A fast-moving, lunch hour storm has knocked out electric power for more than 5,000 customers in Evanston, according to ComEd.
The outages, scattered through the city, were first reported around 12:30 p.m. Monday.
A ComEd update as of 1:36 p.m. showed 5,058 Evanston customers out of a total of 35,823 who did not have electricity, for a total of 14%.
The utility says there were 31 individual outages, with each one obviously impacting a large number of people due to the 5,000+ customers still lacking power.
There were no estimates as to when the juice will be restored, as crews were still being dispatched.
An operator at the city’s 3-1-1 center told Evanston Now that there have been “nonstop” calls from residents about power outages.
Plus, the operator added, “everybody’s calling for trees down” as well.
Update 3 p.m.: ComEd says the number of customers without power in Evanston has been reduced to about 2,200 — with 43 different outage locations.
Update 6:30 p.m.: The City of Evanston says street lights were blown over on Golf Road east of Crawford Avenue and on McCormick Boulevard west of Bridge Street.
Traffic signals were without power at at least 10 intersections across town and city spokesperson Jessie Mayo says nearly 70 trees were reported damaged with more than a dozen completely blocking streets and several falling on cars.
Mayo says city crews will be out during the evening and through much of the rest of the week doing cleanup work.
By early evening, ComEd said there were still about 28 outages in Evanston affecting about 560 customers.