Fox Valley cooling centers open amid heat concerns
With many in the North and Northwest suburbs still without electricity Tuesday, crews from ComEd and public works labored to clear roadways and restore power amid concerns about the heat.
ComEd has 900 crews working throughout the region to restore power and is receiving help from utility workers in neighboring states. Crews from as far as Alabama and Pennsylvania are expected to arrive shortly.
ComEd said the bulk of outages remained in Lake and McHenry counties, where Libertyville and Crystal Lake sustained some of the more severe damage. Those affected by the outages were mostly in the suburbs, as about 43,000 customers in the city of Chicago remained without power.
At the height of the outages on Monday, about 868,000 customers lost power, the largest number since the company began keeping records under its current format in 1998.
A ComEd spokesman said Tuesday night that the utility expects to restore power to 70 percent of affected customers by this afternoon, 90 percent by midnight Wednesday and 99 percent by midnight on July 16.
In the meantime, some towns have opened cooling centers where residents who are without power can seek shelter while power is restored.
“The heat is a concern,” said Don Bryant, executive director of the Kane County Office of Emergency Management. “We’re telling people to keep an eye on their neighbors, keep an eye on their family members.”
Cooling centers in the Fox Valley include the Elgin Police Department, the Huntley Area Library, Huntley village hall, the Huntley Park District Recreation Center, Crystal Lake city hall, a Sugar Grove fire station, four locations in Geneva, Batavia city hall and an Elburn fire station.
Public works departments in Kane and McHenry counties have cleared most of the debris from Monday’s storm but continued to work Tuesday to remove fallen branches from roads.
More than 15,000 ComEd customers in Crystal Lake customers were without power at the height of the outages. By Tuesday afternoon, ComEd had restored power to about half of them. Several traffic lights along U.S. Route 14, a major thoroughfare, had not yet been restored as of Tuesday afternoon.
Things were mostly back to normal by Tuesday morning in Elgin, South Elgin, West Dundee and East Dundee, officials said. Bryant said Carpentersville was still dealing with a number of outages, and more than 900 were without power in Huntley.
“Things are catching up but it’s taking time,” Bryant said. “But it seems like most of the population is dealing quite well with the situation.”