Powerful storms with winds nearing 100 miles an hour swept the Central United States on Tuesday, tearing limbs off trees, knocking out power to over a million customers and ripping roofs off buildings. Two people died when medical emergency care was delayed on clogged roads, officials said.
The storms threw out lightning strikes and hail as large as baseballs, which damaged windshields in the most severe cases. They also brought heavy flooding rains, particularly in Ohio.
The reports of severe weather were spread from the Northern Plains to the Ohio Valley. The worst of the storms moved from eastern Iowa across Northern Illinois and Chicago and into northern Indiana. The storms were preliminarily identified by the Storm Prediction Center as what is known as a derecho, a group of intense storms that last several hours, travel for hundreds of miles and generate unusually powerful wind gusts. The strongest wind gust recorded on Tuesday was 99 m.p.h., in Gary, Ind.
“There are trees down everywhere, from the south Chicago suburbs into northwest Indiana,” said Kevin Donofrio, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Romeoville, Ill. “That’s where some of the worst of it is.”
Mr. Donofrio said the Weather Service had preliminarily confirmed two weak tornadoes, with one occurring just south of Chicago in Will County and the other moving across the south suburbs of Chicago into Indiana.
Nearly a million people were without power in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio as of 5:30 p.m. Central time, according to PowerOutage.com, a tracking site. There were also tens of thousands of outages in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio declared a state of emergency in two counties after severe flooding hit Crooksville and Roseville, two villages in the eastern half of the state. Mr. DeWine deployed 40 Ohio National Guard members to help with searches and evacuations, a spokeswoman, Heidi Griesmer, said.
But he emphasized that the entire state was at risk, with the danger of heavy rain extending for several days. “It is unusual to see this,” he said at a news conference.
The extreme flooding also delayed emergency officials from providing medical care, resulting in at least two deaths.
One person died in Roseville after a medical emergency, Sandy Mackey, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Emergency Management Agency, said in an email. “First responders could not reach the individual to provide medical assistance due to the floodwaters,” she wrote.
Another person died in a fire in Indiana after firefighters faced an “extended response time” trying to reach a home in the city of Portage, the fire department said on Tuesday.
A lightning bolt struck at a state prison in Grafton, Ohio, when eight inmates were returning from their evening meal, JoEllen Smith, a spokeswoman with Ohio’s corrections department, said in an email.
Several inmates were taken to a hospital, Ms. Smith wrote, and one of them was flown to another hospital for more urgent care. She did not disclose their conditions.
While forecasters said the most severe weather was most likely over for the day, the threat of thunderstorms lingered into the evening, from the Northern Plains to the Ohio Valley and into the central Appalachian Mountains, said Aaron Gleason, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center.
The threat returns Wednesday, though the storms are expected to be less severe than they were on Tuesday. The highest chances for thunderstorms on Wednesday were expected to fall over the Central Plains and Nebraska as well as in Southern Illinois, southern Indiana and northwest Kentucky.
“This is the time of year for damaging winds with clusters of storms,” Mr. Gleason said.
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