Storms flood streets, knock down trees across Chicago area; more than 1,700 still without power
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Wednesday night's storms might not have brought nearly as much rain to Chicagoland as Sunday's historic rainfall, but strong winds nonetheless caused plenty of damage, knocking down trees and damaging homes, and leaving thousands without power.
While the threat of severe weather appeared to be over for most of the area by around 7:30 p.m., rain was expected to continue falling until about midnight.
Wednesday evening's storms prompted severe thunderstorm warnings, bringing heavy downpours and wind gusts of up to 70 mph in some locations.
While more than 20,000 homes and businesses lost power at the height of the storm, the vast majority of those outages have been fixed. As of 3 p.m. Thursday, 1,365 NIPSCO customers in northern Indiana 386 ComEd customers in northern Illinois were still without power.
Powerful winds uprooted a massive tree that fell on Bill Bill Kocinski's home near 111th and Ewing in the East Side neighborhood along the Indiana state line around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday.
"I was inside working, and the storm was coming through, and then there was a big clap of thunder, and the house shook," he said. "Where it hit, it kind of punctured the roof, which is causing the leaks."
Several homes in the neighborhood have had trees fall on them, but none worse than at Kocinski's house, where city crews were using a crane to cut away some of the larger branches before trying to remove the large tree.
Nearby, at 101st and Torrence, the road was blocked by another tree that was toppled in the storm.
Interstate 55 was underwater near Lemont for parts of the night, bringing traffic to a crawl.
The heavy downpour also flooded several city streets, leaving the Diversey viaduct nearly impassable.
Others were sent running for cover.
In Winnetka, a fallen tree left homeowners to piece their house back together after their roof was crushed.
Items were seen lying outside, along with some downed trees in Calumet Heights near 85th and Woodlawn.
CBS 2's Mugo Odigwe spoke with a man doing his part to help his neighbors by using his truck to pick up and haul the items away.
"I'm picking up scrap about to take to the scrap yard. Help cleaning up, too, I guess," said Richard Puryear. "I feel bad for them. Cause some people lost everything they had in their whole basement. Cause it has happened to me years ago, but they fixed our drain system, so we don't flood anymore."
Over in La Grange Park, firefighters were called to a home on fire.
They found primary power lines down on and adjacent to the home when they arrived. They had to wait for ComEd before safely entering to put out the fire.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but we're told it appears to be directly related to the heat from downed power lines.
The fire department added that initial reports were that the power lines came down due to a lightning strike, which is unconfirmed now.
No injuries were reported.
On Thursday, on the West Side, State Representative La Shawn Ford and volunteers will help with flood cleanup.
Ford and volunteers will help a senior at their home. He is also partnering with the group Every Block a Village to raise money for families there.
