Chicago-area residents were struggling Tuesday with flooding of a major thoroughfare as well as power outages at hundreds of thousands of homes in the aftermath of violent thunderstorms that spawned torrential rains and hurricane-like wind gusts.
Elsewhere in the Midwest, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said rising flood weathers, which made 11 locks and dams impassable, forced the closure of the Mississippi River from Bellevue, Iowa, to Saverton, Mo.
In southeast Wisconsin, about 115,000 people were without power from the storms, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreports. Around 35,000 were still without power Tuesday morning. A spokesman for We Energies tells the newspaper that it was the worst storm since 2005 in terms of its impact on area customers.
The late Monday storms, coming almost one year after a violent derecho pounded Chicago, may have also generated several small tornadoes that left damaged buildings.
Winds, reaching as high as 86 miles an hour — the equivalent of a Category-1 hurricane — also knocked down trees across the city.
The city was still battling flood water generated by heavy rain at the height of the storm. At one point, Midway Airport registered nearly an inch of rain in just 7 minutes.