After Devastating Derecho, Midwest Takes Stock Of The Damage

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Corn plants are pushed over in a damaged field in Tama, Iowa. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said that early estimates indicate that 10 million acres, or nearly a third of the state’s cropland, was damaged in a powerful storm.

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In this aerial image from a drone, damaged grain bins are shown at the Heartland Co-Op grain elevator in Luther, Iowa, on Tuesday.

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Daniel Acker/Getty Images

In this aerial image from a drone, damaged grain bins are shown at the Heartland Co-Op grain elevator in Luther, Iowa, on Tuesday.

Daniel Acker/Getty Images

Iowa’s corn crop alone is worth billions of dollars. Gov. Kim Reynolds says a full assessment of the damage to the corn and soybean crop will take days or weeks, but that initial estimates indicated 10 million farm acres were damaged.

In Northern Illinois, a vocational farm that distributes produce for free to food-insecure neighborhoods was hit hard by the storm, Northern Public Radio reports.

One greenhouse «has pretty much been demolished, DeKalb County Community Gardens communications director Jackie DiNatale told the station. Repairing the damage — estimated at some $50,000 — is difficult, because power is still out at the farm.

Strong winds were also felt in Chicago, where roofs were toppled from buildings and debris blocked streets and sidewalks, as Araceli Gomez Aldana of member station WBEZ reported for NPR’s Newscast unit earlier this week.

Today's #ImageOfTheDay shows how @NOAA’s #GOESEast ?️ tracked severe thunderstorms (along with #lightning) as they raced roughly 770 miles across much of the Midwest and caused a widespread, fast-moving windstorm called a #derecho yesterday.

More: https://t.co/z2coct6vpG pic.twitter.com/H4rWsFpxSX

— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) August 11, 2020

As it barreled eastward across the country, the storm system traveled 770 miles in just 14 hours, according to the National Weather Center’s Storm Prediction Center.