Illinois tornado survivor: 'It's all gone'
WASHINGTON, Ill. - With shattered glass clinking underneath her feet, Julie Fuchs, 74, shuffled through her Washington, Ill., home on Monday afternoon, assessing the damage left by Sunday's EF-4 tornado.
Bundled in a warm winter coat and hat to fight off the frigid wind, Fuchs cautiously stepped over the pieces of her life that covered the kitchen floor: photographs, her date book, huge sections of the walls that once held her house together.
It's funny when someone else's furniture ends up in your house, she muttered, pointing to a neighbor's chair that had blown into her home.
Fuchs almost didn't take shelter in the basement, but her husband of 57 years, Jerry Fuchs, 78, insisted.
As the black swirl of devastating wind and rain barged into his community, he was on his front porch, snapping photographs with his digital camera.
"I could hear it hollering and blowing, and I stood for just a few minutes -- maybe for not even over a minute -- and it kept moving toward us," he recalled. "That's when I told her -- I said, 'We gotta get out of here.' You know? I don't know how to explain it. It just came so fast, and it was gone so fast."
From the safety of the basement, Julie Fuchs listened to the storm "banging and knocking." "I figured it was this tree falling on our house, but it was everything falling."
The storm lasted only a few minutes, but it was long enough to wreck a lifetime of memories.
"It's awful. It's just awful," she cried. "Fifty-seven years of stuff is in there. That's how long we've been married. It's all gone."
When Julie Fuchs emerged from the basement, most of her home for the past 43 years was gone.
"I saw my kitchen table and my TV on top of the refrigerator sitting there. But then I saw the living room and the patio doors gone, and our deck is there, but the railing's gone," she said. "The kitchen chairs are out in the yard. I mean, it's just everywhere."
Holding his wife tightly, Jerry Fuchs described the scene as "pure devastation."
"I think we're going to rebuild," he said, bursting into tears. "You know, it's all them years. You work and you work, and you save and you got a good home, and then something comes along and in just a few minutes it's gone. You know? You can't understand it. You think you're safe in your own home, but you're not anymore."
Julie Fruchs
Washington, Ill., resident
Washington Police Chief Don Volk told America Tonight that as many as 1,000 structures in the area were damaged or destroyed by the storm. Many of the damaged buildings were in the Fuchs' neighborhood.
A stroll along Fayette Street, where they lived, revealed a chaotic mess of downed electrical wires, children's bicycles and decades-old trees snapped into pieces. Hunks of twisted metal wrapped around tree trunks, crunched furniture, broken lamps and shattered windows littered what were once people's front yards. The storm flung a large mattress into the branches of a tall tree.
At Nathan Derrick's house down the street, the roof had been ripped from the structure. Derrick said his brother awakened him from a deep sleep in his basement bedroom seconds before his neighbor's tree crashed through a window. He still considers his family lucky.
"Just think positive about good things," he said. "You know, don't let the stuff overtake you and bring you down. But overall, I do feel bad - like I wish this never happened."
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