A tornado touched down in northwestern Illinois Sunday evening as a multi-day severe weather pattern settles over the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Ohio Valley, leaving more than a thousand customers without power and triggering elevated flash flood risks through the end of the week.
FOX Weather storm tracker Brandon Copic spotted the tornado near Annawan, a small town in north-central Illinois, as thunderstorms swept across the state Sunday night. The same line of storms drove powerful wind gusts through Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, knocking out electricity to more than 1,000 customers in LaSalle County, Illinois, who remained without power early Monday, the New York Post reported.
The National Weather Service recorded a 73 mph wind gust just west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, strong enough to snap tree limbs and toss debris. And forecasters say the worst may not be over. NOAA's Storm Prediction Center issued a Level 2 out of 5 severe thunderstorm risk for a corridor running from northern and central Illinois all the way to eastern Pennsylvania, including parts of northern West Virginia and western Maryland.
That same corridor faces a Level 2 out of 4 flash flood risk beginning Monday evening. For residents in and around Charleston, West Virginia, and parts of southwestern Ohio, the threat is higher: a Level 3 out of 4 flash flood risk through Tuesday.
The flash flood danger is not a one-day event. Forecasters expect thunderstorms to tap into high humidity and produce heavy, repeated rainfall over the same ground for days. The stormy pattern is forecast to linger over the region through at least Thursday.
Widespread rain totals of 2 to 3 inches are expected from Chicago to Cleveland. Localized pockets of 3 to 5 inches could hit northern Indiana and Ohio wherever repeat showers pile up. But West Virginia faces the steepest totals: localized rainfall across the state could exceed half a foot, more than six inches, by the end of the week.
That kind of accumulation turns creeks into rivers and roads into channels. For communities in hilly terrain with narrow valleys, a half-foot of rain over a few days is a recipe for serious flooding.
Monday afternoon marks the next round of severe storm development. By Tuesday, the threat slides slightly south, pushing farther into the central Appalachians and into Virginia. Major metro areas in the risk corridor include Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Scranton, Pennsylvania, a combined population of millions.
No injuries, fatalities, or confirmed structural damage figures have been reported from Sunday's storms so far. Whether the tornado near Annawan has been officially confirmed and rated by the National Weather Service remains unclear; for now it stands as a visual spotter report from Copic.
Power restoration timelines for the 1,000-plus LaSalle County customers still in the dark have not been released. Total outage numbers across all four affected states, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin, have not been disclosed either.
When severe weather stretches across half a dozen states for the better part of a week, the people who bear the cost are the ones least equipped to absorb it, homeowners mopping out basements, commuters dodging flooded roads, and families sitting in the dark waiting for the lights to come back on. They deserve straight information and fast response, not bureaucratic lag.
