The two hour delay in Sunday's Bears-Ravens games was just a small impact of a devastating storm that spanned five Midwestern states, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, NBC News reported. Spinning over 80 tornadoes in just a day, the fast moving storm leveled communities and killed six people.
No region was hit harder than the middle to southern region Illinois, near Peoria. In Washington, IL, a town of 15,000 approximately 145 miles southwest of Chicago, hundreds of homes were wrecked, 15 were injured, and one person was killed, according to Reuters.
"The devastation is just unbelievable," Mayor Gary Manier told Reuters. "I can't imagine people walked away from these places."
About 200 miles farther south in Washington County, winds between 166 and 200 mph (equal to the speeds reached by the typhoon in the Philippines) killed two senior citizens, an 80-year-old man and his 78-year-old sister. Three more died in Massac County, located on the border between Illinois and Kentucky, Reuters reported.
In addition to 80 tornadoes, citizens reported 348 cases of damaging winds and 40 cases of large hail, according to Rich Thompson of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Wind damage warnings will follow into Pennsylvania and New York on Monday, according to Reuters.
As the American Red Cross mobilized relief efforts throughout the affected areas, survivors cased the streets, surveying the damage and offering help.
"I've got a big day ahead of me," Scott Gundy, a 54-year old car salesman from Washington, told NBC News. "This whole town's got a lot of things going on today. Other than that I don't know what we're going to do. I've found pieces of my house 100 yards north east of me."
To survive, residents took shelter in their basements. Because the speed of the storm, many made it just in time.
"It went right over us," Gundy said of the tornado. "It sounded like a freight train. You could hear it just rumbling... I've got glass flying all over the place. I've got a two by four that's like two or three of my walls inside my house."
In Chicago, traffic was delayed in both its major airports and the Bears-Ravens game was delayed for two hours in the afternoon because of dangerous winds and rain, NBC News reported.
