OAN Staff Abril Elfi
11:40 AM – Tuesday, July 16, 2024
Many destructive thunderstorms and “dozens of circulations” have hit the Chicago area, leaving thousands of residents without power.
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As many as 15 tornado warnings were issued Monday evening throughout the Chicago area, which was under a “moderate” risk of severe weather, or four out of five on the Storm Predictions Severe Weather Scale. The warnings covered the suburbs as well as the city.
According to multiple reports, the widespread alerts and moderate risk were “rare” for July.
“Pretty much every single county had a tornado warning,” Meteorologist Alicia Roman said.
The National Weather Service (NWS) is set to survey more than 20 parts of the Chicago area where damage and possible circulations took place, though the effort could take days.
“There’s going to be a lot of confirmation of tornadoes,” Roman said. “We have to wait for the official confirmation from NWS.”
According to the utility company’s outage map, over 100,000 ComEd customers were still without power as of 9 a.m. on Tuesday. Over 90,000 outages were reported in Cook County, which accounted for the majority of the outages, as well as 45,000 outages in Will County.
A message posted to ComEd’s website stated that it could take days before power is restored.
“We know some of you are without power and we appreciate your patience as crews work to restore outages,” the message read. “Based on the history of similar storms of this size across the ComEd service area, we expect 80% of outages to be restored by Wednesday, 7/17/24, at 3 p.m., and the remaining customers restored by Friday, 7/19, at 6 p.m.”
In Northwest Indiana, approximately 99,000 customers are without power, with the greatest impacts across Chesterton Crown Point, East Chicago, Gary Goshen, Griffith, Hammond, La Porte, Portage, and Valparaiso.
“Severe storms overnight brought extremely high winds, rain, and tornadic activity across the region, causing elevated electric power outages in our service area,” a message on the utility’s website said. “Damage includes downed wires and tree limbs and broken poles.”
“All available NIPSCO crews are working to assess the damage, make the necessary repairs and restore power as safely and quickly as possible,” the message went on to say.
Numerous downed power lines and uprooted trees were also left in their path by the widespread storms, which had an impact on traffic.
According to the Lake County Coroner, a tree fell on a woman’s house in Lake County, Indiana, causing fatal injuries.
I-55 near Channahon in Will County is expected to stay closed for “at least 12 hours” because of downed power lines, according to officials.
The NWS posted an update on X stating they will be investigating the damage today.
“Good morning. Our office has six damage survey teams out surveying damage across northern Illinois and northwest Indiana today. So far, we have 29 different paths of potential damage that we will be investigating today and in the coming days to identify potential tornado tracks,” the post says.
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