By Doyle Rice for USA Today
More than 600,000 customers remained without power Wednesday in the Midwest due to the powerful derecho that roared across the region on Monday. Iowa was especially hard hit, as the potent windstorm devastated the state’s power grid and flattened valuable corn fields.
Officials said full recovery from the storm will take several weeks.
The storm had winds of up to 112 mph near Cedar Rapids, Iowa – as powerful as an inland hurricane – as it tore from eastern Nebraska across Iowa and parts of Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois, including Chicago and its suburbs.
Of the 600,000 powerless as of Wednesday, some 330,000 were in Iowa, according to poweroutage.us. Iowa’s three largest metropolitan areas of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport still had widespread outages as of Wednesday morning.
Early estimates say the derecho flattened at least one-third of Iowa’s crops – about 10 million acres, according to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds. In addition, tens of millions of bushels of grain that were stored at co-ops and on farms were damaged or destroyed as bins blew away.
And it rocked Marshalltown, Iowa, where an EF-3 tornado destroyed the town’s business district just two years ago. With winds of 99 mph, Monday’s storm damaged some businesses that had recently recovered, even damaging the scaffolding being used to repair the historic courthouse dome.
Scott Blackstock, manager at a Casey’s General Store on Marshalltown Boulevard, rode out the storm with eight customers inside a windowless beverage cooler.
“It was the only place to hide,” he said. “It was pretty bad.” With power still out Tuesday at his store, Blackstock went through his inventory to see what food could be salvaged. The store’s sign was bent and hanging upside down, and Blackstock wasn’t sure whether a piece of sheet metal wrapped around a nearby electric pole was part of the store’s siding or roof. Read more from USA Today.
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