The story of Fairdale’s resilience and community-wide recovery effort following a devastating tornado in 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n[parallax-scroll id=”5775″]\n Words by Colton Warren<\/strong><\/p>\n Fairdale, Illinois — <\/strong> Just 65 miles west of Chicago lies the modest township of Fairdale, Illinois. Its .23-square mile area is surrounded by acres of cornfields, and it has gone relatively unnoticed since the area was settled in 1842. That was until April 9, 2015, when Mother Nature violently changed the reality for Fairdale\u2019s 150 residents.<\/p>\n Around 6:40 p.m. that Thursday night, a tornado touched down outside Franklin Grove, about 26 miles southwest of Fairdale. It moved quickly and increased in strength to an EF4 rating as it tore across the vast open fields, with tiny Fairdale in its crosshairs.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember we were at work talking about the storm and how it always misses us. Because every time — because we are kind of in a valley — it always misses us,\u201d says Jessica Fruit, a resident of nearby Kirkland.<\/p>\n But this time, the storm didn\u2019t miss. It slammed into the town just after 7 p.m.<\/p>\n And Fairdale changed forever.<\/p>\n \u201cSeeing the disaster was the worst thing in my life,\u201d says John Davis, who has lived in Fairdale for over 20 years.<\/p>\n The once ordinary town — lush green trees dotting yards, the central community park a regular gathering place for friends and families, barbeques on a sunny weekend afternoon — exemplified rural Illinois life, in which family and community came only second to the crop fields that lie just outside of town. Now, the worst natural disaster to strike DeKalb County in generations would bring Fairdale\u2019s residents closer than ever before in unimaginable ways.<\/p>\n The devastation would affect countless numbers of people in the year since. At least 90 properties in and around Fairdale, including 66 residences in town alone, sustained significant damage. Twenty-one homes were leveled. Personal belongings and artifacts were strewn across miles of land; cars flipped and transformed into useless piles of metal, some propelled at speeds great enough to wrap themselves around what trees were left standing. Fairdale was unrecognizable.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was, at a glance, no reason for hope,\u201d says Bill Nicklas, a DeKalb County resident who became instrumental in leading the rebuilding of Fairdale.<\/p>\n But hope soon materialized. With the help of countless volunteers, first responders, local churches, organizations and athletic teams, the remaining rubble was removed. Over the days and months following, Fairdale\u2019s resiliency became the cornerstone for the entire community. As foundations were poured for new homes to be built, a stronger, closer-knit community was formed.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody helps everybody here,\u201d says resident Deena Schell, who was living with her parents and two daughters on the west side of town when the tornado hit.<\/p>\n Neighbors and families alike rose up from what the tornado left of their former community, united by the common goal of rebuilding and restoring their beloved town. With the help of several nonprofit organizations, and left with little government assistance, what may have seemed like years of progress is visible today, just one short year later.<\/p>\n On the one-year anniversary of the storm, however, the survivors\u2019 memories were still vivid.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, we were in the basement,\u201d Davis says, whose home sits near the train tracks that run south of town. \u201cI was sitting on the bottom basement step and they were in the corner — (my wife) and my stepdaughter — and she said, \u2018There goes the train.\u2019 I said, \u2018That ain\u2019t no train. That\u2019s it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Before the tornado nearly wiped it off the map, Fairdale was a quiet, \u201cblink and you\u2019ll miss it\u201d town tucked along two-lane Highway 72 in northwest Illinois, surrounded by miles and miles of seemingly endless farmland. The closest city of significant size is Rockford, about a 30-mile drive north. About 40 miles to the east, the sprawling suburbs of Chicago begin before giving way to the city itself and Lake Michigan.<\/p>\n The folks who live in Fairdale make up a varied population, with ages ranging from infant to retired seniors. Many families are several decades, or even generations, embedded in the history of the blue-collar community. The unincorporated town boasts just six paved roads — three running east to west, three running north to south — and one unpaved residential road. There\u2019s no grocery store, no bar, no post office, no gas station. A leisurely stroll around its perimeter would cost just 15 minutes of time. The odds were incredibly small, then, that this tiny speck of a town would take a deadly hit from an enormous tornado like the one on that April day.<\/p>\n The tornado, weakened slightly to an EF3, turned nearly the entire town upside down, stripping limbs from trees, tossing entire homes several football fields in distance, and mangling the landscape into something unrecognizable.<\/p>\n \u201cI opened up my eyes again, and then the whole house just left,\u201d Schell says. \u201cIt was gone. It was just like out of a movie. It picked itself up and just threw it. One level flew over there, and the second level flew across the highway.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere was glass flying, dirt. You could hear the \u2018pop, pop, popping\u2019 of the windows, and then it was over,\u201d says Schell\u2019s mother, Mary Powell. \u201cI was digging my fingers — I don\u2019t know why — into the cement, thinking it would hold me. I was hanging onto my granddaughter Calli\u2019s leg. She only weighs 70 pounds. Deena had Calli\u2019s other leg and then was hanging onto her other daughter, Haleigh.\u201d<\/p>\n[parallax-scroll id=”5780″]\n This photo, captured by local storm photographer Tom Purdy, shows the EF4 tornado at 7:14 p.m., around the time it passed through the small rural town of Fairdale, Illinois. Photo courtesy of Tom Purdy.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n According to the National Weather Service<\/a>, the April 9 tornado was the strongest on record in DeKalb County since 1950, when the agency began issuing tornado alerts to the public. Its estimated peak winds of 200 miles per hour were so strong and destructive that the weather service radar that detects rotations in storms was partially distorted because of the amount of debris lofted by the tornado. Debris were found up to 80 miles away<\/a> in Racine, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n First responders and DeKalb County residents raced to Fairdale, where the destruction was unlike anything many had ever seen.<\/p>\n \u201cI stepped out of my back door, looked to the west and there it was — there was the tornado,\u201d says Chad Connell, Kirkland Community Fire chief, a first responder to the scene that night. \u201cBy the time I had the time to register what was going on, our pagers dropped for our fire department to respond to Fairdale for multiple houses down.<\/p>\n \u201cI raced out to the station, got my vehicle, got what guys we had that had shown up at the station, got them sort of put on trucks and got out here. Only to get as far as just east of town — the roads were blocked — so we had to backtrack and come around down South Street here, and we still couldn\u2019t get in,\u201d Connell says.<\/p>\n The destruction was unparalleled. At its peak, the tornado was 700 yards wide. Nearly every structure was damaged, if not demolished. Two longtime residents, Jackie Klosa and Geraldine \u201cGeri\u201d Schultz, lost their lives. Both women\u2019s homes sat on the west-central side of town, the most severely damaged area.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, you know, your heart sinks,\u201d Connell says. \u201cPeople start to come towards you; they had seen the lights and that sort of stuff and they are asking for help.\u201d<\/p>\n[parallax-scroll id=”5777″]\n\n Donations flooded in from all over the state in the days following the devastating tornado. These are just some of the items that piled up at the Kirkland Community Fire Department. Residents were able to pick up necessities a few times a week in the months following. Photo courtesy of DeKalb County Long Term Recovery Corporation.<\/em><\/p>\n Connell says in the following days he witnessed something truly remarkable.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next couple days following the actual storm were — that\u2019s the story. That\u2019s the real story because we had so many people come out to help,\u201d Connell says. \u201cIt was unbelievable. The community, people in the community who put their lives aside to take care of all these poor people out here in Fairdale, it was amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Jessica Fruit was one of those residents involved in the recovery from the very beginning. She said the tornado missed her home by less than a mile, but one of her closest friends living in Fairdale lost everything.<\/p>\n \u201cI showed up at the fire department the next morning,\u201d Fruit says. \u201cWent to Sam\u2019s Club, bought some stuff and showed up at the fire department and was just helping with donations and directing things.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of a sudden, I was put in charge of all those donations,\u201d Fruit says.<\/p>\n Those donations piled up in a hurry. Fruit says about 13 semitrailers worth of donations — toothbrushes, water, clothes, cleaning supplies, garbage bags; just about anything — arrived at the Kirkland Fire Department in the days following.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that doesn\u2019t include what people came and got in those couple days,\u201d Fruit says.<\/p>\n The Kirkland Fire Department became the center of the cleanup. That night, displaced residents were transported to the station for safety after the town was evacuated. Fruit describes the scene that weekend, much of which she spent at the station as they set up operations. She says residents stopped in to pick up the most basic necessities.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was crazy,\u201d Fruit says. \u201cWe had lines of people bringing stuff in. And we actually did kind of like an assembly line, pass the bags down the line and get it into the fire department. The fire department was nowhere near big enough for what we needed, but we had no idea. We had no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n The tornado left Fairdale a shell of its former self, hollowed out and broken. Left intact, however, was a full sense of community and the strong spirit of many.<\/p>\n \u201cSmall town strong,\u201d Fruit says. \u201cWe did it. And we\u2019re going to continue doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n