Crews scramble to restore power after severe storms

Severe storms whipped through the region Monday morning, knocking out power to thousands and causing delays on the South Shore and Metra commuter lines.

Commonwealth Edison spokeswoman Alicia Zatkowski said at the peak of the outages, 700,000 customers were without power, the utility's highest number of outages in a decade.

The utility asked for help from utilities in other states and was able to use nearly 500 crews to help restore service to Chicago-area customers.

By nightfall, ComEd had restored service to more than 209,000 customers, spokeswoman Judy Rader said.

"There was intense lightning strikes and high winds that brought down power lines and affected our equipment," she said.

NIPSCO on Monday night reported about 2,800 customers were without power, down from more than 20,000 earlier. Outages included more than 1,300 in northern Indiana. Power mostly had been restored in Crown Point and Whiting, which had extensive outages Monday morning. Michigan City and LaPorte had the largest outages as of Monday night.

NIPSCO spokesman Nick Meyer said the utility brought in additional personnel and mutual aid from neighboring areas to help restore power.

"The last several weeks and even several months have not been good to Northwest Indiana in terms of power outages," Meyer said.

On the South Shore, westbound trains 212 and 14 and eastbound Train 7 were stopped because of a loss of power at Kensington. Once power was restored, the trains experienced delays of up to an hour and 15 minutes.

The storms caused Metra to stop trains on some of its commuter lines.

Airlines reported delays at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport and Midway Airport and more than 200 flight cancellations at O'Hare.

National Weather Service officials predict Tuesday to be slightly cloudy with a high of 82 degrees.