Midwest tornadoes and flash floods leave death, outages

Midwest storms turned deadly Tuesday as a powerful windstorm tore across the region, triggered tornado warnings and left more than one million customers without power at its peak. By Wednesday, forecasters were warning that the same stormy pattern would continue to threaten parts of the Midwest and Ohio Valley with damaging winds and heavy rain.

The storm system was tied to at least four deaths. In Geneva Township, Indiana, a 4-year-old was killed when a tree fell on a home during severe weather, according to the Jennings County Sheriff’s Office. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine said one person died after emergency responders could not reach the individual during a flooding emergency. In Portage, Indiana, police said a home exploded after the storms passed, killing one person. Investigators are still working to determine whether the storm was connected to that blast.

The severe weather also disrupted daily life far beyond the hardest-hit neighborhoods. Damaging winds moved into Illinois and prompted tornado warnings across several communities, including Aurora, Joliet, Naperville and downtown Chicago. The FOX Forecast Center said Tuesday’s outbreak qualified as a derecho, a long-lived windstorm that stretches at least 250 miles and is at least 60 miles wide. The center said destructive winds of 90 to 100 mph swept across northern Indiana and extreme southern Michigan.

Power outages remained widespread into Wednesday morning, with more than 800,000 customers still in the dark, most of them in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. The storm’s reach extended into the transportation system as well, with ground stops in place at nearly every major Northeast airport Tuesday evening. In Ohio, officials also reported a separate emergency at the Grafton Correctional Institution, where 16 people were struck by lightning as incarcerated individuals were returning from their evening meal. One person was airlifted to an outside hospital, and no deaths were reported in that incident.