Chicago faces another round of severe storms, tornado risk Thursday night

Chicago spent a second straight day under severe weather threat Thursday as a broad outbreak pushed across the Midwest and Plains, raising the risk of damaging storms into the evening and night. The National Weather Service warned that parts of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Midwest could see scattered severe thunderstorms with hail larger than two inches, strong tornadoes and damaging wind gusts.

The threat carried a Level 4 of 5 rating from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center, a sign that the region faced a significant chance of dangerous storms rather than isolated weather trouble. Meteorologists said early-season heat and humidity over the Chicago area were helping fuel the next round, while the larger pattern was producing multiple rounds of storms and flooding rain across the central U.S.

Thursday's warning came after a violent Wednesday that already strained the city and suburbs. Winds reached 80 mph in the Chicago area, bringing down trees and power lines, knocking out service to hundreds of thousands of customers and snarling travel at Chicago airports. ComEd said nearly 75,000 customers in Chicago were still without power early Thursday morning, after more than 290,000 lost electricity at the peak of the outage.

The storm system also triggered more than a dozen tornado reports Wednesday across northern Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois, according to the National Weather Service. Brief tornado warnings were issued in Kendall County, Grundy County and Will County in Illinois, although there were no immediate reports of a touchdown tied to that warning. The outbreak had already left damage in several states and was linked to an Iowa death, underscoring how quickly the system turned destructive as it moved through the Midwest.

By Thursday night, officials were warning that the danger could continue to shift east and southeast with little notice, especially as new storms formed ahead of the main line. For Chicago and surrounding counties, the immediate concern was not just whether the storms would hit, but how many rounds would arrive before the system finally moved on.