Severe weather tore through the Chicago area and surrounding regions Tuesday night and into Wednesday, prompting a wave of tornado watches and warnings, according to the National Weather Service.
Parts of Michigan appeared to be hit the hardest, including Grand Blanc, less than 10 miles southeast of Flint. The Genesee County Sheriff’s Office said on Facebook that a tornado struck the area around 1:20 a.m. A spokesman from the Grand Blanc Township Fire Department said that it was receiving “lots of reports of damage,” and the Genesee County Police, Fire and EMS website showed reports of downed power lines and a natural gas odor in the city.
As of 3 a.m., more than 18,000 customers in Michigan were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country.
On Tuesday evening, rolling severe weather prompted officials at O’Hare International Airport to briefly ground all departing flights and suspend its rail service while asking people in the airport to “exercise caution.”
The NBC News affiliate in Chicago shared video of hundreds of passengers packing into the airport for shelter.
An early picture of the damage inflicted by the storms began to emerge Tuesday night as officials worked to assess damage and confirm tornadoes in several communities west of Chicago. The threat of additional tornadoes overnight moved east into Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky. A number of tornado warnings were issued late in the night for parts of Michigan and Illinois, and all expired by 2 a.m. Wednesday. Tornado watches were also issued for Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio until 6 a.m.
At least five other tornado sightings were reported by the Weather Service, including three near the city of DeKalb, roughly 60 miles west of the Chicago.
By about 10:30 p.m. local time, the tornado watches in northeast Illinois had been downgraded to wind advisories as the tornado threat shifted southeast over Southern Illinois and Indiana and Kentucky, including Louisville. At about 10:45 p.m., the National Weather Service said that the severe weather threat had ended for Chicago. Roughly 9.8 million people in these areas were under a tornado watch late Tuesday night.
Derrick Bryson Taylor and Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.