Crews work to fix damage, utility outages caused by powerful southern Illinois storms
More than 2,500 households remained without power in Monroe and St. Clair counties Tuesday morning following a powerful late night storm that ripped through the region.
Starting just before 7 p.m. and lasting until at least 10 p.m. Monday, a thunderstorm bringing heavy rain and high-speed winds blew through Madison, Monroe and St. Clair counties. At 9 p.m., there were at least 6,000 Ameren Illinois customers with reported power outages, the company’s Outage Map showed.
By the next morning, emergency management agencies were assessing what damage had been done.
St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency Director Herb Simmons was in Marissa Tuesday with representatives from the Illinois Emergency Management Agency to take photos and videos of the damage. That footage will be sent to the National Weather Service, which will determine if an inspection is necessary to see what kind of storm conditions caused the damage.
Simmons said that throughout the county, there were “probably 50” homes with siding and roof damage attributed to the high-speed winds and that several trees had been uprooted. He said that at least 36 power lines and transformers had been knocked down, prompting Ameren Illinois to send employees out, as well as union workers from Springfield who joined to clear the damage.
“We got hit pretty bad,” he said. “It was pretty widespread.”
Clearing debris across roadways was a priority, Simmons said, adding that members of a Southern Baptist storm relief organization assisted in the efforts.
Spokespeople from Madison and Monroe counties were not immediately available for comment on damage in those counties, but as of 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, at least 600 customers in Monroe County remained without power.
The storm, known as a derecho, blew through eastern Nebraska across Iowa and parts of Wisconsin and Illinois. It had the wind speed of a major hurricane and likely caused more widespread damage than a normal tornado, Patrick Marsh, science support chief at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, told the Associated Press.
According to Marsh, a derecho is not like a hurricane because it has no eye and its winds come across in a line, but the damage it is likely to do spread over such a large area is more like an inland hurricane than a quick more powerful tornado.
The National Weather Service in St. Louis’ forecast predicts scattered storms throughout the metro-east every day of the week until Saturday.
This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 11:47 AM.
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