Hundreds of thousands without power

Hundreds of thousands of households in Iowa and Illinois remained without electricity Wednesday, two days after a rare windstorm that hit the Midwest devastated parts of the power grid, flattened valuable corn fields and killed two people.

Much of Iowa and parts of several other states suffered outages Monday as straight-line winds toppled trees, snapped poles and downed power lines. The storm, known as a derecho, had winds of up to 112 mph near Cedar Rapids, as powerful as a hurricane, as it tore from eastern Nebraska across Iowa and into Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.

The derecho produced seven tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area, including an EF-1 tornado with 110 mph winds that hit the Rogers Park neighborhood on the city’s north side before moving onto Lake Michigan as a waterspout, the National Weather Service said.

That storm left damage along a 3-mile-long path before reaching the lake and was the first tornado of at least EF-1 strength to strike Chicago since a May 29, 1983, storm, the weather service said.

Another EF-1 tornado that swept through Wheaton, Ill., knocked over the iconic white steeple atop College Church in the Chicago suburb that is the DuPage County seat.

The weather service also confirmed two tornadoes in southern Wisconsin and two in northern Indiana, including an EF-1 that swept the rural community of Wakarusa, about 25 miles southeast of South Bend, leaving behind smashed grain bins, damaged barns and farmhouses.