Nearly 600,000 Americans in Iowa are still without electricity for several days after a rare storm with the wind speed of a Category 2 hurricane ravaged through the Midwest.
The deadly storm, known as a derecho, ripped across Iowa and surrounding states, heavily damaging schools, homes and millions of acres of farmland in its wake.
Alliant Energy said on Saturday that they expect a “significant number of customers” will have access to power by the end of day on Tuesday. But this hasn’t been the case.
Cedar Rapids was one of the hardest hit areas in the state. At least 1,627 properties were damaged, and more than 1,000 homes are now “unlivable,” reports say.
Chief of clinical operations for Mercy Medical Center, Tim Quinn, told Iowa Public Radio that hospitals are being flooded with patients.
Although damage to hospitals is not “catastrophic,” he said, it’s “definitely widespread.”
On Friday, UnityPoint Health’s St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids said they treated 265 patients in the emergency room in 24 hours.
School reopenings in several districts were delayed because of the storms. Some residents had to drive out of town to find gas to power generators.
In Iowa, a 63-year-old man who was biking on a trail was struck and killed by a falling tree, according to the Linn County sheriff’s office.
The man, Thomas Rowland, of Solon, Iowa, “sustained severe injuries that ultimately took his life at the scene,” the sheriff’s office said.
The Fort Wayne Fire Department in Indiana found a 73-year-old woman clutching a 5-year-old in an overturned mobile home, Deputy Chief Adam O’Connor said. She died at a hospital, he said, but the child was unharmed.
School districts, including Clinton Community School District in eastern Iowa, are delaying the school year until power is restored and buildings are repaired.
The superintendent, Gary DeLacy, said many families were without power and internet access so they had relied on word of mouth to communicate the delay.
Iowa Governor, Kim Reynolds, said on Thursday that she had “issued disaster proclamations for 23 counties so far following Monday’s severe weather.”
“Residents of those counties may be eligible for assistance for things like replacement of food and temporary housing,” she said on a Facebook post that was accompanied with a map having the affected counties highlighted.
The derecho caused extensive damage in Iowa, where the storm’s devastating winds not only flattened crops in the field but toppled silos, ruining harvested crops.
“There are 30.6 million acres of farmland in Iowa,” including row crops, livestock pastures and buildings, a spokeswoman for the State Agriculture Department, Keely Coppess, said in an email. “It’s possible up to 10 million acres of farmland suffered damage. We’ll have a better idea of how many corn acres were damaged in the next week or so.”
She added that “the department estimates hundreds of millions of bushels of commercial storage and tens of millions of bushels of on-farm storage bins were lost to the derecho.”
With communities already hampered by the coronavirus pandemic, recovery efforts were further complicated by the continued absence of power. Iowa has over 60,000 confirmed virus cases.
