Hundreds of people in a southern Illinois town were ordered to evacuate Tuesday as water rolled over the top of a dam, just one perilous result of severe weather that raged through the Midwest overnight with relentless rain and tornadoes and hit the Chicago area especially hard. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and even weather forecasters had to briefly scramble for safety. A woman in Indiana died after a tree fell on a home Monday night.
The 89-year-old dam was last inspected in 2021 and categorized as a “high hazard” dam, which means a failure is likely to result in the loss of at least one life, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The condition of the dam was not available in the online data. As the storms swept the Chicago area late Monday, employees at a suburban weather service office had to pass coverage duties to a Michigan post for five minutes. The agency reported wind speeds in the region as high as 75 mph .