(Bloomberg) — A powerful storm that rolled across the Midwest and Great Plains spawning tornadoes, toppling trees and leaving nearly 500,000 homes and businesses without power is starting to wind down there even as gusting winds continue in Chicago and Canada.
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Winds gusted to 90-miles (145 kilometers)-per-hour or more in parts of the central U.S. as the storm combined with already stiff breezes and warm air to set record breaking temperatures across the region. The storm spawned 21 tornado reports, 501 instances of wind damage, and at least 19 outbreaks of hail, some of which reached softball size, according to the National Weather Service.
A steady wind of 28 mph was blowing at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, where the temperature was 61 degrees Fahrenheit (16 Celsius) at about 5 a.m. local time. Wednesday’s high reached a record 66 degrees.
“It was very impressive,” said Rich Otto, a forecaster with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center. “I cannot recall a system like this in recent memory. Today things look quieter and that is good news.”
The storm swept through a week after a devastating outbreak of tornadoes last week killed at least 75 people in Kentucky and neighboring states, including collapsing an Amazon warehouse in Illinois. As of 6 a.m. New York time, 486,365 customers in eight Midwestern and Plains states were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. An additional 33,792 are blacked out in California as heavy snows have fallen in the Sierra Nevada.
Damage was reported from New Mexico to Minnesota from the winds that caused more widespread damage than the tornadoes the storm spawned. Aircraft were damaged and a radio tower collapsed in New Mexico, power lines were downed throughout the region, there were numerous reports of toppled trees and roofs being ripped off buildings, according to the Storm Prediciton Center.
The ferocity of the storms stunned many meteorologists, who took to Twitter to express shock such an event was unfolding in December, when such systems tend to be rarer.
“Ok, nocturnal mid-December thunderstorms along the north shore of Lake Superior by Canada. When I was an undergrad meteorology student in the 70s at Michigan, predicting such an event would occur in my career would have seemed ludicrous!” Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground and a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections wrote in a tweet.
What made the system worse is that conditions were already ripe for high winds across the central U.S. and then the thunderstorms were embedded in it, Otto at the Weather Prediction Center said.
High Temperatures
In addition to the winds, temperatures rose to record highs for the date across the Great Plains. In Topeka, Kansas, Wednesday’s high reached 76 degrees; 74 in Omaha; 70 in Sioux City, Iowa, and 74 in Des Moines, the weather service said.
Meanwhile, to the west, as much as 5 feet (1.5 meters) of snow fell in California’s mountains, and another two feet could fall Wednesday as a smaller storm moves in off the Pacific Ocean. That could help alleviate drought conditions that have gripped the state and much of the U.S. West.
The snow and high winds already have knocked out power to more than 20,000 homes and businesses across California and those outages could spread eastward as the wind rises. In addition, many roads in the mountains of California and Nevada have been closed.
The low pressure system that spawned the storms has moved into Canada, Otto said. High wind warnings have been posted throughout southern Ontario by Environment and Climate Change Canada. The agency said poweroutages are possible through Thursday.
(Updates with impacts starting in second paragraph and throughout)
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