United Group Insurance

Hundreds of thousands without power days after Midwest storm

News, Weather

August 12th, 2020 by Ric Hanson

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of residents in Iowa’s three largest cities are without power two days after a rare wind storm hit the Midwest. The storm known as a derecho devastated the state’s power grid, flattened valuable corn fields and left two people dead in Iowa and Indiana. Major parts of Iowa suffered outages Monday as straight-line winds toppled trees, snapped poles and downed power lines. The storm had winds of up to 112 mph near Cedar Rapids, 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. In Iowa, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport still had widespread outages Wednesday morning.