95% Of Power Restored, 5K Still Without Power In McHenry Co.: Comed

MCHENRY AND LAKE COUNTIES, IL — ComEd crews are continuing to restore power following an ice storm this past week that, at one point, left 25 percent of homes and businesses in the dark in McHenry County.

As of Friday morning, more than 5,000 ComEd users remained without power, and electricity has been restored to 95 percent of those who lost electricity during the storm, according to ComEd officials. The hardest hit communities as of Friday included Carpentersville, where 1,360 were without power; and Algonquin Township and Crystal Lake, where there were 412 homes and businesses in each town that did not have power.

ComEd did restore the electricity for 20,000 homes and businesses in McHenry County in 24 hours. As of Thursday morning, more than 25,000 were in the dark, and just before noon on Friday, that number had dropped to just over 5,000, according to ComEd.

As of noon on Friday, power had been restored to 95 percent of customers who experienced outages following the Wednesday night storm, which included heavy, freezing rain that downed branches and power lines across the Chicago area.

All power should be restored by Saturday evening, though some homes in areas where there was heavy damage from the storms may need to wait longer than that, according to a Friday update posted on ComEd's website.

Downed trees, power lines and branches led to road closures across McHenry County and power outages downed stop lights, including the light at the busy intersection of Northwest Highway and Route 176 in Crystal Lake Thursday evening. This led to heavy traffic delays during rush hour.

The Jewel-Osco along Northwest Highway in Cary closed for nearly 24 hours due to the power outage and was forced to store all of its freezer goods, meats and dairy in storage coolers outside the store, employees told Patch. The Starbucks at 620 Northwest Highway in Cary lost all its milk during the power outage and was closed for several hours Thursday.

The storm also caused delays on the Northwest Metra line Wednesday evening after a tree fell on the tracks at the Pingree Road stop in Crystal Lake.

In Cary, police handled 40 calls for service related to the weather since the start of the storm, Scott Naydenoff, deputy chief of support services for the Cary Police Department, told Patch Thursday morning. The majority of calls were related to power loss, including downed wires, sparking transformers, alarm activations and citizen assists.

"The incidents were spread throughout the village, but the majority appear to have been on the north side of town, north of US Route 14," Naydenoff said Thursday morning. "We are still receiving calls related to the weather, but not at the same frequency."

Cary police responded to five traffic crashes during the ice storm. No one was injured in any of the crashes or weather-related incidents, Naydenoff said.

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