Between 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. Monday, July 15, 2024, there were 15 tornado warnings issued by the National Weather Service Chicago during a severe storm being classified as a Derecho.
The National Weather Service Chicago office also announced today that they have six damage survey teams out surveying damage across northern Illinois and northwest Indiana on Tuesday, July 16, 2024. NWS Chicago reports they have identified 29 different paths of potential damage that we will be investigating today and in the coming days to identify potential tornado tracks.
Derecho
A widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms known as a mesoscale convective system with a QLCS or quasi-linear convective system, which is a line of thunderstorms, often forming along or ahead of a cold front. Linear thunderstorm formations often contain heavy precipitation, hail, frequent lightning, strong straight-line winds, and occasionally QLCS tornadoes and waterspouts.
All was not good with the NWStornado / X (formerly Twitter) account. Many of the X posts that should have provided notifications of Tornado Warnings were delayed or never appeared. Also the notification for the Tornado Watch issued on appeared only in Spanish language. The English language Tornado Watch notification never appeared.
Note that this may not be the fault of NWS Chicago. X.com has had problems with their programming interface (API), and notification failures have also been an issue with hurricane notifications.
One of the issues with the National Weather Service that may have caused problems with notifications is that the government weather has changed their RSS or Atom feed addresses twice in the last year without much notification to the public. This causes failure of third-party websites, such as CARDINAL NEWS, to receive warning and watch notifications, including the ability to archive such notifications. Initially, it is unknown if the feed address changes might have caused any X.com issues.
See more “Tornado Warning Missing Gap” below.
During peak outage conditions Monday night, 400,000 ComEd customers were without power.
ComEd reported at 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, July 16, 2024, that based on the history of similar storms of this size across the ComEd service area, they expect 80% of outages to be restored by Wednesday, 7/17/24, at 3PM, and the remaining customers restored by Friday, 7/19, at 6PM.
At 10:00 a.m. Tuesday, July 16, 2024, there were 5,240 Active Outages with 187,097 customers affected out of a total of 4,060,257 customers served in northern Illinois
The worst incidents related to weather appear to involve …
a fatality when a tree fell on a home in Cedar Lake, Indiana, where the Lake County Coroner’s Office identified the victim as 44-year-old Laura Nagel;
Illinois State Police responding with Channahon firefighters to crashes on I-55 south of Arsenal Road after high voltage power lines fell across all lanes of I-55 (Southbound and northbound lanes remained closed as of 6 a.m. Tuesday due to high voltage power lines on the interstate, and I-55 is expected to be closed for 12-24 hours);
a garage collapse in Broadview;
a roof blown off a home in Crestview;
multiple trees down in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago; and
multiple tree branches down on power lines in Streamwood and south Elk Grove Village.
Tornado Warning Missing Gap
The X.com timeline for the official NWS Tornado notification account did not list any of the Tornado Warnings between 8:33 p.m. and 9:52 p.m. A screen capture of @NWSTornado timeline screen capture was at around 11:00 p.m. CDT Monday, July 15, 2024, and shows evidence of this (CARDINAL NEWS/@NWSTornado). The Tornado Warning for Northern Cook County, Southern Lake County and Northern DuPage County was activated at 9:16 p.m. Monday, July 15, 2024 when severe thunderstorms capable of producing both tornadoes and extensive straight line wind damage were located over Streamwood, moving east at 35 mph. The Tornado Warning at 9:16 p.m. never appeared on x.com/nwstornado.
Streamwood and southern Elk Grove Village were among the areas hardest hit in the region served by the 9-1-1 center Northwest Central Dispatch System (NWCDS), located in Arlington Heights.
An examination of x.com/nwstornado Tuesday morning shows a gap in tornado warnings from 8:33 p.m. to 9:52 p.m.
The 8:33 p.m. tornado warning was activated for Sycamore IL, Genoa IL and Kingston IL until 8:45 PM CDT.
The 9:16 p.m. Tornado Warning that included Streamwood, Arlington Heights and other nearby municipalities was missing from the @NWStornado timeline.
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