Tens of thousands in northern Illinois still without power Tuesday following storms

CHICAGO — About 80,000 ComEd customers in Chicago remained without power Tuesday as the city neared 24 hours since the powerful storms, which spawned the first time a tornado touched down in city limits in two years.

More than 340,000 customers areawide were without power Tuesday afternoon, said John Schoen, a spokesman for the utility. And although the company already had called in 1,500 workers from out of state to help, there are customers who won’t have power restored until Saturday afternoon, he said.

“Right now we expect to have the vast majority of customers up by Friday. I know that’s hard for people to hear, but really people’s power is going to be coming on between now and then,” Schoen said. “I know people got the message that it’s going to be Saturday (on ComEd’s app), but that’s the very last person, versus everybody.”

It will be in areas “with really significant damage” where “a limited number of people, the absolute minority,” will be without power until Saturday, he said.

There had been 635,000 customers out at one time at the height of the outages, he said.

Northern Indiana Public Service Co., which provides electricity to most of the northern third of the sate, at the peak of outages had more than 95,300 customers were without power, said spokeswoman Wendy Lussier. More than 40,000 had power restored by Tuesday morning.

The National Weather Service had put out among its highest threats of severe weather, which ended up displaying its forecasting ability when a tornado hit on the Far North Side in Rogers Park, said Brian Leatherwood, a meteorologist.

Schoen said there was enough notice for the company to put its systems in place in advance, but this storm was different because it was a derecho, which is “an organized and long-lived system of storms producing a family of particularly damaging downbursts,” according to the weather service.

“Usually a storm hits a certain area hard, but we don’t normally see it come through and hit the entire area … from Wisconsin to southern Illinois,” Schoen said. “This storm, we haven’t seen anything like it in years. There was a tornado in Rogers Park, whose ever heard of that?”

The Rogers Park tornado was confirmed using a combination of radar, photos and two submitted videos, Leatherwood said — including one taken by Sabina Tuladhar on Birchwood Avenue in Rogers Park. The tornado was embedded in a storm with already strong winds and it quickly moved out over Lake Michigan, where the funnel became a waterspout, Leatherwood said.

“That’s the only one that’s confirmed,” Leatherwood said. “It’s pretty significant, it’s not straight line, you can see rotation, you can see debris.”

Meteorologist Matt Friedlein said the tornado likely was the most recent in the city in at least two years, potentially longer. The last time the Chicago Tribune wrote about a tornado in city limits was a landspout near Midway Airport in 2016 — four years and one day before Monday’s tornado.

Before that, it had been a decade since a tornado touched down in the city — and that one also was in Rogers Park, on the Loyola University campus in September 2006.

Reached Tuesday morning, Tuladhar said via text message that she has always been fascinated by clouds and lightning. “Just saw it moving so fast, I thought, let me capture that moment. In a matter of a couple seconds debris started flying. … I haven’t seen anything like that before in my life,” she said.

The derecho that blasted a swath of the Midwest spurred more than 600 such severe weather reports from Omaha, Nebraska, to northwest Indiana, knocking down trees and power lines.

It blew in from Iowa, where winds surpassed 100 mph. It swept east across Illinois and into Indiana, with winds of 40 to 70 mph, with some gusts as high as 92 mph, the weather service reported, but the Chicago area mostly dodged the direst consequences as no deaths were reported, forecasters said.

At least one semi-truck blew over in the Peru area as a result of the 60 mph-plus winds, Leatherwood said. One person was reported injured as a result, but additional details were not immediately available.

Judy Wood Edstrom’s van was hit by part of a tree that split nearly in half in North Park following a lightning strike. Edstrom explained that while she was surveying the damage on her parked van, she noticed a small white car near West Catalpa and North Spaulding avenues, also trapped under the huge branches. Police and firefighters responded and cut the branches away and the occupants emerged seemingly unscathed, she said.

Firefighters also responded to numerous fires started by energized power lines, the Fire Department said in a tweet.

Throughout the Chicago area, roads were blocked by downed trees and power lines.

In the Logan Square neighborhood, tree branches plummeted onto power lines, cutting power on several blocks south of Diversey Avenue and east of Kedzie Street.

In Lombard, more than 200 homes were in some way damaged by winds that exceeded 50 miles per hour at Glenbard South High School, according to a post on Facebook from the village of Lombard.

One such structure was the Sheldon Peck Homestead, the oldest house in Lombard, built in 1839, according to Alison Costanzo, executive director of the Lombard Historical Society. The home, which was restored to its 1839 configuration by the historical society, sustained roof damage, and has a tree against the east side of the building, Costanzo said.

They planned to call for volunteers to help with the cleanup through their social media pages.

“It’s just incredibly mind-boggling, just the amount of damage that the storm did in a short amount of time,” she said.

The historical society also maintains the Lombard Cemetery, where there are several large trees down, she said, but they have not yet ascertained whether any headstones were damaged.

“They’re both important landmarks here in Lombard,” she said.

The Lombard Veterinary Hospital was also damaged in the storm and is closed until further notice, according to a Facebook post.

There also was damage across a wide swath of Joliet after the storm, according to Mike Eulitz, public assets supervisor.

“This damage seems to have covered the entire city,” Eulitz said.

Power outages remained an issue there, as well.

Elmhurst lost power to its City Hall and police station, but backup generators kept the buildings in operation, according to Kassondra Schref, the city’s communications manager.

About a third of ComEd customers in La Grange had no power Monday night, but Palmer Place Restaurant in the village’s downtown did. The restaurant posted on Facebook: “If your power is out, come to Palmer’s and bring your phone chargers. Enjoy a drink and some food. We got ya covered.”

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(Pioneer Press reporter Kimberly Fornek contributed to this report.)

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