St. Charles, Geneva avoid storm's fury

While some areas were still assessing damage caused by strong storms early in the week, Geneva and St. Charles officials Wednesday said they were fortunate to have missed the brunt of the system.

"We had a few trees come down, not many power issues," said Dan Dinges, Geneva's director of public works. "We were able to clean it up the next day and it was not nearly as bad as some other storms we've had before."

The storms caused 551,000 ComEd customers to lose power and resulted in four confirmed tornadoes in Illinois and Indiana.

St. Charles Public Works Director Mark Koenen said the city's normal brush collection program will take care of the rest of the work as residents and crews have been piling debris on their front driveways since Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a ComEd spokesman said Wednesday morning 45,000 customers in the Chicago area were still without power but they expect to have 100 percent restoration by Friday.

Jeff Burdick said the company had more than 750 crews in the field, which included 140 out-of-state crews from Michigan, Kansas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

"Most of the (remaining) outages don't affect large number of customers," he said. "The extra crews help us get to small pockets of customers."

He said 3,300 homes were still without power in the West and Northwest suburban area and 2,100 remained in the North suburbs.

The storms ran across northern Illinois and Indiana on Monday evening and into Tuesday morning.

Also Wednesday, the National Weather Service confirmed four tornadoes as a result of the storm system, including an EF-1 touching down in Bloomingdale at about 7:45 p.m. and traveling through Addison. The Bloomingdale tornado produced winds of up to 110 mph and was strong enough to blow out the windows at the Stratford Square Mall.

A tornado in Bolingbrook and one in Griffith, Ind., and Boswell, Ind., were also confirmed.

• Daily Herald staff writer Lee Filas contributed to this report.