By By JAMES COLLINS / Niles Daily Star
NILES -- Linda Crocker had always wanted a new house and the large trees removed from her back yard, but Wednesday night's disaster was not exactly what she had in mind.
She screamed when a pine tree in her yard at 2016 Baldwin Drive snapped in half and landed directly on her house.
Crocker started running the other direction when her living room ceiling also began caving in. She made an escape and found shelter at her next door neighbor's home.
She expects that the house will have to be completely rebuilt.
Her husband Kevin, who was at work while the storm was going on, returned home to find his home destroyed.
Just a few blocks away on Lewis Drive, Mike Ostrander was outside working to clear the broken tree branches from his lawn on Thursday.
Ostrander, who has lived in the Oak Manor neighborhood for nine years, only experienced some minor damage with winds blowing a shudder off his home and wiping out a few bird feeders in his yard.
To help compensate for the storm's impact in Oak Manor, many neighbors were working together to help each other.
By 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, a group of helpful neighbors had visited their ninth house of the day on Baldwin Drive after starting their clean-up of the street seven hours earlier.
The ninth stop was the home of Bob and Carla Custard, who were very grateful for the help of their friends.
Niles Township was not in much better shape, especially at D &D Storage located off of Walton Road.
The storm ripped off a 40 foot section of one of the buildings and tore off parts of the roof of the other building.
Owner Donn Fairchild was eating out in downtown Niles when the storm hit.
Luckily, his home, which is located in the front office area of the storage units, was not damaged by the storm.
But, the extremely high winds did cause the entire structure to pull away from the foundation by a few inches.
He spent Thursday morning assessing the damage and trying to contact his storage customers.
One of those customers was Chuck Rouse, who stored his collection of 12 classic Volkswagen vehicles in four of the units.
The roof was ripped off his units causing some minor body and windshield damage to a few of the cars.
The area surrounding the storage units was littered with debris from the roofs and buildings that were destroyed.
Niles resident Eileen Doyle, who was outside cleaning up the fallen limbs from her yard on Thursday afternoon, did not get hit nearly as bad as some of her neighbors along 14th Street.
When Doyle returned home from work on Wednesday night after the storm had crashed through her neighborhood, she was pleased with the how well the city responded to the disaster.