00:00We do want to get right out to meteorologist and storm chaser Tony Laubach.
00:04He's been slowly but surely moving into town trying to capture all of the damage.
00:09Tony, what have you found now?
00:12Well, Anna, not much has changed since the last time we spoke.
00:15I'm still here on the south side of town again, just north of the I-57, US-52 junction.
00:20That's US-52. You see all the flashing lights kind of behind me.
00:24That is the crews that are blocking, and then you see the building kind of off in the distance,
00:28not very well lit. Unfortunately, I have to be a little bit further back.
00:31But some significant damage to that building and the debris from that building,
00:35parts of the roof, the walls, everything else got scattered across US-52.
00:39So 52 right now closed because of the debris that came out of this area.
00:43Showing you some of the video right now, the more close-up views I was able to get in and
00:47get
00:47with some of the firefighters giving me kind of a brief walkthrough.
00:51Pretty heavily damaged vehicle in the parking lot there as well.
00:54But again, this is kind of the area where we think that tornado initially got spun up,
00:58right in this area on the south side of Kankakee, right at US-52.
01:02Again, just north of I-57, where we really started to see the damage start to come to fruition.
01:07Again, that included power poles, some of the industrial buildings.
01:10A lot of what I'm in right now is an industrial area.
01:13So warehouse, garage-type buildings.
01:16And again, that debris being strewn across the highway and eventually working its way out
01:21further east into some of the neighborhoods, south and east of Kankakee,
01:24which I have not been able to get to at this point in time.
01:27Again, most of the damage here.
01:29Beers will be pretty minor.
01:30Again, structurally, the building is still standing, albeit not in the best of shape.
01:35We talked about some of the damage from the hail as well.
01:39And again, I'm kind of standing in a grassy area.
01:41I'm seeing hailstones that are buried in the ground.
01:44I mean, these came in and sunk two or three inches.
01:47There's one here by my foot that is pretty impressive to see.
01:51Some of the hail that's actually just been knocked into the ground from the impact it made when it came
01:55down.
01:56Again, some of those hailstones bigger than five inches.
01:59You saw that live report there from the school.
02:01Just absolutely insane.
02:03And again, wasn't the scattered about type hail.
02:06This was just fields covered in hail.
02:09Some of the biggest hail I've seen in quite some time.
02:11Certainly the biggest I've seen in the Midwest since the early 2000s
02:15when I saw some six-inch hail up in Wisconsin back in 2006.
02:18So this was a heck of a storm that rolled through here.
02:21Again, if you want to call it the silver lining, the tornadic part of this storm,
02:25again, staying south of Kankakee proper.
02:28So most of the heavier damage, the tornado damage, limited to the south side of town.
02:32Again, I haven't been able to get further east to assess anything out there.
02:35So kind of waiting to hear on that one right now.
02:37But they did not get through the hail.
02:40That hail came through with a vengeance for sure.
02:42I just sent back some video they'll show you here, some up-close shots of the cars.
02:46And you see some of the craters in the windshields of these cars from some of this hail that came
02:51down.
02:51And again, keep in mind, I came in about 15, 20 minutes after the fact.
02:56So some of that hail coming down, probably approaching five and a half inches or bigger,
03:01certainly was going to be some heavily talked about.
03:04I'll be very curious to see because I don't know off the top of my head
03:07what the state record is for hail size in Illinois.
03:09But I would imagine this will at least get in the conversation for sure.
03:14All right.
03:14Yeah, Tony, earlier in the evening when you showed us some of that car damage,
03:17if you had said someone broke into the Lexus that you were showing us,
03:21I would have said, okay, because that's what it looked like.
03:24We're going to continue to track those updates on the damage.
03:28But this is certainly a severe weather outbreak this evening.
03:31So we want to go to Jeff with Radar and give you the bigger picture of what's going on at
03:34this point.
03:35All right, Anna.
03:36Well, we have a few different features at play here.
03:39We've got some elevated convection just north of a warm front lifting up along the Wisconsin-Illinois line.
03:46The primary risks that we're facing right now, we've got tornado warnings.
03:50One, that's the Kankakee cell that's now in the northern parts of Indiana.
03:53Number two, north of Peoria.
03:55Number three, along the northeast corner of Missouri into southeast Iowa between Kirksville and Ottumwa.
04:02And number four, northeast of Kansas City.
04:04So we've got four separate rotating tornadoes.
04:07And you can see they're similarly spaced from one another here.
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