Midwest battered by 'ring of fire'

CHICAGO — After a series of powerful summer storms didn't break so much as a branch on the 70-foot locust in front of their Chicago home, Natalie and Wendell Tucker figured the tree could withstand just about anything.

Right up until Sunday night, that is, when yet another storm knocked it onto their house.

The Midwest has been hit this summer with an extraordinary conga line of storms that have flattened trees and power poles and left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the dark.

"I've been here 33 years and I've never seen anything like this, all the storms we're having," said Natalie Tucker.

It's hard to find anyone who has. And that includes tree surgeons and meteorologists. In fact, for anyone born after the Depression, this has been a July unlike any in memory.

The record for thunderstorms in the city for July is 13 set in 1927 and 1935, said Tom Skilling, chief meteorologist at Chicago's WGN-TV. "We've had 12, and we have more thunderstorms due this weekend."

So what's going on?

Skilling explained that the unusual weather is primarily the result of an "incredible dome of hot air" anchored over the western United States.

Places like Phoenix that are under that dome are experiencing scorching heat. But around the periphery of that dome is a jet stream that is carrying clusters of thunderstorms.

"This is sometimes called a ring of fire," Skilling said. Thunderstorms are spinning off the circle one after another, like office workers spilling out of a revolving door.

And because the storms are being pushed along by a jet stream, they are moving a lot faster, and thus creating higher winds than typical summer thunderstorms.

Throughout July, powerful, damaging storms have hit in a huge region, bringing tornadoes, drenching rain and hail the size of grapefruit.

This week, two days of storms flooded many people out of their homes and left three people dead in northeastern Ohio, while severe thunderstorms roared through Indiana, causing flooding and knocking over trees and bleachers at a high school.

A storm that tore across many parts of the East on Tuesday, packing wind of up to 100 mph, killed at least six people and knocked out electricity for hundreds of thousands of customers.

"It's just amazing," Skilling said of the size of the region affected.

In the Chicago area, the turbulent weather pattern has created almost a daily display of nature's fireworks.

Commonwealth Edison, which supplies electricity to northern Illinois, reported more than 300,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes this month — about 85,000 more than in all of last year, ComEd spokeswoman Meg Amato said.

"In talking to people who deal with this, we've never seen anything like this in at least several decades," she said.

The weather has people sounding a lot more like they live on the Gulf Coast during hurricane season than Chicago in the summer.

"All of a sudden there was this incredible gust of wind that began to build like a wave and like a wave came crashing down on the house," said the Rev. Steve Wenner of a weekend storm that toppled a tree near his Chicago home.

"There were 60- to 80-year-old silver maples literally picked up and uprooted," Matt Smith, spokesman for Chicago's Department of Streets and Sanitation, said after the storms over the Fourth of July weekend in which winds gusted up to 80 mph.

ComEd reported that the number of customers who have lost power this month is closing in on 850,000. Last July, 47,000 customers lost power, Amato said.

For the Midwest, there is little relief in sight. While these hot-air domes typically break down, there is no indication this one will fall apart anytime soon.