KANKAKEE, Ill. — Bob Wehrle sat in his driveway Wednesday morning and looked at the lot where his house once stood. His belongings and debris were scattered across his lawn, and his trailer was frozen in the air, pierced by a tree. It’s difficult to make out where the house ended and began.

Wehrle, 60, said he and his wife moved into their Kankakee home about 30 years ago. The same tri-level home that Tuesday’s tornadoes demolished while he was inside.

“Where do you start cleaning up? Where do you start making calls? What’s the process?” Wehrle told the Tribune. “You got insurance. What do you do now? And how do I get my trailer out of a tree?”

At least two people are dead and homes leveled after tornadoes and “gumball”-size hail tore through Kankakee County and northwest Indiana Tuesday evening, according to local authorities and weather officials.

Several intense supercell thunderstorms were responsible for at least four tornadoes that hit Livingston and Kankakee counties in Illinois, as well as Newton, Jasper and Starke counties in northwest Indiana, according to Chicago’s National Weather Service. Survey crews will work to determine the strength and total number of tornadoes.

“When (tornadoes) happen outside of the core season, they have the propensity to be on the stronger side,” said meteorologist Kevin Donofrio. “We have less of them but they’re stronger.”

Donofrio said the core tornado season is April through June in northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana, but that it’s a “pretty dynamic time of year.” Donofrio said there was minimal chance of severe weather on Wednesday, but wind gusts of 45 miles per hour or higher are possible Thursday night into Friday.

One supercell appeared to produce a long-track tornado that started west of Kankakee, moved through that town and nearby Aroma Park, and then eastward into Indiana, striking areas in and around Wheatfield. The other storm of interest which produced hail moved through the western suburbs of Chicago, Donofrio said.

“The unique thing when you have just two individual storms is they’re taking all the energy,” he said. “All that juice and moisture is going into those two storms — that’s another thing that can make these two individual cells become stronger.”

The strength of the storm is something Wehrle experienced firsthand. He received a tornado alert on his phone around 5:30 p.m., and looked out his window to see a “huge” twister throwing debris across the field behind his house. He sought shelter in his basement before his kitchen fell on top of him, leaving him pinned under a mini fridge.

“After everything was done, I was there for a while trying to unbury myself,” Wehrle said.

An hour later, he heard his best friend, who lives a mile away, shouting his name. Wehrle said he then texted his brother and nephew, who also came to help. While sticking a broom through the rubble to mark his location, Wehrle waited as the three men dug him out.

The paramedics checked on him and took him away from the gas leaks in his neighbors’ houses, which were also destroyed and damaged. Wehrle said he sent them to check on his next-door neighbor and were relieved to find them all right.

“It’s kind of a small community out here, and everybody helps watch your backs,” Wehrle said. “It’s always been like that.”

Wehrle said he is holding up fine emotionally and is thankful for the help he received. But he knows there’s a long road to recovery ahead of him.

Most of Wehrle’s immediate neighbors’ homes were either flattened or severely damaged as well. The drive along South Sandbar Road, where Wehrle lives, is lined by fallen and broken trees. In some places, cars have to turn around while crews work to clear the road.

Throughout the day, residents worked through rain to pack up belongings and search through rubble. Homeowners and their helpers carried out clothes, TVs and urns. Some called out for their pets. Patricia Eldred’s family grabbed her cat and belongings.

The 79-year-old was sitting on her couch looking in her phone book for a dental surgeon when she got a severe weather alert Tuesday night. Within 10 minutes, her windows shattered, the front door blew open and drywall started falling on top of her.

“I wasn’t really thinking at all,” Eldred said. “I was just thinking that I was hoping I would get out alive.”

She got stitches on her head and arms at the hospital. But she’s most worried about the state of her home. It’s the first year she hasn’t had homeowner’s insurance, Eldred said.

“My house was trashed,” Eldred said. “It can’t be rebuilt, and it’s knocked off the foundation. I’m homeless.”

In Indiana, where the two fatalities were recorded, an elderly couple were found dead in Lake Village after a tornado struck and destroyed their home, according to the Newton County Coroner’s Office.

The couple was identified as Edward Kozlowski, 89, and his wife, Arlene Kozlowski, 84. Their preliminary cause of death was ruled as “multiple blunt force trauma,” the coroner’s office said.

Matthew Alexander-Hildebrand, the chairman of the Kankakee County Board, said at a Wednesday morning news conference that there were no deaths or missing people from the storms there, but that there were nine minor injuries. He said the county formally declared a disaster declaration with the state Tuesday night.

“While homes, buildings and infrastructure can be rebuilt, lives cannot be replaced,” he said.

Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement that he’d been briefed on the storm and tornado damage and that he’s in contact with local officials to “offer our full support.”

Two deaths in Indiana

In Indiana, where the couple was killed, the storm destroyed their home, officials said.

Lake Village, about an hour and a half drive from Chicago, “took a direct hit” from the tornado, Rob Churchill, the chief of the Lake Township Volunteer Fire Department, said late Tuesday night. He said multiple homes were destroyed by the storm, which hit around 7 p.m.

“A large tornado hit our community and it hit us hard,” said Lori Postma, the fire department’s spokesperson. She added that first responders were stationed throughout the community to serve as storm spotters before the weather hit, “and many of us saw it. We did locate some very injured people.”

“We will be working feverishly to bring our little town back to where it once was,” Postma said. “We are a very strong community and we will be just fine.”

By early Wednesday morning, Newton County Sheriff Shannon Cothran said at a press conference that “no other significant injuries” have been reported. Officials said they hadn’t found any more victims during additional searches Wednesday.

“Don’t come to see the devastation or how many trees are down,” he urged. “Let us have the room to work and stay off the roads in the immediate Lake Village area.”

Hugh Ulrich left a gas station in Lake Village Tuesday evening after learning of the impending storm. He stopped his truck at a friends’ yard to figure out what to do when he saw a massive black cloud heading his way.

“It reached the ground, and it got a hold of my truck,” Ulrich said. “Then a tree came in the passenger side, and there was spinning, but then it put me down and obliterated the house.”

Ulrich believes his friends were the people who died.

Nikki and Scott Hanger also barely escaped the tornado’s path, their daughter-in-law Jill Hanger said Wednesday afternoon. The family was texting them all evening to get to safety, but Scott Hanger fought it until the last minute.

“He said, ‘I’ve been here for 36 years and rode out the other storms,’ but we told him this one felt different,” she said. “By the time they got out of the driveway to head to the fire department, the hail started coming down.”

When they came back to their home, they found a whole wall to the outside blown off.

“We’re here grabbing all the sentimental stuff — photos we haven’t digitized, statuettes our great-grandfather painted and the important documents, but those were in the safe,” Jill Hanger said.

‘Exceptionally large’ hail

The storms also produced “exceptionally large” hail that ranged in size from three to five inches in diameter, the weather service said. A potentially record-setting hailstone of six inches was reported in Kankakee. The previous record was a hailstone measuring 4.75 inches in diameter that fell in Minooka in 2015.

Carrie Johnson, 51, was driving home from work Tuesday night when she stopped for gas at Ricky Rockets, a little over three miles away from her Kankakee home. She and other customers sheltered in the store’s bathroom when the storm hit.

Johnson said large hail broke windshields and windows of cars in the parking lot. People cried inside the gas station while calling their loved ones, Johnson said. She helped a storm chaser clean up blood from a cut after hail smashed his window.

The timing of her stop was fortunate, Johnson said. Otherwise, she might have been home while the tornado ripped through it. Although the bones of the house remain standing, there’s a hole where the sliding glass door should be, and the porch and porch swing are gone. The siding has blown off the front of the house, and Johnson said the winds blew a kayak inside.

Johnson said she’s still processing what she described as a nightmare. She’s worried about her neighbor, who she said was in the intensive care unit last night. She returned today, working for six hours to pack up her family’s belongings.

“My neighbors over here lost everything pretty much,” Johnson said, looking toward the remains of a flattened house. “I’m kind of glad I could go in, and there’s enough roof left on my bedroom.”

Johnson described Kankakee as a “tight-knit community” and said people have checked in on her, like John Lewis, who spent hours Wednesday helping load Johnson’s things into her car.

Lewis, 28, lived in Kankakee for eight years before moving to Bloomington, Indiana almost two years ago. When he heard about the storms, he called out of work at the elementary school where he teaches and made the drive to help strangers, like Johnson.

“This is what people do when there are storms and things,” Lewis said. “Some bigger towns have organized efforts. … But smaller places like this sometimes don’t have organized things right out the gate. So it’s especially those that I’m trying to get into and just kind of help.”

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