ATKINSON, Ill. — Tuesday morning's strong thunderstorms, hail and winds left damage across the Quad Cities region. An EF-2 tornado touched down in Colona and an EF-1 tornado was reported near Woodhull. Straight-line winds with speeds up to 90 mph were reported at the Quad Cities International Airport, leaving behind significant damage and power outages in Rock Island County.
Damage can also be seen in rural Atkinson, along Rt. 6 just east of Geneseo. The National Weather Service says powerful straight-line winds, possibly stronger than 90 mph, is what caused the damage.
One property had four buildings flattened by the storms, including a corn crib, a barn, a hog house and a machine shed. The house is still standing but has significant damage.
"I think the house needs to be torn down," Mike Dwyer said. "It's in pretty bad shape."
Dwyer lives half a mile down the road and rents around 80 acres of farmland on the property. The woman who owns the home is in her nineties and no longer lives there, so thankfully no one was home or injured during the storm.
Trees were split in half or pulled out of their roots. The ground is littered with nails, glass, wooden planks and tin.
"What a mess is, you know, my first impression," Dwyer said. "How are we going to clean this all up? But we got neighbors all volunteered to help. Whenever it dries off - it's too wet to get out in these fields - we got eight or 10 neighbors who offered to come with their skid loaders to help pick up debris."
Dwyer recalled watching the storm hit around 10:30-11:00 Tuesday morning, but just half a mile away where he lives, suffered no damage.
"Clouds got awful dark and kind of grayish looking and the rain came in," he said. "Then the wind picked up just a little bit. I didn't think nothing of it. Half hour, hour later we noticed a neighbor called and said the farm here was completely wiped out... I think it was a tornado the way things spread out across the field here."
Dwyer is gearing up to plant his crops in two weeks on the farm and is trying to get things cleaned up as soon as possible.
"That's why we're in a big rush to get this cleaned up because the neighbors got ground to work, we got ground to work, so we're trying to work with everybody," he said. "We don't want to farm around it. It's more trouble when you gotta watch out for nails and little boards that are out in the field. Yeah, you got to be careful."
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