By KAREN BINDER
Illinois Correspondent

CARBONDALE, Ill. — Derecho or not, some southern Illinoisans digging out from the massive storm system’s havoc are calling it an “inland hurricane.”

National Weather Service (NWS) officials in Paducah, Ky., are quick to point out that there’s no such thing as an inland hurricane, and instead use the term derecho. This Spanish word for “line” (pronounced deh-REY-cho) describes a system of tightly packed and highly convective storms in a line formation that blow forward with what weather officials called a bookend vortex, stretching between 34-46 miles wide. This “comma head” shape also featured an “eye,” which weather radar shows rotating in a similar manner as a hurricane.

“I don’t care what they call it. Look at this,” said Carbondale resident Matt Medlin, pointing to the destruction of storm system. “It sure looks like a hurricane ripped through here to me.”
NWS Senior Forecaster Chris Noles said the storms cut across Jackson, Franklin and Williamson counties, dumping up to five inches of rain, unleashing winds of up to 106 mph and 13 tornadoes, including some in the EF-2 and EF-3 range.

“At one time, every residence in Williamson County was without power,” said Steve Land, deputy director of the Williamson County Emergency Management Agency at a press conference. “After the National Weather Service did their assessment, it was confirmed that tornado activity was involved. Even in the straight-line winds, there were embedded tornadoes.”

Land said it will take months to clear all the debris. Restoring power took an army of linemen from Ameren and two rural electric cooperatives, with more than 5,000 field and support staff called in from five states working in the field last week.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has declared Franklin, Gallatin, Jackson, Randolph and Williamson counties state disaster areas, and he has asked for a federal disaster declaration, a request that could wait months for a decision.

The Springfield NWS office was planning to send storm assessment teams to the area over the weekend to determine which storm tracks were caused by high winds and those by tornado.

The derecho which hit southern Illinois originated in Kansas and spawned severe storms in Missouri before it hit its peak in Illinois, with the system losing its violent momentum in Saline County and crossing into Indiana as strong wind, NWS reports stated. The derecho had dissipated by the time it reached the East Coast, touching nine states.