EFFINGHAM – Residents in Effingham are beginning to clean up the damage from Wednesday’s tornadoes – including the rubble from a family-owned Corvette museum leveled during the storm.
Several tornadoes touched down in central Illinois Wednesday night, causing power outages, downing trees and damaging buildings.
Mid America Motorworks is a second-generation Corvette parts store and museum.
“My father-in-law borrowed $500 52 years ago to start this business, and he started by selling Corvette parts out of the trunk of his car,” Elizabeth Yager said. “And he would go from Corvette show to Corvette show, and he built a name for himself. He started making catalogues, and that’s sort of how it began.”
The museum that housed one-of-a-kind cars and memorabilia took the bulk of the damage from Wednesday’s storm.
“We’re looking through the rubble for anything salvageable. I just found an album cover signed by The Beach Boys,” Elizabeth Yager said. “We’re trying to grab anything and everything that’s salvageable.”
Several totaled Corvettes were towed away. President and CEO Michael Yager hopes to fix as many as possible.
“Outside of the National Corvette Museum, I would say this is probably one of the most prominent Corvette collections,” he said.
The couple was at home when the tornado siren went off.
“I went outside out front, and I saw a tornado heading our way,” Elizabeth Yager said. “I had the kids run inside. We went down to the basement.”
The tornado just missed their development, she said.
After their Internet came back on, they started getting pictures of the damage.
“We didn’t even know what we were looking at first,” she said, “because the back of our building – it’s completely destroyed.”
The building is a complete loss, Michael said. Although the warehouse with the company’s inventory took less damage, he’s not optimistic.
“I probably think maybe 5 percent of our inventory might be recoverable,” he said, “so that’s quite literally millions and millions of dollars out the door.”
He would like to get the business up and running somewhere else before thinking about rebuilding.
“The most important thing outside of family and employees being safe is getting the business back up to an operable state, so we can get staff paid,” he said. “It’s a lot of lives.”
He said the company has 20 employees.
Ameren reports electricity has been restored for most of the area, but downed trees and power lines still line the tornado’s path.
Next door, a local drone company was helping remove debris from the area.
Tony Weber with Green Creek Drones oversaw a large drone as it picked up piles of branches and flew them away.
“Some of our drones have high lift capacity,” he said, “so we’re experimenting with some different applications today, looking at brush removal after a storm.”
IPM meteorologist Andrew Pritchard reports a total of three tornadoes swept through the region on Wednesday. The other two touched down in Charleston and Rose Hill, he said.
According to the National Weather Service, Illinois has had the most tornadoes in the country this year, eclipsing the amount in the traditional tornado alley.