The Fairdale Tornado

On the evening of 9 April 2015 a tornado touched down in Lee County at twenty to seven, crossed Ogle and DeKalb counties and lifted forty one minutes later in Boone County, having travelled thirty miles with winds estimated at two hundred miles an hour. It was rated EF4, the strongest tornado recorded anywhere in the United States that year and the first of that strength in northern Illinois since the Plainfield tornado of 1990. On its way it crossed the northwest side of Rochelle, where twelve people took shelter in the basement of a restaurant at the junction of Illinois 64 and US 251 and were dug out an hour and a half later, after the building came down and laid a wall across the cellar doors. Everyone who went down there lived. Fairdale, an unincorporated hamlet of about a hundred and fifty people, took the worst of it. Rescue crews from fifteen agencies searched seventy one buildings in the settlement, most of them homes, and contemporary accounts put the number levelled at seventeen. Two residents were killed, Geraldine Schultz and Jacklyn Klosa, both in their sixties. Eleven people were injured at Fairdale and twenty two along the whole track, and damage came to about nineteen million dollars. Fairdale had no siren: it is unincorporated, and unincorporated communities are not required to have one. A decade on, some lots hold nothing but a slab, and the people who stayed still gather on the date.