Over 1,000 remain without power after stormy gusts reaching 70 mph hit Chicago area

Over 1,000 ComEd customers remained without power Tuesday after stormy winds reaching 70 mph caused tree limbs to fall onto power lines in the Chicago area.

The outages impacted 61,000 customers Monday evening, most notably in Elgin and Rockford, said Tom Dominguez, a ComEd spokesperson.

“The main cause of the outages were the storms packing high winds, which brought a lot of tree limbs down onto power lines,” Dominguez said.

Power has been restored to 98 percent of customers. The remaining outages should be fixed by 6 p.m. Tuesday, according to ComEd.

The high winds were caused by a Wake Low, which occurs when warming air sinks and causes a drop in pressure on the edge of a decaying line of thunderstorms or rain. The difference in pressure with the cold air then creates the damaging winds, according to the National Weather Service.

“That caused instances of tree damage and even some minor structural damage,” said Ricky Castro, a meteorologist with the weather service.

Nearly nine-tenths of an inch of rain fell at O’Hare Monday, while over an inch fell at Midway, the weather service said. The totals were less than the storms could have brought to the area. Instead, central Illinois got hit hardest.

“The fact that we missed out on the worst of the rain did kind of help in terms of not really exacerbating the flooding situation that had been ongoing,” Castro said. “That could have been a bigger issue in terms of flooding, developing renewed rises on rivers [and] places that have been hard hit by river flooding of late.”

Tuesday’s high was expected to be in the mid-60s and lighter showers could return to the Chicago area Tuesday night into early Wednesday. High temperatures are forecast to remain in the 50s through the rest of the week.