One woman died as severe weather swept across the Chicago area and northwest Indiana on Monday.
Laura Nagel, 44, was killed when a tree fell on a home in Cedar Lake, Indiana, during the storm, the Lake County Coroner's Office said.
The coroner's office said an autopsy is ongoing. No further information is available at this time.
The entire Chicago area is facing a “moderate” severe weather risk Monday night, a level four out of five on the Storm Prediction Center's severe weather scale. According to NBC 5 meteorologist Alicia Roman, the area is rarely classified as such, especially in July.
“The SPC ranks us at a level 4 out of 5, which is a pretty severe outbreak,” Roman said. “To be at moderate risk, the SPC has to have a high degree of confidence that the storm will become severe and turn into a tornado. But this That doesn’t always happen.”
Roman noted that northern Illinois is typically placed under “moderate risk” once a year or less.
Every county in the Chicago area was under a tornado warning Monday night, from the suburbs to the city to northwest Indiana, Roman said.
“There's going to be a lot of tornado confirmations,” Roman said. “We have to wait for official confirmation from the National Weather Service.”
While the Chicago area will become calmer and drier on Tuesday, the aftermath of Monday's storm remains.
The utility's outage map showed more than 100,000 ComEd customers were still without power as of 9 a.m. Most of those outages occurred in Cook County, with more than 90,000 outages reported. Will County also had a high number of outages, with more than 45,000.
It could take several days for power to be restored, according to a message posted on ComEd's website.
Storm aftermath: I-55 remains closed due to downed power lines; subway delays
“We know some of you are without power, and we appreciate your patience as crews work to restore outages,” the message reads. “Based on the history of storms of similar size in ComEd's service area, we anticipate 80% outages. Will be restored by Wednesday, July 17, 2024 at 3:00 p.m., remaining customers will be restored by Friday, July 17, 2019, at 6:00 p.m.”
In northwest Indiana, about 99,000 customers are without power in Chesterton, Crown Point, East Chicago, Gary Goshen, Griffith, Hammond, La Porte, Portage and Valparaiso. has the greatest impact.
“Severe overnight storms brought extremely strong winds, rainfall and tornadoes across the region, causing increased outages in our service area,” a message on the utility's website said. “Damage includes downed power lines, tree limbs and Broken telegraph poles.”
“All available NIPSCO crews are working to assess the damage, make necessary repairs and restore power as safely and quickly as possible,” the message continued.
No estimate was given for when power would be restored.
