Also known as the town of Geneva, Como saw “massive damage” with trees downed across almost every road within the subdivision, said Undersheriff Hausner during Friday’s press conference.
As of 3 p.m. Saturday, about 6,500 customers remain without power in Walworth County, or one in 10 of all homes and businesses.
For Como resident Debbie Krebs, the storm sounded a little like a train engine, unlike anything she’s ever seen or heard before. She watched as entire uprooted trees flew by her window. Just a few minutes before, she said, the skies looked eerily calm.
She didn’t have time to shelter, as the warning came several minutes after the storm passed, she said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it — it was worse than when I was a kid,” she said. “These trees were down to the ground, and they were spinning, and the hail, oh my God, the hail.”
Her neighbor, Tina Invergo, was getting coffee at a friend’s house, five minutes down the road, when the winds overtook the neighborhood. With all the downed power lines and trees, it took her 35 minutes to get back to her house from just a few blocks away.
She’s since had to make a trip to Lowe’s to get a generator to power a feeding tube for her husband, a cancer patient. Like other residents, she’s been told power will return in three to five days.
Invergo had been looking forward to throwing the Fourth of July celebration she’s organized in her neighborhood every year for the past eight years. She made the quick decision to cancel the event, she said.
“Her yard is a mess, a total mess,” she said, pointing to a neighbor’s house. “And I was in her yard before it happened, and we were looking at a woodpecker. And then the tree that the woodpecker was in was gone. It was like a nightmare.”
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