Sunday's Storm Left A Dramatic Trail Of Destruction, Outages

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jul 25, 2016 5:29PM

Severe thunderstorms tore through the Chicago region on Sunday night, resulting in hundreds of calls to the city reporting damages and causing thousands of power outages. Also: heaps more jaw-dropping images and video.

John Schoen, Communications Manager at ComEd, told Chicagoist that the electric utility had restored 87,000 in the northern Illinois region, including Chicago and its suburbs, and approximately 15,900 customers were without power as of late Monday morning. In the city, 467 had suffered outages and 14,506 customers were affected as of Monday morning, according to data on the ComEd website. Service-interruption details can be tracked on ComEd’s Outage Map.

While the most dramatic documentation of Sunday’s storm damage was CTA-related—including video of a lightning strike to the Blue Line’s Illinois Medical District station—CTA had restored all train service as of early Monday morning.

The Department of Streets and Sanitation received an estimated 1000 calls for uprooted trees, limbs and other debris scattered in the streets, Jennifer Martinez, Director of Public Affairs, DSS, told Chicagoist.

But those trees had it relatively easy, it turns out. Check out this video, posted to Facebook by Anja Englert of Leo Burnett, of a pole being absolutely destroyed by lightning near Irving Park Ave and I-90.