Watch now: Mattoon warehouse looking to rebound after storm damage | Local

Dawkins, the company’s marketing and customer relations manager, estimated that the back one-sixth of the warehouse on the building’s west end was destroyed, with the roof and walls all blown in. The office portion on the structure’s east side also sustained some damage.

“The center of the building is actually pretty intact right now,” she said. “But the west end, there’s going to be some major reconstruction there. We’ll have to close off the end of the building and then kind of rebuild from there.”

Thankfully, none of the company’s 20 employees or owner-operator truck drivers were present at the 110,000-square-foot structure when the storm hit Friday evening.

Dawkins said the company will be able to rebuild, but likely won’t be “up and running full capacity for a couple of weeks, probably.”

The former LSC Communications building located nearby the Alton warehouse also was damaged. A Mattoon Police Department dispatcher indicated there were some homes that were severely damaged.

The storm that hit Mattoon was part of a massive front that wreaked havoc across the Midwest.

The National Weather Service confirmed the presence of EF-2 tornado damage near Herrick in southern Shelby County, with surveys still pending in Moultrie and Coles counties.

Shelby County Emergency Management Agency Coordinator Troy Agney confirmed that the Herrick area “took the brunt of it,” but said there was damage across the county.

One resident who lives near Herrick was taken to a Springfield hospital after sustaining injuries caused by the collapse of his home, which Agney described as “a total loss.” He received another report of a home farther west that was “shoved off the foundation,” but it could not be immediately reached due to downed power lines.

Agney said it was easy to follow the tornado’s “path across from the southwest to the northeast,” with damage also present near Cowden, Lakewood and Windsor before eventually moving into Gays in Moultrie County.

“The South Central fuel terminal over between Windsor and Gays was basically wiped off the map,” Agney said. “The office is gone and the warehouse is gone. I think they have three tanks left standing out of the five.”

Agney said they are “cleaning up that mess now.”

Preliminary reports from the National Weather Service show the first report of a tornado from a storm spotter in Moultrie County came at 9:52 p.m. two miles west of Gays and a second sighting was reported one minute later.

At 10 p.m., the weather service had a report of high winds in the area of the Rural King Distribution Center along Illinois 121 in Mattoon that resulted in a truck being overturned. At 10:02 p.m. trained weather spotters reported a tornado in southeast Coles County and at 10:04 p.m. a tornado was reported in northwest Coles County that resulted in a family being trapped in a damaged home. No additional information on that report was available.