A group of storms that swept through the Midwest this week have destroyed homes, demolished crops and left more than a quarter of a million people without power for days.
Nearly 100,000 people in northern Illinois were still without electricity Thursday morning, according to ComEd, the utility that serves the area. In Iowa, about 200,000 people were left without power.
“Is it Thursday?” Clarissa Huilman, 34, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said in a phone call. ‘We have no power back yet,’ she added as she watched workers try to remove a 75-foot tree that collided with her one-story house, punctured with the roof and tied in the living room and dining room.
The storms brought humiliation over power outages to the region: Traffic on Interstate 380 in Cedar Rapids was halted when truck training was reversed on the north and south lanes. One neighborhood placed a trial “dead end” sign when caravans were blocked and houses were smothered by fallen trees.
Reopening of schools in several districts was delayed due to the storm. Some residents had to drive out of the city to find gas to power generators.
The rare group of storms, called a derecho (pronounced deh-REY-cho), brought hurricane winds of more than 100 miles per hour to the Midwest. At least two people died as a result of the severe weather.
In Iowa, a 63-year-old man who was riding a track and was hit by a falling tree, according to the Linn County Sheriff’s Office. The man, Thomas Rowland, of Solon, Iowa, “sustained serious injuries that eventually took his life on the scene,” the sheriff’s office said.
The Fort Wayne Fire Department in Indiana has found a 73-year-old woman who raped a 5-year-old in an inverted mobile home, said Deputy Chief Adam O’Connor. She died in a hospital, he said, but the child was unharmed.
In Cedar Rapids, “there was no property that was without damage of any kind,” Ms. Huilman said.
Because damage from the storm made her home unsafe to live in, she and her 3-year-old daughter stayed at their parents’ home in Cedar Rapids this week, where neighbors gathered to create a schedule for using the single generator on the block. Residents had to drive 45 miles out of town to get gasoline for generators, she said.
“That moment – we felt that no one came to help,” she said of the neighborhood meeting, where expansion cords were inserted from the generator and a plan was made to check on elderly neighbors.
School districts, including the Clinton Community School District in eastern Iowa, delay the school year until power is restored and buildings repaired. Gary DeLacy, the superintendent, said many families were without access to the Internet, so they relied on word of mouth to communicate the delay.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said on Thursday she had issued “so far Monday’s severe weather” disaster announcements for 23 counties. “
“Residents of those counties may be eligible for assistance with matters such as food replacement and temporary housing,” she said in a Facebook post that was accompanied by a map marked with the affected counties.
The derecho caused extensive damage in Iowa, where the devastating wind of the storm not only flattened crops in the field, but dismantled silos, and ruined harvest crops.
“There are 30.6 million acres of farmland in Iowa,” including crops, livestock and buildings, said Keely Coppess, a State Department spokeswoman, in an email. “It is possible that up to 10 million hectares of agricultural land has been damaged. We’ll have a better idea of how much corn crop is damaged in the next week or so. ”
She added that “the department estimates hundreds of millions of bushels of commercial storage and tens of millions of bushels on farms were lost to the derecho.”
Fields that were once filled with towering stone corn now stand “like stumps,” said Michael Ciabatti, a Cedar Rapids resident.
“The steels are just flat to the ground,” he said. “I don’t see how some farms will recover from losing a whole summer crop.”
With communities already hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, recovery efforts were further complicated by the continuing lack of power. Iowa has 50,167 confirmed virus cases, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
“Hotels are also without power, and limited accommodations” for Cedar Rapids residents, Mr Ciabatti said. “These are now 96 hours we have gone without power, and self-service is bad almost every hour of the day,” he said.
A derecho is a line of widespread intense storms that can move rapidly across the landscape. The potent wind may be as destructive as tornadoes, but the wind moves in a straight line instead of the tornado’s circular patterns. The Spanish word “derecho” can be translated as “straight ahead”, like the wind.
Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at the Northern University of Illinois, said derechos were no strangers to the Midwest, including northern Illinois, where he lost trees in his own backyard.
“In the Midwest, we don’t get any hurricanes,” he said. “We get this.” He compared the experience of living through a derecho to “10 to 15 minutes of a Category 1 hurricane”.
Is there a relationship between climate change and derechos? Climate scientists have found links between a warming world and many aspects of extreme weather, especially in the frequency of heavy rainfall and the resulting flooding. But derechos could be a different matter.
“We do not have a good answer yet,” said Dr. Gensini; he is working on a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the question. Binding each individual storm to climate change is the work of those in the field of attribution science, he noted, taking time after each particular event.
Patrick Marsh, a meteorologist with the National Water Service’s Storm Prediction Center, said that “from a theoretical point of view, you could argue that a warmer world is more humid, and you have more energy for thunder.” But derechos are so complex that the impact of climate change on the various factors is hardly predictable, and some elements that go into making a derecho could be inhibited rather than improved.
In Cedar Rapids, both Mr. Ciabatti and Mrs. Huilman noted the attention that the city and state had attracted during the presidency and the relative silence of national politicians now.
Vice President Mike Pence was in Des Moines on Thursday for events at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. While in the state, he met with a group of farmers to hear about damage to their farms and property.
Marie Fazio contributed reporting.
