Tens of thousands of ComEd customers lost power Wednesday afternoon as severe thunderstorms rolled across the Chicago area, bringing wind gusts up to 80 mph to some areas.
A line of strong thunderstorms spanning from Wisconsin into central Illinois is pushing through the Chicago area, bringing with it heavy rain and potentially damaging winds, according to the NBC 5 Storm Team.
Across the Chicago area, roughly 46,000 ComEd customers were without power as of 4:00 p.m.
Two large outages impacted roughly 1,500 customers each in LaSalle County and DuPage County, and farther north, more than 1,000 customers were impacted by outages in Jo Daviess County and near Rockford, Illinois, according to ComEd’s Outage Map.
The storms prompted ground stops at both O’Hare and Midway airports and severe thunderstorm warnings in several counties. A tornado warning was also issued briefly in parts of Will, Grundy and Kendall counties around 3:20 p.m.
The storms hitting the area are producing straight-line wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour, according to live radar estimates.
More outages are likely as the storms continue to churn through the area.
Live coverage of the storm can be found here.
