Monday night’s line of storms was a derecho

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WANE) – Severe thunderstorms rocked parts of our area Monday night. High winds of 50 to 70 mph caused damage and power outages.

Because of the long duration and extensive damage path, the line of storms that passed through our area Monday night has been preliminarily identified as a derecho. A derecho is a straight-line windstorm that occurs over a large geographic area. The damage swath is 400 miles or more and is at least 60 miles wide. Wind gusts of at least 58 mph are needed along most of its path, along with several well-separated 75 mph or greater gusts, in order for a derecho to be classified.

Here in northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio, a derecho occurs once every year on average. 70 percent of all derechos occur in the May to August window. Luckily, Monday night’s derecho was weakening as it entered our area and ultimately dissipated once reaching northwest Ohio. As a result, we avoided the high impact wind gusts (greater than 70 mph) like we have seen with derechos in the past locally. However, there were reports of wind gusts over 90 mph to our west with this derecho.

You can see all of the wind damage icons below. States that saw damage from this derecho include Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. Locally, the much higher damage concentration was in west-northwest areas. We even had two weak tornadoes confirmed so far just outside of our area in Elkhart and Marshall Counties. One was an EF-1 and the other was an EF-0. This is typical of a derecho to have embedded rotation that can result in weak tornadoes touching down.

We are thinking of those who are cleaning up from the damage left behind from this derecho. To track much calmer weather in the coming days, visit our WANE 15 Weather Page .

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