Big storms have been coming through Illinois and Indiana the last few days. Last night, a tornado passed through the northern edge of my town of Kouts,IN. It came within about 300 yards of my home. Fortunately, my house was spared of any damage, but I lost 2 trees. One was a weeping tree that luckily fell away from the house and the other was an apple tree. The fence surrounding my back yard was about 50% damaged. The vinyl fence pieces were scattered but we found most of them. It shouldn’t take me too long to reassemble them. Locating missing and damaged parts will be the biggest challenge. My wife and I are both fine and we survived without injury except for being without power for 13 hours. We are very lucky that the trees and fence were the only casualties.

Glad you're OK.

That was a very close call.

Good Luck with your fence repair.

Hope your home insurance can help cover your repair costs.

A-Jay

Glad only some property damage! Those storms were crazy full of energy. The one cell spawned two (or possibly three) tornados at the same time. Channel 9 even got Tom Skilling in on the action and he's been retired a couple years....

I was watching that system crawl across Wisconsin and into Illinois/Indiana this past week. It was nasty muggy earlier this week and the collision of cooler Canadian air that met the tropical stuff created several severe outbreaks of storms. I think they even called one of them a derecho on Wednesday evening.

Those were some big storms that went through. We were spared as they mostly went north. I watched the lightning show from a distance and it was spectacular.

Here’s a shot of the tornado as it went through my town. I live directly behind that grocery store. Apparently it was a EF3

5 hours ago, Scott F said:

Big storms have been coming through Illinois and Indiana the last few days. Last night, a tornado passed through the northern edge of my town of Kouts,IN. It came within about 300 yards of my home. Fortunately, my house was spared of any damage, but I lost 2 trees. One was a weeping tree that luckily fell away from the house and the other was an apple tree. The fence surrounding my back yard was about 50% damaged. The vinyl fence pieces were scattered but we found most of them. It shouldn’t take me too long to reassemble them. Locating missing and damaged parts will be the biggest challenge. My wife and I are both fine and we survived without injury except for being without power for 13 hours. We are very lucky that the trees and fence were the only casualties.

Same thing has happened to my fence several times; easy fix.

Glad you are OK. That pic gave me they willies. That was too close for comfort.

On 6/12/2026 at 12:14 PM, A-Jay said:

Glad you're OK.

That was a very close call.

Good Luck with your fence repair.

Hope your home insurance can help cover your repair costs.

A-Jay

Actually repair costs are minimal. My wife and I were able to clear the downed trees ourselves and we reassembled the fence. Altogether it will only have cost a couple hundred dollars. No need to get insurance involved. My next door neighbor has some damage to his roof and fence. His costs will be in the thousands. We were extremely fortunate. The tornado missed most of our small town. No one was injured and only two or three houses took a direct hit. The strongest part of the storm went through open corn fields.

Glad your ok Thats as close as your gonna get

A nearly identical setup is on tap tomorrow in the same areas as last week in Illinois and Indiana.

Let's hope that this round isn't as bad