(Chicago) Hundreds of people in a southern Illinois town were ordered to evacuate Tuesday as water rushed over the top of a dam, the result of severe weather that raged across the Midwest overnight with heavy rain and tornadoes that hit the Chicago area.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost power and in Indiana, a woman died after a tree fell on a home Monday night.
“We kind of heard a gust of wind that came up really quickly and we decided we were all going to go to the basement,” said Mihajlo Jevdosic, 16, of Norridge, Illinois, where residents swapped storm stories. “And as we were going into the basement, we heard a big thud and the tree fell on the house.”
A flooded dam
Water overtopped a dam near Nashville, Illinois. No injuries were reported in the community of 3,000 people southeast of St. Louis.
Authorities earlier said about 300 people were in the evacuation zone near the city’s reservoir. The rest of Nashville was not in imminent danger from the dam failure, but flash flooding on roads raised concerns about water rescues.
The National Weather Service said 5 to 7 inches (127 to 178 millimeters) of rain fell over an eight-hour period. Additional heavy rain was forecast. A long stretch of Interstate 64 in the Nashville area was closed.
The 89-year-old dam was last inspected in 2021 and classified as a “high-hazard” dam, meaning a failure is likely to result in the loss of at least one life, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The dam’s condition was not available in online data.
Deaths and damages
A 44-year-old woman died in Cedar Lake, Indiana, a suburb south of Chicago, the Lake County coroner’s office said.
The weather service confirmed a tornado hit Des Moines, Iowa, as storms moved through Monday afternoon and overnight. Police responded to calls about power poles snapping in half.
The storms then moved east into northern Illinois and the Chicago area, which received tornado warnings and torrential rains.
As of noon, 215,000 customers were without power in Illinois, although that number was much higher just hours earlier, according to PowerOutage.us.
Chicago firefighters said on social media that there was only one serious injury in the third-largest U.S. city, a person injured when a tree fell on a car.
O’Hare International Airport reported 81 flight cancellations Tuesday morning, and Midway International Airport reported eight.
The storms also knocked out power to thousands of people in Ohio and Pennsylvania and caused damage to property, trees and power lines. No injuries were reported.