Disaster Strikes – The Night of the Twin Tornadoes

Life is like central Illinois weather – it changes in the blink of an eye. It did the night of March 12, 2006.

“The storm sirens go off and I’ve heard those so many times in my life, they don’t even register,” recalls O’Shea Builders President Mike O’Shea. “I click on the TV and it says a tornado is on the ground by Knights Action Park (the south end of Springfield).” He takes his family into the basement as a precaution. “We spend the next couple hours there. It was pretty scary. About 10 p.m. it had passed and we went upstairs. I was listening to the radio and the announcer said, ‘I’m over by Shepardo’s Restaurant near Ninth Street, and there’s just horrific damage.’”

That was by O’Shea’s headquarters on 10 ½ Street. Mike rushed to the car. His son, Matt, says: “I remember looking outside at how orange it was. I was scared for grandpa (Bud O’Shea) and dad to go over there. I thought they were going to die.”

Parts of the city “looked like a war zone” with downed trees and debris, Mike says.

When he got to O’Shea’s building, he was dumbfounded. The front half “got a lot of water and the roof was torn off.” The western half, with the carpenter shop, was “decimated” and the equipment exposed to the rain and wind. “I was completely overwhelmed,” Mike says. “We didn’t have a place to go to work the next morning.”

The year before, O’Shea constructed a building for Springnet, which used half of it as a disaster recovery center for businesses and offered emergency work centers. But they were booked first-come, first-served. Mike called the owner while he was still surveying O’Shea’s destruction. It was 11 p.m. or midnight. “Then, I drove home,” he says. “Well, the storms recur. So, we take the kids in the basement again. I never slept that night. Not for one minute.”

Luckily, O’Shea had already purchased land on the southwest edge of town, where the office is currently located, but they hadn’t started construction. They didn’t even have drawings or permits. “Ironically, if we had built here, the tornado would have wiped the building out,” Mike says. “When we came here the next day, the path of the tornado was cut through the grass” and had demolished a nearby grocery store.

While O’Shea dealt with the devastation of its 40-plus-year-old office and shop, it helped a nearby business – Honeywell Hobbs - that was severely damaged. “We assembled a crew and tools, and I think we were at their building by mid-morning on Monday,” says Jeff Jarrett, Director of Building Services. “They had a roof that was wide open. The owner was very grateful.”

Over the following weeks, O’Shea Builders recovered what it could from 10 ½ Street, secured four different places to work temporarily, and fast tracked the new headquarters construction. It moved in five months after the tornadoes. Before that, operations were once split into three locations simultaneously. “If you worked at O’Shea, you had to be really smart just to know where to show up!” Mike says.

While recovering from the tornadoes, O’Shea “acquired an enormous amount of work and completed some really complex projects,” he adds. “We’re really proud of what the O’Shea team did in the midst of adversity. I tell people, ‘Tornadoes are team builders.’”   

O’Shea’s headquarters was one of 1,548 homes and 55 commercial buildings in Springfield damaged or ruined by the tornadoes, according to The State Journal-Register.