By Howard Packowitz
TAZEWELL COUNTY, Ill. (25 News) – A second round of severe storms swept through Central Illinois early Wednesday, knocking out power to hundreds of Tazewell County households.
The website poweroutage.com reports the number of Ameren Illinois customers affected rose to 971 as of 1:50 a.m. on Wednesday. As of 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, 489 customers in Tazewell County were still without power.
Ameren’s outage map shows most of those impacted in Tazewell County are south of Pekin. That’s close to where power poles were snapped near the intersection of Toboggan Avenue and Chapel Road, just west of Green Valley.
In nearby Mason County, the poweroutage.com map shows 584 customers lost electricity, with Ameren indicating 206 households were in the dark in and around Havana Wednesday morning.
From the first round of storms, the poweroutage.com map counted 318 Stark County households, or about 10% of all customers in the county, without electricity. As of Wednesday morning, McLean County had power restored to all Ameren customers who had lost power.
Kankakee County had the largest number of customers without electricity in the state at 5,200. As of 8:45 a.m. Wednesday, that number was down to 4,196. 25 News reports that severe storms in that area leveled homes, downed trees and power lines.
Several tornadoes formed across northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana as well.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said on social media early Wednesday that he has been briefed on storm and tornado damage in the Kankakee area.
“My administration including IEMA are in contact with local officials to offer our full support. Keeping in our thoughts all Illinoisans impacted by the severe weather — we’ll be here to help them recover,” Pritzker said.
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