The Devastation: Washington, IL

A tornado ripped through Washington, IL on the morning of Sunday, Nov. 17, 2013. These photos were taken six days after clean up began.

I visited the site with a company providing free food to the volunteers. While getting directions to the location of the food truck, our navigator kept referring to the path of destruction as "the devastation." So casually; like a street name.

Photos do not do the destruction justice. At one point, I was standing on a slab of concrete, surveying the entire landscape when my sister said to me: "This used to be someone's garage." Looking down I noticed the piles of broken red bricks lining the slab. I imagined a car pulling into the space, the garage door closing behind it, a man getting out, propping his son's bicycle onto the wall, then grabbing a cold beer from the freezer in the corner on his way into the warm house. The security that comes with arriving home at the end of a hard day was destroyed in a matter of seconds, reduced to nothing more than a cold, exposed slab of concrete.

The Washington, IL tornado resulted in the death of one resident. Many were attending church services outside the tornado's path when it hit, returning hours later to piles of debris.

If you would like to contribute to the recovery, information can be found here.