(Omaha & Des Moines) – Thousands of electric power customers were left without power for several hours Tuesday night into early this (Wednesday) morning. Winds gusted to a little more than 45-mph in Atlantic last night. The highest gusts of near or slightly greater than 60-mph were recorded Tuesday night in Denison, Carroll, Ames, Des Moines and Estherville, while Sioux City had a gust to near 70-mph.

As of 3-a.m. the Iowa Association of Electric Cooperatives’ interactive map showed the outages in Pottawattamie and Shelby County were down to just two customers in the dark. The majority of outages were being reported in southeastern Iowa’s Johnson County, where there were as many as 535 customers without electricity. Other, scattered outages remained in 11 north-central, eastern and southern parts of the State.

As of 3-a.m., MidAmerican Energy reported scattered outages in Mills, Sac and Sioux Counties in western Iowa, with much less fewer than 100 outages being reported in other areas. The greatest concentration of MidAmerican outages were in the Quad Cities. Previously, MidAmerican had reported outages affecting just over 4,300 customers, the majority of which were in Central Iowa.

Alliant Energy reported slightly more than 2,000 customers were without service as of 3-a.m., with most of those in Dubuque County.  Altogether, 3,582 homes and businesses were without power in Iowa, as of 3-a.m., according to the Iowa Power Outage Map.

Meanwhile in Nebraska, the Omaha Public Power District (OPPD) power outage map indicated there were 2,281 customers without power as of 9:45 p.m., Wednesday, most are in Douglas and Sarpy counties, but a vast majority of those people and business had their power restored by 3:15-a.m.