Midwest Tornado Touchdown Damages School Bus

A handful of Rockford, Ill., middle school students and their driver escaped serious injury Monday, Nov. 22, 2010, when a tornado touched down at an intersection in Loves Park and knocked their school bus onto its side, authorities said.

Four or five of the children complained of minor back pain as they were being helped out of the bus, but Winnebago County Deputy Chief Sheriff Don Gasparini said none of their injuries appeared major. The students were taken to local hospitals, Rockford Public School District spokesman Mark Bonne said.

Bonne declined to say which schools the students attended, but he said the bus was bound for Caledonia, the tiny Boone County village that was the center of the storm damage. What was believed to have been a tornado from the same storm system did extensive property damage in the village of fewer than 250 residents.

Its township hall was demolished and a number of homes were damaged, North Boone fire Chief Gale Worley said. The storm also destroyed a number of silos and grain bins.

A complete damage list could not be compiled as of press time because the whole town was in darkness from a power failure, Worley said.

Utility outages were widespread late Monday afternoon, with some 42,200 customers without power from northern Winnebago County east to Belvidere, ComEd spokesman Paul Callighan said. The utility said the storms hit 10 transmission towers in Boone County.

The fast-moving storm system also produced two apparent tornado touchdowns in southeastern Wisconsin.

The storm front then moved eastward into Indiana and Michigan, but much of northeastern Illinois remained under flash flood watches and warnings from the heavy rain that accompanied the storms.