Tim Pinson and his wife, Karen, returned to their home in Kankakee County, Ill., on Wednesday morning to see if they could salvage anything after a tornado the night before tore through their property.
The storm ripped the front door and several windows straight off their house, along with part of their roof. They had taken cover in a pantry closet, just off the attached garage, which was now gone. Mr. Pinson said it felt like the entire house had lifted and dropped.
“We didn’t think we’d make it through,” he said.
Homeowners and officials in Illinois and Indiana were just beginning to assess the fallout on Wednesday after a storm that spawned as many as a dozen tornadoes in the Midwest and South killed at least two people and shredded many homes.
Officials from Kankakee County, on the eastern border of Illinois around 60 miles south of Chicago, added in a Wednesday morning news conference that nine people had reported minor injuries. Roughly 35 miles east in Newton County, Ind., where the damage in the state might have been the worst, an elderly couple were found dead in their home, and more people had reported injuries, officials said.
Indiana officials said that they were conducting search and rescue operations on Wednesday morning.
Sgt. Glen Fifield, a public information officer for the Indiana State Police, said at a news conference that parts of the state had been “decimated” by the tornado.
“This was a long, slow progressing tornado storm that wreaked havoc in our area,” he said.
The storm system on Tuesday, which included strong wind gusts and hail larger than two inches in some areas, affected a vast swath of the central United States. One part of it stretched across Texas and Oklahoma, and another part over areas of Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. The storm knocked out power for thousands in the Midwest.
The severe weather came just days after storms swept through Michigan and Oklahoma, killing at least six people.
In Kankakee County on Wednesday, trees and plywood from destroyed homes were strewn across the ground, and many homes looked to be total losses.
Mr. Pinson, who worked for a tree care company before he retired, said he had done storm cleanup work for most of his career. But he has never before seen destruction like that of last night, he said.
He said that he and his wife had tried to access a crawl space to take cover from the tornado, but that the suction from the wind had prevented him from opening a hatch door to it. Instead, they went to the pantry. But he could not shut the door at first “because there was so much debris flying around,” he said.
The sound, he said, was “deafening.”
Rich Thompson, the chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center, said it was too early to determine the exact number of tornadoes that touched down. Experts rely on a combination of radar data and trained spotters when tornadoes are reported. Because tornadoes are sometimes difficult to see, especially at night, hours or days can pass before a report is confirmed.
Mr. Thompson said the risk for tornadoes was expected to be lower on Wednesday, though it could not be ruled out. The severe weather threat is expected to gradually decrease after Thursday. “It should be nice and calm for at least a few days thereafter,” he said.
Sonia A. Rao reports on disability issues as a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
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