WHITESIDE COUNTY, Illinois — March 31, 2024 marks one year since a historic tornado outbreak tore through Iowa and Illinois. The National Weather Service Quad Cities' forecast area documented 29 tornadoes in our hometowns, the most in a single day since they began keeping records in the 1950s.
Whiteside County cattle farmer Jake Perino says the 31st was just a typical evening for him and his family. That is until his neighbors started calling him, saying he had a problem.
10 years of hard work from the fourth-generation cattle feeder was wiped away in the blink of an eye. One of those 29 tornadoes had turned his cattle farm into a shredded mess.
"The back wall was gone, the trusses were all domino effect down," Perino said. "The whole area where the cattle are, it was just a mess with the trusses and all the boards that were all just intertwined. "
Miraculously, none of his 300 cattle died. But the destruction did not stop at the barn.
"We had two silos that were damaged," Perino said. "That silo was almost full and it still wrinkled like an empty pop can."
But this is not a story of someone losing everything. It's a story about what happened after the storm.
"Within the first hour, all our neighbors started showing up," Perino said. "And everybody just said, 'What can we do to help?'" More than 100 people, some from more than an hour and a half away, pitched in wherever they could.
"People were willing to haul our cattle out for us," Perino said. "I had a lot of people reach out to me and say 'Hey, we'll move our cattle around, and you bring your cattle to our place and we will feed them for you.'"
There is still some work that needs to be done. Perino says the two silos have to come down, and he is in the process of rebuilding the machine shed. But in less than four months, he was back in business.
"The barn went down March 31 and by July 11, we had this barn full of cattle," Perino said.