‘Unprecedented’: Summer storms have been history-making

If it feels like you’re stuck in an endless loop of thunderstorms, tornado warnings and flood-producing downpours, the science says you’re right.

The damaging storms that rolled through the suburbs Tuesday marked the 329th time the National Weather Service office in Romeoville has issued a severe weather warning this year.

That’s more severe weather warnings than issued in all of 2025, and far past the previous record of 273 set in 2006. The warnings are issued for storms that have the potential to produce tornadoes, winds 58 mph or greater, and quarter-size or larger hail.

“It really is pretty unprecedented,” said Gino Izzi, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service.

Izzi said there’s not an obvious answer for the stormy season.

“The way the pattern sets up is really random,” he said.

Part of it goes back to the La Nina winter, when the waters in the Pacific Ocean near the equator were significantly colder than average. When that happens, the transition to spring produces a more active pattern, and that likely established the conditions that led to the stormy summer, Izzi said.

The water temperature affects how the Northern Hemisphere’s polar jet stream moves west to east across North America, including its speed and how far south it dips.

But other La Nina winters have created different effects from this year, Izzi said. In 1988, it meant high temperatures and extreme drought in Illinois.

“It’s a roll of the atmospheric dice,” Izzi said, adding that the last extremely active summer before this one occurred in 2015.

Cleanup costs adding up

That active weather has resulted in added work for public works crews across the suburbs, as they’ve cleared downed trees, fallen branches and flooded streets.

“The storms have occupied quite a bit of our time,” said Carl Goldsmith, Lombard’s public works director.

“This is probably one of the more active summer seasons for storm response,” added Goldsmith, who has been director nearly 18 years.

Much of the work has involved clearing tree debris. In addition to the four people in the village’s forestry division, workers have been pulled from the streets, electrical and utility departments. As many as 18 workers have been putting in 12-hour days, six days a week, he said.

That means other maintenance tasks have been pushed back, such as checking parkway trees for damage and disease, patching streets after utility digs and some utility maintenance.

All the storm-related work wasn’t accounted for in the town’s budget.

“We don’t plan for events of this magnitude,” Goldsmith said, noting that the village likely will dip into its savings to handle the unexpected costs.

ComEd crews busy

Power outages have followed storms all summer, but it could have been worse, according to ComEd spokesman John Schoen. Work to install smart switches on distribution lines, which can detect problems and reroute power, has lessened the number of customers affected by outages, he said.

Thicker cables have been installed in areas where lines run near trees to reduce the risk of breakage caused by falling limbs, Schoen added.

“It certainly has been more active than it has been in a long time,” Schoen said.

“We do think that this kind of weather is why we have been investing in the grid,” he added.

ComEd contracts meteorologists to predict and monitor the weather, allowing the utility to move people and equipment to areas expected to be hit hard by a storm. It also opens an emergency operations center about 24 hours before a major weather event, Schoen said.

ComEd’s emergency operations center has been activated 20 times so far this year, starting in March when a tornado hit Kankakee.

“We have had to open the (center) more times this year than we did all of last year,” he said.

ssarkauskas@dailyherald.com