Hundreds of thousands without power days after Midwest storm
(World News USA)

IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of households in Iowa and Illinois remained without electricity Wednesday, two days after a rare wind storm that hit the Midwest devastated parts of the power grid, flattened valuable corn fields and killed two people. Much of Iowa and parts of several other states suffered outages Monday as straight-line winds toppled trees, snapped poles and downed power lines. The storm known as a derecho had winds of up to 112 mph near Cedar Rapids, as powerful as a hurricane, as it tore from eastern Nebraska across Iowa and into Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. The derecho produced seven tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area, including an EF-1 tornado...