A Peru pizza place made a free, long-distance pizza delivery to residents effected by a tornado more than an hour away in a tornado-damaged city.

Lou’s LaGrotto owner Merry Noonan spent a large part of Sunday afternoon helping to make pizzas, and then managers Allison Nichols and Adam Stuart took the business’s hot-food delivery truck to a shelter at Washington, Ill.

Nichols said she arrived at a checkpoint outside of Washington, where police were not allowing anyone without a Washington I.D. or without emergency-assistance credentials into town. However, at the checkpoint at the Five Points recreation center, the LaGrotto truck was welcomed through and directed about one mile to one of the mass shelters in town, Crossroads Methodist Church.

“People came out and everybody was cheering and clapping for us,” Nichols said. She said people were hugging her and Stuart, and she was so emotional about it all that she forgot to take photos.

They donated about 80 pizzas, including two to the police near Five Points who let them through.

She said she thought the people who were taking shelter at the church did have food available to them, but she thought she and Stuart were the first to bring them a hot meal.

“It really was a good feeling; I was really glad we did it,” she said.

Nichols was already familiar with Washington, because she has a friend who left the Illinois Valley to work there. She said the trip she and Stuart made was just a delivery, down and back, and they didn’t see much damage, other than debris all over.

She said the countryside and city, from south of Metamora all the way to Washington was dark due to power outages.