April 14--"This is a tornado and I cannot tell which way it is going, so I don't know how to get away from it," Sam Smith said as he recorded a massive tornado Thursday evening in north central Illinois. "But it looks like it's coming right towards me."
Smith was driving south on Interstate 39 when he got about as close as possible to the swirling fury of a Midwest tornado.
The North Carolina man caught the approximately two-minute close call on his phone, and the recording has been viewed more than 601,000 times on YouTube as of Tuesday morning.
Smith, a 43-year-old father of three, said he wasn't sure exactly where he was on I-39 when the twister rumbled by, but he was north of Rochelle and his phone told him he was near Lindenwood Township.
It is unclear from the video whether Smith saw the horrific EF4 tornado that spent an unusually long time on the ground Thursday.
That colossus spun across I-39, near where Smith said he was, before decimating the small town of Fairdale, killing Jacklyn Klosa and her friend, Geri Schultz.
Cleanup continues this week in the damaged areas, with personal effects being found dozens of miles from the tornado's path.
National Weather Service officials said a smaller "satellite" tornado was reported in that area Thursday night as well.
Whether it was the EF4, with winds up to 200 mph, or some sort of spinoff, Smith's video provides a harrowing glimpse of what it's like to come so close to getting blown away.
Smith, who works in pest control, said he was driving from Minneapolis to Indianapolis on business Thursday evening.
"There was a lot of rain, a ton of rain," Smith said Monday. "I start to see cars pulled off the side of the road, and cars pulled over in underpasses."
He assumed those vehicles were seeking shelter from the hail, which began pounding Smith's truck as well.
Smith said he eventually pulled over under a bridge.
"I'm sitting there, and all of a sudden, more cars keep pulling under the pass and stopping," he said. "And they're stopping on the interstate." The drivers were seeking shelter under the bridge, he said.
Semis were swerving chaotically and trying to avoid those halted cars, he said.
As his son called him, Smith said he looked over and saw the tornado looming out of the southwest.
"Oh, crap," he says in the video. "I have honestly never been in a tornado before."
Smith said he hadn't gotten any alerts on his phone, and the radio hadn't mentioned anything.
He said his son told him to start recording.
Smith sounds unusually calm in the video, as the ominous tornado approaches and then cuts in front of him and crosses the highway.
"To be honest with you, I was freaking out inside, but what good was it going to do me?" he said. "When it came up and I started seeing all the debris ... I was like, something's going to come through my windshield."
He ducks down at one point and the video turns on its side.
Smith said the tornado's passing was "way more violent than I think the video shows."
"I could feel the truck lifting up on its suspension," he said. "I thought, 'I'm getting ready to get blown away.' I remember thinking to myself, 'I'm seat belted in. That's about as good as it's going to get for me at this point.'"
While the tornado's edges appear to just graze his truck, Smith said it felt like he was in the midst of the tornado as it passed.
Smith said the video ends when it does because he ran out of memory.
He then gunned it down I-39 and shot past police heading toward the tornado.
"I looked back, and I guess it had gotten bigger after it passed me," he said. "It was completely black behind me."
Smith drove several miles before getting out and surveying the horizon.
The paint on the passenger side of his truck was stripped down to the metal, he said.
Smith said he has been on the road for the past few weeks and is ready to get home to his family in Raleigh this weekend.
He said the experience hasn't made him wary of driving Illinois' highways in the future.
Smith stressed that he was not some careless, thrill-seeking storm chaser, as people have insinuated, along with other anonymous insults that appear below his video.
"I wish my buddy had never posted that up there to a degree," Smith said. "Whew, people are nasty on the Internet."
geoffz@tribpub.com
