Stormchaser Chad Cowan has shared his photos and accounts of storm encounters with us on this blog before. But, THE series of photos we post here hits home because they include hometown scenes in which the sheer power of last Thursday's thunderstorms is front and center. Chad shares some of his thoughts here in this excerpt of a write-up he did for StormTrack:
""I ducked out of work a little early and tried to get up to the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower to watch the squall move in, but the storm beat me there and I was caught on the street. I saw a woman get knocked off her feet by the gusts and a few large branches snap off. My commute home took 3x longer than usual due to trees on the train tracks and power outages.
The cemetery in which I took the damage photos is about 4 miles north of downtown, near the Sheridan red line stop (4000 block of N Sheridan), for anyone familiar with the area. As you can see in my pictures, the trees that were blown over or snapped are amazingly large. I was surprised to see some of the large trees were snapped in half, rather than blown over. "
Chad Cowan's photography and his always riveting analyses of the storm situations he encounters are alway A-1! Thanks Chad!
Tom Skilling
Photo courtesy: Chad Cowan
