking kid with spiky black hair, had changed both sets from ESPN to the Weather Channel.
The sky, he told anybody who asked, just didn't look right to him. Didn't look right at all.
By the time Pietrycha walked back into the weather service office at about 5:45 p.m., everything had changed. It was as if an orchestra conductor, with a simple flick of the baton, had abruptly altered the room's tempo. What had been casual was suddenly intense. Phones rang, people scurried back and forth, frowning meteorologists hunched over computer screens.
That lackadaisical warm front suddenly had come to life, moving north much faster than any of the forecasters thought it would, initiating the fatal tangle of warm and cold air. Tornadoes darted across the Midwest, making jailbreaks from the thunderstorms.
At 5:32 p.m., Pietrycha's colleague, radar operator Rich Brumer, had issued a tornado warning for north-central Illinois. Typically, a watch--which alerts people to be on their guard--precedes a warning, but the warm front had risen so fast that Brumer went straight to the warning.
Now it was a matter of what meteorologists call interrogating the storm: keeping an eye on the screens as the data pours in, supplied by the Doppler radar tower that rises just behind the Romeoville office. In one sense, Pietrycha and his colleagues are immensely powerful as they compile fact after fact after fact about the atmosphere. They know just about everything there is to know about the air, the clouds, the wind, the rain.
But in another sense, they're utterly helpless. They don't know the "ground truth": the meteorological term for what's actually happening to real people, people who don't just record and measure the weather but must live through it.
That night, the weather service would tally 53 tornadoes in the Midwest. Fourteen whipsawed across north-central and northeastern Illinois.
One of those--born about 2 miles southwest of Granville and cutting a 15 1/2-mile, 200-yard-wide notch from Granville to Utica--seemed to make a beeline for a venerable two-story tavern. It would arrive at 6:09 p.m.
At 5:55 p.m. the phone rang in Beverly Wood's mobile home in Utica. It was her daughter, Dena Mallie, a vivacious 44-year-old who lives in Peru, just west of Utica.
"We're having really bad hail," Mallie told her mother.
Wood, 67, was in the middle of dinner with Wayne Ball, 63, whom she'd dated for years and who lived in a mobile home right across the road, and Helen Studebaker Mahnke, 81, another friend who lived in the same trailer park just east of the downtown business district.
Wood and Ball were an easy, comfortable couple, with an affection that ran deep and true. When Ball's hands were severely frostbitten during his work with the railroad several years ago, and had to be bandaged and immobile for many months, it was Wood who fed him, who lit and held his cigarettes for him.
Wood had heated up a frozen pizza and mixed a few drinks. Mallie could hear music in the background; the three old friends had settled in for the evening. But Wood deeply feared storms.
"We're going to scoot," she told Mallie. "We're going uptown."
Trailers, as everybody knew, were notoriously vulnerable in bad weather. It made sense for Wood, Mahnke and Ball to hunker down in one of the Utica taverns, one of those big, reliable old buildings that could shrug off a storm like it had been shrugging them off for decades.
Leaving the pizza--minus the three slices they'd just eaten--on the table with the drinks, because they'd be back in a jiffy, Wood, Mahnke and Ball hurried outside and climbed into Wood's car, a taupe Buick Century.
It couldn't have taken Wood more than a minute to drive them to the bar, even pausing for the single stop sign on East Church, even heeding the posted speed limit of 20 m.p.h.
She parked across the street, and they quickly walked in through Milestone's double doors. Wood was in such a hurry she didn't lock the car; for her, an unheard-of lapse. It was just after 6 p.m.
Relief. They were, they thought, safe now.
For several minutes before the three arrived, Milestone's lights flickered.
Larry Ventrice, 49, was getting irritated. On or off, he didn't care. Just wished they'd make up their mind, on or off, on or off. It climbed a person's nerves, real quick.
He was a restless, impatient man, a man with a finger-snap temper but a good heart. He hailed from Bridgeport, a South Side Chicago neighborhood, and was proud of it, and he was proud as well of what he'd done with the tavern: filled it with funky antiques such as a roulette wheel and fake "WANTED" posters that gave the place a toe-tapping, down-home feel. The atmosphere started at the threshold, where a couple of horseshoes served as door pulls, and continued on around to the building's southern exterior, where a big, colorful mural, a rollicking pioneer scene with wagon trains and sod-busters, had been painted on the sandstone blocks.
Larry Ventrice knew about the bad weather heading their way. On the big TV set over the bar he'd heard the stations yakking about tornadoes and seeking shelter and all the rest of it, but he wasn't worried. Why should he be? Milestone, with its thick sandstone walls, flat concrete roof and slate foundation, was as solid as a vault. It was 117 years old, but just as hard times strengthened a person's character, surely rough weather over the years toughened up a building, didn't it? Showed its true mettle. Milestone was a survivor. You'd bet your life on it.
Larry knew just about everybody who was there that night, and they knew him. His cousin Jim Ventrice, 70, was sitting at a table finishing up a bowl of chicken noodle soup while waiting for his second course, a pork chop sandwich he'd ordered from Marian Ventrice, 50, Larry's wife. Everybody called Jim Ventrice "Cousin Junior" or just Junior.
Junior, a slight man who wore his shirt tucked in and his hair combed neatly back from his forehead, had gotten to Milestone at about 5:40 p.m. that night. He stopped in at least once a day because he liked the bar's cozy, nobody's-a-stranger ambience.
He'd taken a seat, spotted Jay Vezain at the bar and called out, "Hey, Jay, how're you?"
Vezain, 47, who worked at the Utica grain elevator just south of Duffy's, was nursing a bottle of beer. "I'm OK, Junior, how're you?"
He had a good sense of humor, Vezain did, and the kind of smile to go with it: quick, mischievous-looking. A lot of folks saved their best jokes for Vezain, just to see that smile.
Over in the corner, Carol Schultheis, 40--Wayne Ball's daughter--was playing the video poker game, shoving in coins and waiting for luck, and taking occasional drags on a Marlboro Light. She'd been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a few years ago, but so far it hadn't slowed her down; she was a day-shift cook at Joy & Ed's, and everybody in Utica knew her and she knew everybody right back, and if you passed her on the street you'd get a smile and a wave and maybe a naughty joke or two.
Rich Little, 37, a truck driver from nearby Troy Grove, was sitting at the bar, drinking a bottle of Bud Light. He was supposed to meet his girlfriend here at 6:30 p.m.
Back in the kitchen, Debbie Miller, 44, pushed a pork chop around on the grill for Junior's sandwich.
The lights flickered again. The door opened, and Wood, Mahnke and Ball came in.
Just after that, Debbie Miller's family spilled in through the back door, a pinwheeling mass of kids that must have quickly overwhelmed the small hallway and kitchen, a living scribble of elbows and long legs and sneakers and stick-thin arms, talking and pushing.
There was Debbie's husband, Mike, 49, lanky and bushy-haired; sons Mike Jr., 18, Gregg, 14, and Christopher, 8; and daughters Ashley, 16, and Jennifer, 12, along with Gregg's best friend Jarad Stillwell, 13.
Mike Miller's lean, lined, mournful face seemed to carry all the family's woes in its crevices. They'd had a lot of hard luck over the years. Money was tight, and Mike's salary from the Illinois Central Railroad never seemed quite able to stretch from one payday to the next, not with all those skinny tow-headed kids to take care of. Debbie Miller had signed on as a cook at Milestone about a year and a half ago, and Ashley and Mike Jr. sometimes came along, too, to wait tables or sweep up, netting a few bucks from Larry.
So when Mike Miller, back in the family's little blue house a half-mile south on Washington Street, had gotten spooked by those increasingly agitated TV weather reports, he thought of Milestone. Milestone was a second home. And Milestone, he figured, would be safer. It was big and thick-walled and had a stone-floored basement that was reassuring just to think about.
Milestone, anybody would tell you, was as sturdy as a preacher's promise.
Mike had just pulled a frozen pizza out of the oven for the kids' dinner, but to heck with it: They could eat when they got back home in a few minutes, after the storm passed.
So Mike ran down the crumbling steps with his children right behind him, and everybody scrambled into the family's Ford LTD.
By the time he and the kids got to the bar--two minutes later, tops--Debbie Miller was shutting down the grill, just like Larry had told her to.
"Everybody in the basement," Marian Ventrice said. "Kids first. Get the kids." She was a nervous, fretful, excitable woman, and you could hear the anxiety spiking in her voice.
The basement door was toward the front of the bar, under the stairs leading to the second floor. It was an old-fashioned cellar door, flush with the wooden floor, and you pulled up on a metal handle then flipped the door over.
Jarad and Gregg trooped down the wooden stairs, followed by Jennifer, Christopher, Ashley and Mike Jr., and then the adults. They moved quickly, efficiently, but without panic, because they were heading to safety; the basement was a haven, the basement was exactly where you'd want to be at that moment. Thick stone floor, low ceiling. Like a cave.
"Stick together, everybody stick together," Marian said, and she and Larry went to the center of the basement. So did the older people--Wood, Ball and Mahnke--and the Miller family piled up against the north wall, just beyond the bottom of the stairs. Gregg and Jarad headed to the south wall, next to the walk-in cooler.
Everybody was still talking, still speculating about the storm, and Mahnke asked Ashley and Jennifer their names. Marian was agitated, jittery, but everybody else was relaxed and casual, so casual, in fact, that Junior and Little had brought their beers with them. They set them on top of the chest-high freezer against which they stood, waiting for somebody to tell them it was OK to go back upstairs. No big deal.
At 5:58 p.m., Dena Mallie saw it from her driveway in Peru.
As it blossomed darkly, a huge batwing erasing the sky around it, a Utica contractor named Buck Bierbom saw it from his back yard.
Rona Burrows saw it. She leaned out the front door at Mill Street Market, where she worked as a cashier, and looked up at the sky.
Lisle Elsbury saw it from the alley behind Duffy's.
It was a great black mass, a swirling coil some 200 yards wide at the ground--it was wider in the sky--heading northeast at about 30 m.p.h. They looked up and saw it but they thought: No. Couldn't be. Could it?
There was a wild beauty to it, a fiercely knotted loveliness that was like nothing they'd ever seen. They could see debris swirling in it, pulled in and out and sucked up and around, frenzied sticks of wood, trees, dirt, other things, everything.
The ones who watched it come, watched it fill more and more of the blue-green sky like the canvas of a finicky painter who decides to slather the whole thing in black and start over, felt almost hypnotized at first, rooted to the earth but looking up, up, up. "Awesome" is the word that came instantly to Mallie. And not the way teenagers meant it. Awesome as in something that fills you up with awe.
Steve Maltas, 23, a Utica volunteer firefighter with a trim goatee and a distinct aversion to small talk, was at the car wash in Utica's south end. He heard the report from the LaSalle Fire Department on his dispatch radio: A tornado was bearing down on them.
Maltas gunned his pickup toward the fire station, just up on Mill across from Milestone. He knew where the switch was to activate the tornado siren, the mechanical wail that would give his friends and neighbors a fighting chance.
He braked in front of the yellow-brick firehouse, cut the engine, raced inside and ran smack into a dilemma: He had no authority. Only the chief was supposed to give the OK to sound the warning. Another firefighter, quiet, blond Shane Burrows, 23--Rona Burrows' son--was there too. He had tried to reach Edgcomb, but the chief's cell phone was turned off--a requirement for the EMT class.
The two men had seconds to decide and what they decided was:
Screw the rules.
Flip the switch.
A moment later they were joined in the firehouse by Steve Maltas' mother, Gloria, who'd hustled there when she heard about the storm. She, too, worked at the firehouse in her spare time.
But even with the siren, the townspeople weren't paying attention. When Gloria Maltas looked outside, she saw them standing in the street, watching the sky. Maybe they thought the siren was just a precaution, or maybe they were trusting old Utican wisdom: A tornado won't go in a valley. A tornado won't cross water. Both were false.
So Gloria, ordinarily a shy, reticent woman who deeply disliked anything that could be remotely construed as making a spectacle of herself, who usually spoke in a soft, whispery voice that made listeners lean in a little to catch her words, did something wholly uncharacteristic: She directed Steve to one side of Mill Street and she took the other, and they began running and yelling at people who stood in the doorways, telling them to get inside, take cover, for God's sake go back in.
Gloria kept running. She ran faster than she'd ever run before, and she didn't realize how fast she was running. A day or so later, her legs ached and she couldn't figure out why, and then she remembered the running, running up and down Mill Street, screaming at people who must've wondered what on earth had gotten into sweet little Gloria Maltas.
Steve Maltas made it back to the fire station, where his last warning was issued to a few folks who stood in the doorway of the bar across the street. "Get in! Get back in!" he hollered, and he saw that one of them was Jay Vezain, who did as he was told, and then the others who'd been standing behind Vezain went back in too.
Because the fire station didn't have a basement, Maltas and Burrows and the other firefighters who had gathered there headed for the boiler room. They heaved the door shut behind them, and then they waited, having done all they could do, for whatever the next flurry of seconds would bring.
Gloria Maltas, whose last warning was to the people standing outside Duffy's, wasn't going to make it back to the fire station. It was only a block away, and she had started back, thinking she could do it, but then she glanced over her shoulder and Oh my God saw the tornado gaining on her, spreading out behind her.
She was running toward the station, running and running, but there wasn't time, there wasn't time. The big black triangle was rising right behind her, capturing more and more of the sky.
At Mill Street Market, the tiny grocery store in the middle of the block, Gloria halted at the glass door--the one with the "We appreciate our customers" sign--and pounded on it. Closed, locked. Nobody stirred inside. Gloria had done her job too well. They were all in the back, she guessed, having fled into the big walk-in freezer.
Still Gloria pounded and hollered, because there was nothing else to do, no other option. She had to get inside somewhere, anywhere, and then she saw Rona Burrows running toward the door, jiggling the key in the lock, twisting it, that lock was always stubborn.
"Hurry up!" cried Burrows, pulling her inside. "If I have to see you flying through the air, I'll kill you!" she added, half-laughing, half-sobbing, and then they got to the back of the store, past the meat display case and into the freezer where the others--Mary Jo and Bruce Conner, the couple who managed the market, and a woman Gloria didn't know--were huddled.
They waited that final minute, not knowing if they were really safe, not knowing if the walls would hold, not knowing if these were the last seconds of their lives, and they embraced, and then--at 6:09 p.m.--there was a sound like hundreds of cars being dumped on the roof, and they knew that it was, unmistakably, upon them.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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chicagotribune.com >> Special reports
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UTICA, ILLINOIS
Part 2: `Milestone's gone!'
A savage tornado obliterates the century-old landmark where many sought shelter. Who lived? Who died?
By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 6, 2004
In the basement of Duffy's Tavern, dirt sifted between the floorboards overhead for 10 seconds. They could hear muffled booms from above, the crashes, the bangs and cracks and rattles. The whole building seemed to shudder, as if bumped rudely in a crowd. Sixty seconds before, they had hurried into the basement, chased there by a tornado flying toward the tiny town of Utica at 6:09 p.m. on April 20.
Down the wooden steps they had come, hurrying, hurrying, but trying not to shove. The lights died. Once at the bottom, they huddled shoulder to shoulder, next to things they couldn't see: shelves with plastic tubs of French dressing and twist-tied bags of the green and white mints that Lisle Elsbury liked to hand out to departing customers.
Elsbury, the owner of Duffy's, was last in line, having gathered everybody--six staff members, six customers--and made sure they were headed down the stairs and then closing the basement door behind him. His foot was still on the bottom step when it hit.
Ten seconds of shaking. Of falling dirt. "Everybody OK?" Elsbury said, once the shaking stopped. A nervous murmur of yeses.
He waited another 45 seconds or so. When he thought it was all over--you couldn't be sure, not really, but you followed your instincts--Elsbury headed up the steps and cautiously opened the door.
He expected chaos. He expected, at the very least, severe damage: splintered bar, overturned tables and chairs, busted windows.
But Elsbury saw little change. Later he would discover a great deal of structural damage to the second floor, but for now, he felt lucky.
Chris Rochelle, 23, the bartender, was right behind his boss. When he saw that Duffy's seemed intact, Rochelle moved straight out the back door to check on the rest of the town. He had good friends up and down this street, but none better than Larry Ventrice over at Milestone, Larry who'd encouraged him to start lifting weights again and take care of himself, Larry who'd lent him a car in which to drive home to Kansas last Christmas. If Duffy's looked OK, then Rochelle wanted to help his friend Larry clean up Milestone.
He ran north through the alley, past the backs of Duffy's and Skoog's Pub and the other buildings, past the blown-down bricks and felled trees and hunks of twisted metal.
When he got to the corner he couldn't believe what he saw. What he didn't see.
Rochelle ran back to Duffy's--he would have no memory of the running, of his knees rising and falling or of the breath tearing in and out of his chest, but he knew he must have done so, because that's where he ended up--and he screamed, "Milestone's gone! Milestone's gone!" Even as he was saying it, even as the words flew out of his mouth, it didn't sound possible. But it was. He had seen it. Or, not seen it.
Steve Maltas, who had taken refuge in the boiler room of the firehouse along with seven other volunteer firefighters, shoved open the heavy door. Yep, the building was still standing.
Then they all hurried outside, and the first thing they saw was what wasn't there: Milestone.
A knee-high pile of rubble--sandstone blocks, thick wooden beams and a crusty overlay of broken concrete--seethed and steamed in the space where a two-story building had stood since 1887, right across the street from the firehouse.
For a few seconds Maltas and the others were too stunned to move, too numb, their minds utterly rejecting what their eyes were telling them was true: A building had been flattened in 10 seconds, like a sandcastle squashed by a bored kid at the beach.
They broke out of their astonishment and ran across the street to the jagged pile. Where to start? What to do? Good God. The center was absolute mashed chaos--wood and concrete and stone and wire and a thick powdery mist of pulverized mortar--but the edges, the edges looked bizarre: At the edges were huge intact sandstone blocks that had toppled in neat rows, like dominoes.
They started pulling at the rocks, doing what anybody would do: trying to get to whoever was inside, grabbing and lifting and clawing. They could hear screams and calls for help, and it was a healthy sound, God knows, because silence would have been worse.
Seconds later, they were joined by other people, people who had emerged from downtown buildings and looked around to check the damage and then saw--Good Lord--Milestone, what was left of Milestone, and so they ran to the site and bent over or dropped to their knees and pulled, scratched, dug and heaved the stones, but there were so many stones and so many layers and it seemed hopeless. They couldn't let themselves think that, though, so they just kept digging and pulling at stones.
So intent were they, so focused, that at first they didn't notice the damage to the rest of Utica. They didn't really see the garage right next to Milestone, where the Fire Department parked its ambulances, wrecked so badly that later it would have to be torn down. They hardly noticed that Starved Rock Bait & Tackle, the century-old building across the alley from Milestone where Jim Collins had sold gas, cigarettes, soda pop and hunting licenses for almost two decades, was a ruined mess.
All anybody could think about was Milestone, Milestone, Milestone, because the tavern wasn't just mauled and pummeled, wasn't just grievously damaged. It was gone.
In the top layer of the rubble, two bodies were clearly, excruciatingly visible. And because Utica is a small town, because everybody knows everybody, they knew who they were: Jay Vezain and Carol Schultheis, two local folks who'd been having a drink in Milestone just before the storm.
By the time Joe Krizel got there about five minutes later, at least two dozen people were tugging at the rubble. Krizel worked at Uniman, a sand plant on a hill just north of Utica. From his vantage point up there, he had watched the tornado move in, watched it churn and whip its way northeast, then saw it pause over Utica--10 seconds, he thought, no more--almost as if it had an appointment there, as if it knew where it wanted to go, right down to the street address. Krizel couldn't tear his eyes away from it.
Then the spinning black cloud moved on, heading up the hill where it broke apart, and Krizel suddenly felt released from whatever spell that awful thing had cast over him.
Krizel, 49, had been a volunteer firefighter for more than two decades. He knew there'd be a lot of damage, so he slid into his pickup to head downtown. Trouble was, the road was blocked by debris--ripped-up trees with their shocked roots still dangling, thrown-down telephone poles, big chunks of roofs, swatches of curled-up sheet metal--and he couldn't get through. He hollered at Blayne Bimm--son of Shelba Bimm, one of Krizel's Fire Department colleagues--who also worked at Uniman, and Blayne hopped into an endloader and cleared the way for the pickup.
Krizel took a look at the mess that had been Milestone. He knew what kind of job this was: technical rescue, which meant equipment and expertise, not just hard work and good intentions. Maltas already had alerted state officials and in the next few hours 52 fire departments would respond. The streets of Utica would be jammed with firetrucks. But right now, it was just Joe Krizel and the Utica firefighters, and they could hear people calling for help from under the rubble.
Krizel dashed into the firehouse, flung open his locker and started yanking on boots and coveralls. He slapped on his hardhat with the light on it.
Back across the street, firefighters had just pulled Rich Little from a corner of the rubble, and Little had pulled out Jim Ventrice. It was the easiest rescue they'd have; from here on out, it would be desperate and difficult work, but the two men who'd been standing next to a couple of freezers in the basement seemed to be fine. It was astonishing, really: Amid the destruction, with an entire two-story building compressed into an appallingly tiny space, two men had climbed out. They were dazed and groggy and dust-covered, but alive.
A woman ran up to Little and embraced him. It was Kristy Kaiser, 35, the girlfriend he was supposed to meet in Milestone that night. But she'd seen the tornado blooming in her rear-view mirror like an assailant who'd been hiding in the back seat, so she pulled her Dodge Ram to the curb, jumped out and ran into a grocery store, where she spent the anxious minutes in a walk-in freezer with strangers.
Now she was here with Little, here amid the confusion and the shouting. It was so chaotic that Ventrice wandered over to a stack of stones and sat down, and minutes later said hello to a friend, and the friend remembers thinking, "Why's he bothering me when we got a crisis here?"--not realizing until much later that Ventrice himself had just been pulled out of the building. It was that kind of scene: wild, surreal, drenched in panic and dread and a kind of crazed disbelief.
Gradually, though, the firefighters took control, moving the townspeople back and back and back, so Krizel could get to work. They were afraid to touch Vezain and Schultheis, afraid they might send the whole fragile mass crashing down on the survivors inside, so they draped the bodies in plastic, and tried to put out of their minds what they would never get out of their memories. They had a job to do, there were more people down there, living people. They could hear them crying and screaming. So there was no time for grief or reflection.
By 6:20, 11 minutes after the tornado belted Utica, Shelba Bimm and Dave Edgcomb, Utica's fire chief, showed up. They'd been in a class in Oglesby to upgrade their EMT certifications. When the tornado sirens sounded, their instructor, as protocol required, marched the students into the basement. On the way down, somebody turned on a dispatch radio and everybody got the news: Utica.
"We gotta go," Bimm told the teacher, and she and Edgcomb ran to the parking lot, Edgcomb to his pickup and Bimm to her Honda CRV, and their journey back to Utica was something neither would remember in any detail, because their only thought was get there, get there, and it bullied all other thoughts out of the way.
They had to abandon their vehicles at the edge of town, because there was too much stuff clogging the streets: trees and rooftops and hunks of siding, plus toppled power lines that twitched and sizzled. They had to claw their way through branches and shattered glass, around broken pipes and crinkled windowless cars, and they took a crazy, makeshift route under and over and through. It was like moving across a war zone, Bimm thought, like advancing through a dangerous maze during combat.
She made it to Church Street, and she looked at her house for just a second--everything was happening in fragments now, time had been sliced up into smaller and smaller increments--but it didn't make sense. She couldn't figure out at first what she was looking at.
Somebody had made a mistake. A bad, bad mistake. This wasn't her house. This was a place that had been wrenched off its foundation, twisted sideways beneath a battered roof. This looked like one of her dollhouses--the kind she sold in her front room--after somebody had knocked it off a shelf and stepped on it.
She shook her head. Said to herself, Well, OK, my house is gone. Let's go see what other folks need.
And the retired 1st-grade teacher with the bright white hair bent over and thrashed her way inside the mess of what had been her house, digging out her fluorescent vest, so people would know she was an EMT. Then she started toward Milestone.
Please, God. Don't let it be kids.
That was Edgcomb's single thought, the one that kept pace with his racing heart as he ran toward Milestone: Please, God, no kids. Please. Please.
He'd been a firefighter for 25 years, he was a powerful, well-built man, a natural leader, and nobody would call Dave Edgcomb weak, no sir. He carried an air of can-do confidence.
But right now he was, in his thoughts, on his knees:
Please, God, just don't let it be kids.
He knew it was bad, real bad, and he knew he could handle anything--but not kids. No dead kids.
In one of his first days as a firefighter, Edgcomb was called to an accident scene on Interstate Highway 80. A drunk driver had crashed her car, the car was burning, the driver had tumbled out and was fine--wasn't that always the way?--but she kept screaming, my kids, my kids, and the firefighters did the best they could, but in the end, Edgcomb was asked to retrieve two small charred bodies in the back seat.
Now, as he approached Milestone and saw his fellow Utica firefighters, saw their grim faces, he knew. He just knew. There were kids down there.
Please, God.
From under the rubble along the southern wall, Krizel heard somebody yell for help. He thought he knew that voice. So he yelled back and, yeah, it was Jarad Stillwell, a pal of Krizel's son Zack.
"How many down there?" Krizel called. "How many, Jarad?"
"A bunch." The raw, choked voice of a 13-year-old, scared out of his mind.
Krizel spotted a dime-sized hole in the jagged debris. "Hey, Jarad," he said, "can you get your finger out there?"
A pale fingernail appeared in the opening, then a pale finger, then a few more fingers managed to spread the hole wider. Krizel touched Jarad's fingers.
The firefighter knew how extraordinarily careful he had to be. If he moved the rocks too much, too fast, he could dislodge a crucial section. He had to consider every gesture he made, every wriggle and bump--but he also had to work quickly, because the people trapped below might be dying.
Krizel probed cautiously at the stones and splintered wood and broken concrete, taking a piece here and then a piece over there, careful, so careful. It required almost two hours just to enlarge the hole.
Finally it was big enough, and Krizel reached down to take Jarad's hand--yeah, yeah, here he comes--and Krizel and four other firefighters pulled the kid up and out. There was a kid next to him down there, Gregg Miller, 14, and they pulled him out too. Right as the boys emerged there was a moment of panic because they were drenched in something sticky and red--Is it blood? For God's sake, are they bleeding?--but it turned out to be syrup for the soda pop served at Milestone, stored in the basement in pressurized containers that had popped open in the collapse. The kids were OK.
Krizel handed off the boys to his colleagues--Shelba Bimm was there, his old friend Shelba, where'd she come from?--and then he got ready for the hardest job of all: reaching the people who were entombed under hundreds of tons of debris.
He knew a technical rescue team from the Sandwich Fire Department was on the way, he knew Edgcomb was coordinating things, but he had to get started. He could hear people screaming.
Krizel looked down in the hole from which he'd pulled the boys. Might work.
He inched himself into the opening, feet first. It was just barely wide enough. A couple of guys held his arms and lowered him on down, on down, until his feet hit something solid and he had to stop. Krizel flipped on a light. He could see a young girl's narrow ankle caught under a beam. He wiggled and turned and twisted so that he was on his stomach, so that he could crawl over to her.
Above him, he could hear the crunchy steps of people walking on the debris, feel the pile shift. One wrong footfall, Krizel knew, might bring everything crashing down. So he climbed back up and stuck his head out of the hole and yelled, "Get offa there! Clear those people off!"
Then he went back down, back on his belly again, and crawled closer to the girl. By this time he could see other bodies, too, some alive and some dead. Krizel was crawling through at least 6 inches of frigid water, through sewage and booze and electrical lines. He used tin snips to clip and bend and poke and push his way forward. I got $10,000 worth of rescue equipment up there in the truck, and none of it's gonna do me a bit of good, Krizel thought. Just these tin snips.
Water. Wires. Sheet metal. Pipes. Jagged wood. Krizel kept cutting, cutting until his hands were red-raw. Ashley Miller, the girl whose ankle he'd seen under the beam, was crying; she was in pain and wanted out, and he said, "I can't get to you yet. Hang on." She sobbed, "But I can see your light! Come and get me!"
There were other firefighters down in the hole by then, too, coming behind Krizel, cutting and pushing, but gently. They had to be smallish, fit men, like Krizel, because the makeshift tunnel was so narrow, so frail. They didn't know what they were touching or what the touching would do. Before Krizel cut a pipe, he wondered, Is it gas? Electric? Water? He couldn't tell. He just kept working, pushing, tunneling, and when he came to a dead body, he kept going, kept going, toward the living.
For the people buried alive in Milestone, it had sounded like an explosion, like a bomb going off right over their heads, like the end of the world.
Mike Miller was slammed to his knees. His left foot was twisted up under him, and Debbie was jammed against that foot, and they couldn't even flinch, they were pinned in every direction.
Before Jarad and Gregg were rescued, Debbie had called out the children's names, one by one, and after a child responded, she went on to the next one, calling for Christopher, 8; Jennifer, 12; Ashley, 16; and Gregg and Jarad.
When she said, "Mike," there was no answer from 18-year-old Mike Jr., and she knew. She knew.
They started yelling for help, all of them, and the kids cried. In a minute or two they heard answering yells--people on the outside, above them--so they knew somebody was coming.
But when? When? Why didn't somebody just unstack these stones and junk and get them the hell out of there? Ashley was crammed up next to her mother; Jennifer was pinned against Ashley; everybody was smushed against somebody else.
They were wet and cold and scared and confused. They could hear pipes bursting and then, because this was the basement of a bar, they could smell alcohol, urine and excrement. Their arms and legs and shoulders and backs were clasped by a vast unfathomable heaviness. They could barely move their chins an inch or shift a knee. They were suspended in a prison of sandstone, concrete and terrible weight.
Mike Miller sensed a presence wedged beside him, and somehow he realized it was Larry Ventrice. Or what had been Larry Ventrice. Mike Miller was as close to Larry as a person standing next to him in a crowded elevator.
They could hear the firefighters inching their way toward them, cutting and pushing, and the great heaviness all around them shimmied and creaked and groaned. They could hear Jarad and Gregg being pulled out, and that gave them hope, great hope. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Mike Miller asked the firefighters how bad it was, and they wouldn't give him details. "Bad," one said. That was the only word he would use: "Bad."
After another two-and-a-half hours of work, rescuers had reached Chris, the smallest. They pulled him out, and then it was on to Ashley. Her thin blond hair was caught under a wooden beam, and they told her she'd have to pull out several handfuls before they could free her. Ashley hesitated, but her mother said, "Do it, Ashley," and she did, yanking a succession of strands in small painful bundles from the front of her scalp.
Mike and Debbie, though, were bigger, bound tighter, and would require another three hours of delicate work by the rescuers. While firefighters snipped and probed, one managed to lower a flashlight into Debbie's fingers. He also handed her some ice and asked if she wanted anything else.
"Yeah," she said. "A cigarette."
That drew chuckles. And Mike--did he want anything?
"A pain pill," he said. His back, his foot: It was agony, agony. It was so excruciating, in fact, that he was finished. He'd had enough. He was done. Sick of fighting. "I'm going to give up," he told his wife. A simple fact: I'm through.
"No," Debbie said. "You're not giving up. You're not giving up."
He hung on not because he wanted to--he didn't want to--but because he had no choice. He couldn't move, he was helpless, he was trapped in life right now, the same way he was trapped under the heavy stones.
Gradually a tunnel widened above them, and they could see hands and lights. Voices were louder. Mike Miller had to push Larry Ventrice's knee to one side to free his own leg. First Debbie, then Mike, were strapped on backboards and hauled out.
Within the first hour after the tornado, Chief Richard Kell and 30 firefighters from Sandwich had arrived, experts in rescues in collapsed buildings. Kell dispatched two teams--one with two men, the other with three--to crawl under the rubble toward the survivors, and Krizel was told to come up, come back up, they'd take over. Come up. The crew from Sandwich would continue the tedious journey: snipping, bending back metal, scooting gingerly through the water and muck and sharp-edged broken stones.
When Krizel climbed out of the hole he was as tired as he'd ever been in his life. He was angry, too, at having been relieved. He argued, he fought, but he knew they were right. He'd done all he could, but there was so much more to do. Living people were still pinned down there.
The dead were down there, too, people he knew, friends of his, and it was clear the night had really just begun.
He stood there a minute or so, and then Shelba Bimm came forward and hugged him, holding him as his shoulders bobbed up and down with quiet sobs, because now there was a weight on Joe Krizel, too, and it was heavier than any building.
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ABOUT THIS SERIES
To report this story, Tribune reporter Julia Keller interviewed the nine survivors of the Milestone collapse, and their friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues; and the friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues of the victims of the Milestone collapse; over a seven-month period, beginning a week after the tornado.
She also interviewed townspeople of Utica, Ill.; public officials, including employees and elected officials of Utica and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; meteorologists at the National Weather Service's Chicago office; tornado experts such as Howard Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma; public safety officials, including Utica Fire Chief Dave Edgcomb, Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni, LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton and LaSalle County Coroner Jody Bernard.
The reporter also used newspaper and television accounts of the tornado, and consulted historical books about Utica and the surrounding countryside.
Passages describing downtown Utica before and after the tornado were based on first-hand observations by the reporter, and on the observations of townspeople who were interviewed. Descriptions of the interior of Milestone the night of the tornado were based on the recollections of survivors and on the recollections of other townspeople who frequented the bar. Descriptions of the exterior were based on photographs and the accounts of Utica citizens.
Passages describing the rescue at Milestone were based on eyewitness accounts obtained from multiple interviews with firefighters, police officers, EMTs and volunteer citizen rescuers at the scene that night, along with the recollections of survivors and townspeople present shortly after the tavern collapsed.
Scenes of the Miller family's life after being rescued from Milestone--in their Utica home; sitting on the porch with Mike Miller; searching for a new home; the morning their granddaughter was born--were witnessed by the reporter. Scenes of Pat and Lisle Elsbury's life after the tornado were compiled through first-hand observation by the reporter and through interviews; thoughts and emotions attributed to the Elsburys were derived from multiple interviews with the couple.
Passages dealing with Shelba Bimm, Edgcomb, Steve Maltas, Gloria Maltas, Rona Burrows and other townspeople were based on interviews and observations by the reporter.
Scenes that were not witnessed by the reporter were assembled through multiple interviews with people who were present, both named in the story and not named. When thoughts and emotions are presented, those thoughts and emotions come directly from the reporter's interviews. Descriptions of the activities and thoughts of people who died in the collapse were compiled through interviews with those who were present, or those to whom the deceased had confided their thoughts and emotions.
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TUESDAY: A town grieves, then rebuilds.
By Julia Keller
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 7, 2004
They picked at the pile, inch by inch, stone by stone, just in case. They thought they'd gotten to everyone who was alive, but you had to be sure. You had to. Buckets of debris were passed from hand to hand along chains firefighters. It began to rain, but nobody noticed.
Earlier that evening--at 6:09 p.m. April 20--a tornado had barreled through the town of Utica in north-central Illinois and, with a tornado's savage whim, had shunned a building here but shredded one over there. Hitting and missing and hitting.
Milestone. That was where the firefighters now were gathered, hundreds of firefighters from 52 units throughout the state. The 117-year-old tavern near the corner of Church and Mill Streets had taken a direct hit and collapsed into a ponderous heap of wood, stone and concrete, trapping 17 people who had sought shelter within its thick walls.
Nine had been rescued earlier that night: Jim Ventrice, Rich Little, Jarad Stillwell, and Mike and Debbie Miller and their children Ashley, Jennifer, Gregg and Chris.
The eight others still down there, firefighters believed, were dead. But they had to be sure.
So they kept working, systematically removing buckets full of rubble, pushing back thoughts of anything except the task at hand: dig, fill the bucket, pass the bucket, dig.
The whole place was lighted like a movie set. The lights cast an eerie glow on the firefighters in their heavy gear and their hardhats, their steel-toed boots and leather gloves. The lights splashed up on their solemn faces, which looked steep and angular in the artificial glare. All of that illumination made it seem as if a strange new sun had been unearthed, a mixed-up one that didn't know night from day.
At about 1:30 a.m., when the listening devices that were dropped down into crevices continued to fetch only silence, they knew the rescue part of their job was over. Now it was a different mission: recovering the bodies.
Buck Bierbom's skid loader was waved forward to handle the larger chunks of debris, but they had to be careful, so careful. When firefighters edged close to a body, the heavy equipment backed off and the painstaking labor by hand recommenced, the tender, awful job of verifying what they already knew.
Bierbom was a local boy, Utica-born and Utica-raised, a slender, wiry man with a creased, weathered, beard-fringed face and the kindest eyes you'd ever hope to see. He and his brothers, Mark and Doug, had run their own construction company for 12 years. Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni had called him at 6:30 p.m., 21 minutes after the tornado leveled Milestone, and asked him to get there with his skid loader and mini-excavator just as quick as he could.
So tonight Bierbom was unearthing the bodies of people he'd known all his life. People he'd grown up with. People he'd waved to on the street maybe twice, maybe three times a day for a whole bunch of years.
Shortly before dawn, when all the bodies had been located, a chain saw cut away sections of Milestone's floor. Bierbom's big machine removed the sections. Then Jody Bernard, the somber, petite LaSalle County coroner, or one of her three deputy coroners, would climb down, examine the body and pronounce the death.
Each body was placed in a blue bag, then the blue bag was lifted out of the hole.
At 6:59 a.m., they lifted out Jay Vezain.
At 7:04 a.m., Carol Schultheis.
At 11:12 a.m., Mike Miller Jr.
At 11:15 a.m., Larry Ventrice.
At 11:17 a.m., Beverly Wood.
At 11:22 a.m., Marian Ventrice.
At 11:25 a.m., Wayne Ball.
At 11:28 a.m., Helen Studebaker Mahnke.
All but Vezain and Schultheis died of traumatic asphyxiation, which means they were crushed to death, probably in the first instant of the collapse, when the walls and floors began to pancake down into the basement. Vezain and Schultheis, who never made it into the basement, died of blunt force trauma.
But those official-sounding causes of death, announced by Bernard at the coroner's inquest May 27 at the LaSalle County Courthouse, hardly hint at what actually happens to human bodies when crushed by a two-story building: the brutality, the blunt and unimaginable violence of hundreds of tons of stone and wood and concrete collapsing upon fragile frames and soft flesh. There were shattered bones and severed arteries and fractured skulls and lacerated organs and one transection of the brain stem--decapitation.
The ones who survived did so because they chanced to be standing in just the right places. The walk-in cooler and the two freezers blocked a portion of the plummeting debris, creating instant, lifesaving lean-tos.
There had been, survivors said, simply no time. No time for final thoughts or last-minute regrets, for so much as a cry of pain or yelp of warning. There was only time, if one is inclined to think that way, for the freeing of eight souls to continue their journeys elsewhere.
- - - - -
They lived or they died. Among the living, the most serious injuries were the broken ankles suffered by Mike Miller and daughter Ashley, but no one was paralyzed or maimed, which meant there was no middle ground for the people in Milestone. It was life or death.
Whether you ended up on one side of that line or the other depended on whether you went down those basement stairs and what you did when you got there.
Whether you turned left or right. Whether you paused or didn't pause. Whether, when everybody was hustling down the stairs, you waited to let an older person pass or a kid go ahead of you, or whether you didn't wait, or whether you moved to the center of the basement or stayed against the sides. Left, right, forward, backward, life, death.
Schultheis' body was found beneath the video poker machine. Vezain had used his cell phone to call his sisters, making sure they were safe in the storm, and in the last call--suddenly cut off--he talked about trying to close the door, so maybe that's what he was doing, which would have been characteristic of the amiable, thoughtful Vezain, and then there was no more time, time itself was extinguished, and eight histories ended abruptly in a sandstone tavern at dusk.
The funerals began two days later, when Vezain was remembered at a service in LaSalle, and continued for a week after the tornado, in locations that widened out from Utica in concentric rings: Wood, Ball and Schultheis, also in LaSalle; Mahnke in West Brooklyn; Miller in Rock Falls; the Ventrices in Chicago.
They started on a hill about a half-mile northeast of Utica, where the tornado had worn itself out, and worked their way back, back to where it began, some 15 1/2 miles southwest of that hill.
It was approximately 10 a.m. on April 21, and Albert Pietrycha, Mark Ratzer and Jim Allsopp, meteorologists assigned to the National Weather Service's Chicago forecast office in Romeoville, were doing what they always do after a major storm: surveying the damage, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They'd map it on the ground first and then, the next day, by air.
Armed with laptops and GPS tracking software, the men in the Ford Explorer crossed country roads and state highways, cut through farm fields and spongy riverbank, using thrashed trees and flattened vegetation and ripped-off roofs to track the tornado's path. Out in the open ground they found its vivid footprint in the black mud, a herringbone pattern that testified to the violent, switchback winds.
Recording the damage in its wake is how meteorologists rank a tornado's severity. The F scale, named for University of Chicago meteorologist Ted Fujita, is based on the havoc wrought by tornadic winds--not on an actual measurement of those winds. The Utica tornado was deemed an F3, meaning that, based on the destruction the meteorologists observed, it probably had packed winds of between 158 and 206 m.p.h.
Despite all that is known, however, despite all the charts and statistics and technology, tornado forecasting still has a long way to go. Since the 1950s, which saw the first major advance in atmospheric science, little has changed. Tornado forecasting still is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty, with the locked-up secrets of nature's worst tantrums.
It's a mystery why some thunderstorms turn into the supercell variety, whose organized rotating updrafts explode into tornadoes. The questions keep scientists such as Pietrycha, who's worked at the weather service for two years, relentlessly searching a tornado's dark heart.
And there is a point, Pietrycha knows, where the scientific facts abruptly stop, a stark cliff-edge where something else takes over, some inscrutable plan or perhaps just cruel caprice. Destiny--or dumb luck. Who can say which?
That was why, as Pietrycha and his colleagues followed the tornado's crooked trail that morning, they were all struck by a thought they couldn't seem to get out of their heads:
If the 200-yard-wide funnel had moved just a bit to either side during its furious charge, leaning a half-mile left or right, it would have missed Utica altogether. It would have churned up only farmland, and Milestone still would be standing.
And the regulars, people such as Jay Vezain and Carol Schultheis, would have had quite a story to tell, the story about the tornado that nearly hit Utica. Talk about your close calls.
Why the tornado dived straight at Milestone, why it demolished some houses and ignored others, why it turned when it did and didn't turn when it didn't--those were questions the meteorologists couldn't answer.
And neither, come to think of it, could anybody else.
- - - - -
Mike Miller and his family had been trapped in the Milestone rubble for almost five hours. They were rescued, but sometimes you can be rescued and still be trapped.
Two months after the tornado, Miller sat on the postage-stamp of a front porch of his house in Utica and smoked Marlboros, one after another, through the long summer afternoons. He looked out at the green field across the street. Beyond the field and the tangled mass of trees was the Illinois River. Even if you couldn't see the river you knew it was there; the river's scent rode the breeze, just the faintest tang of moisture and sweet coolness and the tantalizing hint of elsewhere.
His ankle was on the mend. He'd spent a week in the hospital and two weeks in a rehabilitation center. Now he was home, in the small blue rented house on Washington Street.
Miller's skinny legs were propped up on the porch rail. The cast and bulky protective boot on his left foot was the only suggestion of heaviness about him. He was as thin as a matchstick, which tended to make his thick nest of hair--not quite gray but getting there--look even wilder. He had a bountiful mustache and flyaway eyebrows and round spectacles. There was a quietness about Mike Miller, a kind of baffled resignation.
The Miller family had to find someplace else to live. The landlord had evicted them in May--too many complaints about the kids from neighbors, they were told. Granted, Mike and Debbie hadn't been around the house a lot to keep an eye on things; he was an engineer with Illinois Central Railroad, she was a cook at Milestone.
Now both were home all the time, because Mike was on disability leave and there was no more Milestone. But it was too late. Now the Millers wanted to be rid of Utica just as much as Utica seemed to want to be rid of them.
They hoped to find a place in nearby LaSalle, so they could stay in the same area as their three oldest children, Kassi, 24, Brandon, 23, and Michelle, 19, who hadn't been with them in Milestone.
Their next-oldest child, 18-year-old Mike Jr., had died when the tavern collapsed.
It was bewildering sometimes, Mike thought, all that had happened to his family that night. "The Good Lord put us through four-and-a-half hours of hell," was how he phrased it, thinking back on the long rescue and the pain.
And there were times when he wondered, as he sat on the porch with his crutches stacked beside him, if they'd ever really gotten out of that place, ever really broken the surface. There were times when he felt as if things were piled on top of him still, things that made it tough to move forward.
Tear it down. That's what they told him.
And Lisle Elsbury said, Nope.
But you could see their point. Duffy's Tavern had long ragged holes on both sides of its second floor, the bricks ripped out as savagely as if someone had been digging for treasure hidden behind them. When the tornado hit, it tore off sections of the grain bins of Utica Elevator just across the canal, turning them into missiles. Two of those sections sliced into Duffy's.
A week after the storm, Elsbury was standing in the middle of Mill Street, peering intently at the building in which he'd stuffed his hopes and his cash. Contractors hired to help him repair it were snapping together the scaffolding to reach the second floor. Elsbury wore sunglasses, a hardhat, black jeans and a bright green T-shirt with "Duffy's Tavern" in yellow letters.
Built in 1892, easily Utica's most distinctive-looking structure, Duffy's sported a tower that flared out over the corner of Mill and Canal Streets with a Disneyesque flourish. That was why Elsbury and his wife, Pat, had bought it the year before. They loved the look of the place.
What it looked like now was a lost cause.
Elsbury had worked in construction in Lyons before buying Duffy's, so he knew the repairs would cost at least $100,000, only part of which would be reimbursed by insurance; already, he was deep in arguments with the agent.
And there was something else.
When you looked at Duffy's, you couldn't help but think about Milestone. They had been a block away from each other. Elsbury and Larry Ventrice, Milestone's brusque manager, had rhyming lives: Both had done other things before deciding, in their middle years, to run a bar in Utica. Both had wives who kept their jobs and lived in other cities so the family could have health insurance.
Marian Ventrice had quit her job just two months before, to join her husband at Milestone.
Pat Elsbury, who worked as a secretary for an oil-recycling company in La Grange, had been contemplating the same kind of bold stroke: Just do it. Forget what everybody says is the smart move. Follow your heart. Lisle was remodeling the second floor, turning it into an apartment--just like Larry and Marian had done at Milestone--and they'd be living and working together. Just like Milestone.
And then came April 20, when Milestone collapsed and killed the Ventrices and six others. Pat and Lisle Elsbury were haunted by the crazy capriciousness of it all: Two bars. Two couples. One tornado. Two fates.
Why did Milestone fall and Duffy's stand? Pat Elsbury tried to stop thinking about it, but she couldn't. When she drove to Utica, she kept running into the questions as if they were police roadblocks: Why Milestone and not Duffy's? Why had the tornado veered left just before it hit Duffy's, dealing it only a glancing blow, but pounced on Milestone as if on a mission?
Why was Lisle Elsbury alive and Larry Ventrice dead?
Pat, a pretty, talkative woman with strawberry blond hair and a quick laugh, soon realized that the only way to outfox her thoughts was to do what Lisle did: stay busy.
So while her husband kept an eye on the crew that was restoring Duffy's, rebuilding the brick sides and shoring up the roof, Pat was there every Saturday and Sunday. When Duffy's reopened after three weeks, Pat would wait tables and grapple with paperwork, unpack supplies and sweep floors. Anything to keep her mind away from that relentless and quietly terrifying, "Why?"
Jim Ventrice had gone to Milestone every day, for lunch or dinner or both. Now that it was gone, he had to get his meals and his companionship somewhere else.
Through the summer you'd see him at Skoog's Pub, maybe, sipping a Miller Genuine Draft, his favorite, or over at Duffy's, having a burger, or sometimes at Joy & Ed's.
Ventrice and Rich Little were the first two people rescued from Milestone's basement. While the others down there died or were forced to wait hours before being pulled out, Ventrice and Little had escaped right away. Within minutes. The building fell in all around them, but except for a few bruises and cracked ribs, both were fine.
When he'd gone down to the basement that night, Ventrice turned right at the bottom of the stairs. He stood beside Little, a stranger, over by a couple of freezers.
He didn't know why. If Little hadn't been there, Jim Ventrice believed, then he would've gone over next to his cousin Larry Ventrice or Larry's wife, Marian, Milestone's managers, and he would've absorbed the full weight of the falling slabs--the concrete roof, the second floor, the first floor--just as they had.
A week later, Jim Ventrice called Little.
"Were you in the tornado?"
"Yeah."
"I was the guy beside you."
"Well," Little said, "that freezer saved us."
Wasn't much more to it than that. Wasn't much more to say. They didn't talk philosophy or religion or predestination. The freezer had blocked the falling debris, sparing them. It was the freezer, plain and simple. Wasn't it?
Ventrice had plenty of time that summer to sort it all out. He'd walk along Mill Street, hands in his pockets, and think. He'd just about settled things in his mind: You had to live with the fact that for a lot of questions, there aren't any answers. Good people die. And God doesn't have to explain himself. It's his call.
Rich Little had moved in with Kristy Kaiser, the woman he'd been supposed to meet in Milestone. The single parents blended their families, his three kids and her three.
A month after the tornado, he bought a Harley, his longtime dream. On solitary rides he thought about that night, about how he'd been sure it would change him in some fundamental way, but it really hadn't. He was the same guy. Wasn't he?
- - - - -
Debbie Miller was writing down recipes. It was the best way she could think of to remember Milestone, a job she loved, the first outside job she'd held after 18 years. Fried chicken, burgers, spaghetti, hot wings--garlic was the secret ingredient in the wings--and steaks, all the recipes she and her boss, Larry Ventrice, had concocted together. They'd never put them on paper, because Debbie caught on quickly and repetition did the rest, and even Marian took to calling the back room of Milestone "Debbie's kitchen."
Debbie had lost so much--her son, her job, her best friends, Larry and Marian--and she wanted to hang on to what she could.
While Mike Miller sat on the porch the first two months after the tornado, feet propped on the rail, Debbie often stayed inside the small house, smoking cigarettes until the rooms were hung with a yellow-gray glaze. Blond bangs hung between Debbie's eyes and the world; straight blond hair fell down her back. The big-screen TV that dominated the living room always seemed to be on, and the Miller kids and a few of their friends and Debbie sat on couches and watched. With the curtains closed you couldn't always tell if it was day or night, unless you already knew.
But the Millers had to find a new place to live, so on an afternoon in late June, Mike, Debbie, Gregg and Chris piled into the car--they'd gotten a teal Ford Taurus to replace the LTD damaged in the tornado--and drove to LaSalle. They had called a couple of newspaper ads for rental houses.
The first one was bright blue with a wide front porch. The moment the car stopped at the curb, Chris and Gregg tumbled out and rushed over and mashed their noses against the windows to see inside: "Cool!" "Wow!"
Mike hobbled to the picture window, cupping his palms over his eyes to peer in. "Nice big living room," he said.
But Debbie didn't like it. She looked around, then folded her arms across her chest.
"It needs a lot of cleaning," she said.
A quick, hopeful response from 8-year-old Chris: "I can dust!"
They moved on, though, and reviewed a few more houses that day, a few more the next. On July 1, a week before they had to be out of the Washington Street house, they signed a lease for a good-sized stone house on a corner lot in LaSalle. By July 5, they'd left Utica.
Debbie still drove back there once a week or so for an informal support group of Milestone survivors and families that met evenings at Joy & Ed's. Jim Ventrice sometimes showed up too.
They didn't talk much about what happened that night. They talked about their lives, about their struggles, about how hard it still was to drive past the corner of Mill and Church Streets, where Milestone had stood, and where the city had put up a makeshift memorial. There were, affixed to white-painted concrete barriers, pictures of the victims and pictures of Utica from long ago.
Rising from the thin layer of gravel spread over the site was a row of white crosses, each inscribed with a name: Jay Vezain. Helen Mahnke. Bev Wood. Wayne Ball. Carol Schultheis. Marian Ventrice. Michael Miller. Lawrence Ventrice.
Shelba Bimm was leaving Utica. She wasn't going far, just to a subdivision on a hill west of town, a pretty little neighborhood of gently curving streets and polished-looking homes with wide driveways.
Bimm had loved living right in the middle of Utica. But she and her neighbors with homes crushed by the tornado faced a tangle of complications. Utica was on a flood plain, and if you rebuilt, you were required to start with an expensively high foundation. Also, state officials long had planned to redo Illinois Highway 178 to divert its noisy truck traffic, and when they did, many of the homes on Church Street would have to go.
At first, Bimm had been determined to rebuild right on the same spot. This was home. Long divorced, this was where she'd raised her two sons, Shayne and Blayne, by herself. But there was just too much up in the air. Bimm wanted to move on, to get going. She didn't like to stand still. So she bought the lot and began planning her new house.
It would be white with cranberry shutters, just like the old one. On June 21, Buck Bierbom dug the foundation, using the same equipment he'd used to help clear tons of rubble from the Milestone site.
- - - - -
Pat Elsbury had finally had enough. Enough of the dilemmas. Enough of the back-and-forth--both the highway kind and the philosophical kind.
In mid-July she gave her notice in La Grange. Her last day on the job, a job she'd had for 13 years, was July 30. She cleaned out her desk, packed her pickup and drove straight to Duffy's, where by early evening she was drinking a Miller Lite at the bar, and talking and laughing. "This is what I want to do," she said. "This is where I want to be. I don't want to be back there anymore." Simple, declarative statements.
What wasn't so simple, though, was making up for the money Duffy's had lost. It was only closed for three weeks after the tornado, but the tourists who normally thronged into Utica on summer days on their way to Starved Rock were taking other routes. They'd heard about the disaster and, according to what Lisle Elsbury was picking up here and there, they figured Utica was still in disarray. That exasperated him, but what could he do?
One Sunday afternoon in August, he was sitting in the back room of Duffy's, looking grim and discouraged. There were smudges on his forearms; he'd been struggling to fix an exhaust fan in the basement. But what really irritated Lisle was his insurance company, with whom he'd been tangling all week about repairs to the front of the tavern. The threshold was crucial, Lisle believed. The three-sided glass entrance with neat wooden trim was Duffy's signature. You just couldn't do it on the cheap. It had to be done right.
He wasn't going to compromise. He and Pat had sold their house, had sunk every nickel they had into this place, had staked their future on the corner of Mill and Canal Streets. No way would he short-change it all now because some guy in a button-down shirt with a clipboard didn't get it, didn't understand why the entrance had to be special. No way. He was a fighter, Lisle Elsbury was, and he hadn't survived a tornado just to capitulate to some insurance company.
Lisle was bothered, too, by something Pat had mentioned: When she told her boss back in La Grange goodbye for the last time, he'd given her a look. The look, she said, could have meant only one thing: You're not going to make it.
- - - - -
Pat had shrugged it off. Come and see us in a year, she wanted to shout at him. Come back and see us then.
Mike Miller returned to work part time for the railroad Nov. 9, running a locomotive. He walked with a limp and probably always would, his doctors told him. He didn't mind. "As long as I don't fall flat on my face," Mike told Debbie, "I don't care."
The Miller kids started school in LaSalle, and Mike and Debbie's biggest concern was Chris; at the threat of a storm, the merest hint of one, the quiet little boy was terrified. They alerted his teachers: If a storm came, they'd need to hold him, to tell him things would be OK.
Debbie Miller put in job applications to cook at several restaurants. No luck yet, but she was hopeful. She didn't spend her afternoons in a dark room anymore.
They still had money problems, though, and wondered how they were going to cover Christmas gifts for the kids. And they still hadn't been able to afford a headstone for Mike Jr.'s grave in Sterling, 47 miles northwest of Utica.
On Aug. 16, at about 5:30 a.m., Mike and Debbie's daughter Michelle had given birth to 5-pound, 10-ounce Melodie Marie. Debbie stayed all night at the hospital, and when she returned home mid-morning, exhausted but joyful, there was a lightness in her face that hadn't been there in a while. Her smile was tentative--she still wasn't sure about the world, after what it had taken from her--but the smile came more easily now, lingered longer. The haunted quality in her eyes had receded a bit.
Yet even as she sat on the couch that morning and talked about Melodie Marie, photos spread out on the coffee table, Debbie had to know that just above her head, high on the wall in the Millers' living room, was a picture of Mike Jr.
He was facing the camera, and the tall, skinny young man with the glasses and straight blondish-brown hair wore his mother's smile: shy, cautious, not quite sure he can trust the world, not really certain it has his best interests at heart.
By the end of November, Bimm's new house was coming along nicely. The walls were up, and so was the crisp white siding, the gray roof.
She loved to stop by and watch her contractor, Tom Trump, and his crew do their work. And she had a little more time on her hands these days; she and Dave Edgcomb had been notified Sept. 17 that they'd passed the test to be certified as EMT Intermediates, so there were no more classes.
The flat crash of hammering, the piney astringent smell of new wood: Bimm liked to walk around the job site and plan what she was going to put where. She hoped to move in by Christmas. She'd been living in a small trailer that her sons bought for her the day after the tornado, setting it up on Blayne's property.
Some afternoons Bimm would drive out to the site of her new house and just stand in the yard, taking it all in, while the wind fingered its way through the trees.
If you glanced up at the sky, the blue seemed to go on forever--up and up, straight through the roof of the world--and to spread seamlessly from horizon to horizon. So blue, so calm, so beautiful. You would almost swear nothing bad could ever come from such a sky.
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ABOUT THIS SERIES
To report this story, Tribune reporter Julia Keller interviewed the nine survivors of the Milestone collapse, and their friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues; and the friends, family members, neighbors and colleagues of the victims of the Milestone collapse; over a seven-month period, beginning a week after the tornado.
She also interviewed townspeople of Utica, Ill.; public officials, including employees and elected officials of Utica and the Federal Emergency Management Agency; meteorologists at the National Weather Service's Chicago office; tornado experts such as Howard Bluestein of the University of Oklahoma; public safety officials, including Utica Fire Chief Dave Edgcomb, Utica Police Chief Joseph Bernardoni, LaSalle County Sheriff Tom Templeton and LaSalle County Coroner Jody Bernard.
The reporter also used newspaper and television accounts of the tornado, and consulted historical books about Utica and the surrounding countryside.
Passages describing downtown Utica before and after the tornado were based on first-hand observations by the reporter, and on the observations of townspeople who were interviewed. Descriptions of the interior of Milestone the night of the tornado were based on the recollections of survivors and on the recollections of other townspeople who frequented the bar. Descriptions of the exterior were based on photographs and the accounts of Utica citizens.
Passages describing the rescue at Milestone were based on eyewitness accounts obtained from multiple interviews with firefighters, police officers, EMTs and volunteer citizen rescuers at the scene that night, along with the recollections of survivors and townspeople present shortly after the tavern collapsed.
Scenes of the Miller family's life after being rescued from Milestone--in their Utica home; sitting on the porch with Mike Miller; searching for a new home; the morning their granddaughter was born--were witnessed by the reporter. Scenes of Pat and Lisle Elsbury's life after the tornado were compiled through first-hand observation by the reporter and through interviews; thoughts and emotions attributed to the Elsburys were derived from multiple interviews with the couple.
Passages dealing with Shelba Bimm, Edgcomb, Steve Maltas, Gloria Maltas, Rona Burrows and other townspeople were based on interviews and observations by the reporter.
Scenes that were not witnessed by the reporter were assembled through multiple interviews with people who were present, both named in the story and not named. When thoughts and emotions are presented, those thoughts and emotions come directly from the reporter's interviews. Descriptions of the activities and thoughts of people who died in the collapse were compiled through interviews with those who were present, or those to whom the deceased had confided their thoughts and emotions.
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
Utica United Recovery Manager
www.Utica-IL.gov
Craighullinger@Utica-IL.gov
815 667 4111 Fax 815 667 4679
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