Monday, August 10, 2020
A rare wind storm with power similar to an inland hurricane swept across the Midwest today, blowing over trees, flipping vehicles, causing widespread property damage and leaving tens of thousands of homes without power.
The storm known as a derecho lasted several hours as it tore across parts of Illinois, eastern Nebraska, Iowa and parts of Wisconsin.
Thousands of people in central Illinois are without power due to the storm.
At 4:48 p.m. Monday, outage maps showed over 4,000 people without power in the Champaign-Urbana area alone. Ameren Illinois’ map had four outage areas highlighted across the area.
The Decatur area also had 720 people without power at the same time, per Ameren. There were 784 Ameren customers without power in the Maroa area.
City Water, Light and Power in Springfield showed 29 outages affecting 519 customers in its outage map Monday evening.
At one point today, more than 180,000 customers in Cook County, Illinois were without power.
A scientist at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center says the storm had the wind speed of a major hurricane, and likely caused more widespread damage than a normal tornado.
Officials in the Iowa cities of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Marshalltown say the damage is extensive.
Some reporting is from our television news partner WAND-TV.