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Commonwealth Edison was reporting power outages scattered throughout northern Illinois as the region gets blasted by a strong winter storm.
As of 8:20 a.m., ComEd reported more than 53,400 customers were without power in an area ranging from Rockford to the northwest to Waukegan on the far northeast and as far south as Coal City in Grundy County.
Counties hit the hardest were Cook, DuPage, Lake, Grundy and Will.
By 2:45 p.m., those without power numbered 27,223, according to ComEd’s outage map.
“Over 1,700 crews are working to restore power and we have restored power to over 135K customers,” ComEd said in a statement on its website. “We’re expecting additional snow and frigid temperatures to pass through the area. We prioritize repairs that restore the greatest number of customers and emergency services such as police, hospitals, etc.”
Lake County saw the number of outages rise between the morning and afternoon with 307 outages affecting 8,644 customers about 8:30 a.m. Friday climb to 464 outages affecting 3,025 customers by 2:45 p.m.
Cook County had fewer outages but more impacted customers with 1,248 outages affecting 72,780 customers in the morning compared to 1,313 outages affecting 20,821 customers in the afternoon. McHenry County had four outages affecting 51 customers in the morning, up to six outages affecting 45 customers in the afternoon.
DuPage County had 101 outages impacting 2,480 customers as of 2:45 p.m.
Will County had 73 outages affecting 3,411 ComEd customers in the morning. That was down to 67 outages affecting 794 customers by the afternoon. Grundy County went from 17 outages affecting 999 customers to 13 affecting 46.
Whiteside, Stephenson, La Salle, Kendall, Kankakee and DeKalb counties all had fewer than five customers impacted by outages by the afternoon. All other counties serviced by ComEd had none.
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for northern Illinois, that predicted accumulations of more than 8 inches and strong winds with gusts of up to 45 mph. The warning, which runs through noon Saturday, applied to McHenry, Lake, Cook, Kane, DuPage, Kendall, DeKalb, Ogle, Lee, La Salle, Will and Grundy counties.