Damaging storms swept through the Midwest, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers and causing more than a thousand flight delays or cancellations at Chicago airports with more potentially severe weather expected Thursday.
The National Weather Service said it received more than a dozen reports of tornadoes Wednesday across northern Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois. There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths.
The storms were fueled by cool air from Canada clashing with warm, humid air from the South. Wednesday storms moved into the Chicago area in the afternoon, downing trees and damaging some buildings.
The two major Chicago airports, Chicago O’Hare International Airport and Chicago Midway International Airport, temporarily put all flights on hold in the evening due to thunderstorms. By Wednesday evening, more than 1,000 flights going into and out of Chicago had been delayed or canceled, according to FlightAware , a flight tracking website.
Air traffic appeared to return to normal Thursday morning, with only 24 flight cancellations and 34 delays nationwide, FlightAware reported.
Strong winds blew part of the roof off an apartment building in the Chicago area, forcing residents to leave, according to NBC 5 Chicago. Elsewhere, barns collapsed in Wisconsin, buildings were crushed in rural northern Missouri and some large trees and power lines were downed in other areas across the Midwest, photos and video online showed.
Around 390,000 customers had no electricity in the Midwest on Thursday. including nearly 226,000 outages in Illinois, including around 150,000 in Cook County. Commonwealth Edison Company, which provides electric service across northern Illinois, said the storms had downed poles and wires.
“We know this is challenging and will restore service as safely and quickly as conditions allow,” the company said in a post on X.
Some early Thursday morning showers and thunderstorms pushed through South Central Illinois. Centralia City Fire reported a transformer fire and downed lines in the 200 block of Janet Drive, but it was not immediately clear if the problem was caused by the storms. The Salem Water Plant recorded 27 hundredths of an inch of rain from the storms.
