DES MOINIES, Iowa - Many utility customers with outages across Iowa may not have power restored for days after Monday's powerful "derecho" storm packed straight line winds of up to 100 miles per hour.
After outages peaked at about a half million customers between Iowa's two large utilities - MidAmerican Energy and Alliant Energy - more than 400,000 were still without power as of 8:30 am Tuesday.
MidAmerican Energy's Jeff Greenwood says crew are dealing with significant barriers and challenges to restore energy. "We have overhead lines down," said Greenwood. "We're got poles that have been snapped. We've got trees down on lines, roads that are blocked and preventing us from going to where we need to go."
Mid-American Energy had just over 200,000 outages Tuesday ,morning, with roughly 85,000 of them in Des Moines metro area and 98,000 in the Quad Cities.
Alliant Energy also had more than 200,000 Iowa customers without power this morning, 94,000 in the Cedar Rapids area.
About 25,000 are without power in the Iowa City area Tuesday morning.
The City Power Utility in Ames reported almost 23,000 customers without power.