Belmont Cragin residents left without power for hours during extreme heat warning
Katie Benson wasn’t sure if she’d need to stay at a hotel Wednesday after a power outage on her Belmont Cragin block left residents fighting extreme heat into Thursday.
“We didn’t have that much ice because we didn’t know that the power was gonna go out [and] we were trying to figure out if we should go to a hotel or not because we have all these little kids,” said Benson, 38.
Instead of going to a hotel, Benson, her husband and their three young children spent more than five hours without power in their backyard pool.
Other residents in the 5100 block of West Diversey Street fanned themselves with their hands or had buckets of ice on their feet after the power went out around 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, Benson said.
The power outages happened amid an extreme heat warning in Chicago. On Wednesday — the day the outages started — temperatures reached 94 degrees, with a heat index of 105, according to the National Weather Service. The extreme heat continued Thursday, with temperatures reaching the mid 90s and the heat index pushed into 100 degrees.
Severe storms cause ground stop at airports, explosion in Berwyn
Later Thursday afternoon, conditions dramatically changed when storms in the area brought heavy downpours, wind gusts up to 60 mph, and lightning. There were reports of downed trees across Chicago following the storms.
The storms were believed to have caused an explosion at a Berwyn gas station, according to the Berwyn Police Department. The explosion caused a fire to break out at the gas station, located at Ogden and Oak Park avenues. No injuries were reported as of Thursday afternoon.
Several trees were also knocked down due to the storms, Berwyn police said.
Thursday's storms also caused a ground stop at O'Hare and Midway airports. In Jefferson Park, lightning struck a radio transmitter just after 3 p.m., temporarily shutting down power at WCPT 820 AM, an executive producer at the radio station confirmed.
‘It was unbearable’
Back in Belmont Cragin, Benson said her house was “pretty f- - - - - - hot” without functional air conditioning and that her next door neighbors texted her complaining about the temperature in their home too.
The most significant power outage recorded overnight was in the Belmont Cragin, where roughly 800 ComEd customers were affected.
“There were some repairs that needed to be done with a substation that affected 800 people and that was taken care of within a couple hours," said Tom Dominguez, a ComEd spokesperson.
Citywide, power outages peaked around 4,900 between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Thursday, according to ComEd. About 83% of the outages were restored within an hour.
As of Thursday afternoon, there were 1,095 active outages with 47,734 affected customers, according to the ComEd.
“Despite the heat, we're seeing the typical average number of outages across the territory right now,” Dominguez said. At any point in time, the number of outages range from 300 to 1,000 total customers.
Angelica Sandoval, of Belmont Cragin, said she doesn't do well with the heat. She was in her living room with her husband and two children when they lost power.
“For me it was unbearable,” Sandoval said. “We didn’t even think of going to the cars and turning on the air conditioner.”
Sandoval, 63, and her family were using an exhaust window fan to try and stay cool before eventually going to her mother’s house — which didn’t lose electricity — two blocks away.
Her power was out for more than three hours, the longest she can remember going without electricity in the 31 years she's lived there.
She said city officials could’ve done more to make residents aware of what was happening.
“I didn’t get any text messages or emails, no notifications,” Sandoval said.
ComEd didn’t attribute the outages to excessive heat or the grid being overworked, and they said they would have more information about the outages Friday. ComEd had about 500 crews out in the service territory Thursday morning and a command center monitoring the situation.