The Vault

PLAINFIELD, Ill. (CBS) ― On the afternoon of Aug. 28, 1990, an F5 tornado touched down in the southwest suburbs, ultimately leaving 29 people dead and more than 300 injured, and devastating Plainfield and surrounding communities.

CBS 2 was the first television station to go live with the news of the tornado and send a helicopter to the scene. In the videos you see to the right, we look back at a special report that ran as crews and heartbroken residents surveyed the damage the following day.

Plainfield
In Plainfield, the force and the fury of the storm was stunning. The twister blasted through homes, spraying debris for hundreds of yards. Power lines were snarled like string and trees were snapped like twigs.

Victims said they had no warning.

"We do have a tornado siren here, and I was here right after it hit, and there was no sound whatsoever," one man said.

"All the warning was that there was a tornado watch, and that was all," another man added.

The lack of warning was later blamed on the National Weather Service, which was stretched thin because it only had one office for the entire state of Illinois at the time. More offices have been added since.

Among the hardest hit was the St. Mary's Church and School. The steel parish steeple was left twisted and dangling, and a car was embedded in what appeared to be the school lunchroom. Above the school was a Civil Defense siren mounted atop a wooden pole, sitting silent after the storm.

The students had just left class for the day, but the school principal was still inside. She was killed when the tornado ripped through.

The high school football team was practicing nearby and made it into the school just in time.

"All of a sudden, my ears started popping," one football player said, "and then we heard big crashes and we all jumped into the corners of the high school, and the roof was shaking up and down and a big hole got in the roof."

"As soon as they came out, the whole gym was gone," another football player said. "Usually you can look in the door and see a gym, but all you could see was trees."

Plainfield Central High School was also devastated. The day after the tornado, it looked like a bomb had gone off. It was littered with cars from nearby parking lots, roofs from nearby homes, and debris from the school itself. Only one wall of the gymnasium remained standing.

Three people were killed there, including a teacher preparing for classes and two maintenance workers.

Plainfield High School had been hit by a tornado before, in 1975, and the gym only sustained minor damage at that time. But after the 1990 tornado, the school had to be rebuilt from scratch.

In 2003, school principal James Waldorf recalled the tornado.

"You regularly practice the drills, but there is nothing like the real thing," Waldorf said. "I'm not sure any of us could have imagined it could be that devastating and that quick. It was almost a snap of a finger and it was gone."

Former CBS 2 anchorman Bill Kurtis was live in Plainfield for the second of the two special reports the day after the tornado. He talked to some of the residents whose homes were destroyed.

"That was my family room," one woman said tearfully as she stood before a pile of debris where her house had once stood. "The swing set is underneath all this junk here… there was a tree there, there was an apple tree over here. They're all gone." But she and her husband said they planned to rebuild.

Kurtis also met a 16-year-old girl named Mary, who was inside a house that was called "Dorothy's House" because it was ripped from the foundation and tilted at the same angle as Dorothy's home in "The Wizard of Oz."

"It was kind of a miracle that I just ran to the basement because the hail scared me – regular sized hail – and I just got a pop and got the dogs downstairs, and then I sat down, and like 30 seconds after I sat down, everything just went black, and I hit the floor, and when I got up, water was pouring all over me, and dirt, and the chair that I was sitting in was totally gone."

Mary said she jumped out of the basement and hid in the bushes at a neighbor's house with her dog. The neighbor's daughter found her and she followed them to a nearby Century 21 realty office.

Kurtis was visibly moved by Mary's story.

"You're a brave little girl," he told Mary. "It makes me emotional to hear that story."

Crest Hill
Crest Hill reported the most fatalities as a result of the tornado, and National Guard helicopters were sent.

One three-story apartment complex was leveled to one story. Nine people in the complex were killed and their bodies were thrown into a cornfield.

"The kitchen went in, and the bedroom," one woman who lived in the complex said. "We were in the living room watching TV and it went out, and we just went on the floor."

The following morning, rescue crews were making a final search, and then-Crest Hill mayor Don Randich said he had never seen anything like the devastation he saw that day.

Randich was also a member of the Crest Hill fire department, and was on the first truck that arrived at the leveled apartment complex.

"We were on the first engine, and just like everything, when you drive up, after 33 years on the fire department, I've never seen one like this," Randich said. "We had people screaming, telling us where people were. There were people standing on the floor waiting to get down. There were people laying on the ground. There were people in the cornfield behind us. We could only do so many things."

Other Municipalities
The tornado first touched down near Aurora, where it ripped through the Chicago-Aurora Municipal Airport.

While no one was injured there, propeller planes were seen flipped upside down, and airport officials looked in dismay.

Meanwhile at Copley Hospital in Aurora, two dozen people were reported injured early the morning after the tornado.

The tornado's path ended in Joliet. While the damage there was far less severe, it was declared a federal and state disaster area along with Plainfield and Crest Hill.

Altogether, the tornado left 1,000 people homeless in its 16-mile path. It remains the worst tornado ever recorded in the Chicago area.

(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)