By DAVID PITT

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Farmers across a wide swath of Iowa are dealing with the heartbreaking aftermath of a rare wind storm that turned what was looking like a record corn crop into deep losses for many.

The storm, known as a derecho, slammed the Midwest with straight line winds of up to 100 miles per hour on Monday, gaining strength as it plowed through Iowa farm fields, flattening corn and bursting grain bins still filled with tens of millions of bushels of last year’s harvest.

“It’s a problem of two years of crops here. You’re still dealing with what you grew last fall and you’re trying to figure out how to prepare for what you’re growing this fall,” said Iowa State University agriculture economist Chad Hart.

Farms in Illinois and Indiana also reported crop and property damage, but not to the extent seen in Iowa.

Before the storm hit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had been expecting a record national corn crop this year of 15.3 billion bushels harvested from about 84 million acres. Iowa was to provide about 18% of that production. Iowa’s crop was valued at about $9.81 billion in 2019.

The Iowa Corn Growers Association said it is too soon to accurately describe how much of this year’s crop was lost. Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig said Tuesday that tens of millions of bushels of grain stored at farm cooperatives and privately on farms were damaged or destroyed.

Western Iowa has been declared an extreme drought zone and corn plants there were already weakened due to a lack of moisture. Those fields are likely a loss, Hart said.

According to a USDA report dated Aug. 1, farmers in much of central and eastern Iowa had been expecting near-record yields with healthy plants that could bounce back. For now, much depends on whether the plants snapped off or were just bent over by wind.

“There’s a lot more breakage or pinching of stalks than I thought there was now that I’ve been out and looked at more of it. That, of course, essentially has killed the plant,” said Meaghan Anderson, an Iowa State University extension agronomist who works with farmers in nine central Iowa counties.

Corn is flat on the ground in numerous fields in the region, Anderson said. The corn stalks had grown to full height and were in the final stages of producing ears and filling them out with kernels. Modern corn varieties can grow up to 8 feet tall making them vulnerable to powerful straight line winds.

For plants that were bent, and stalks not broken, there’s some hope, with a significantly reduced yield. But it will be difficult to harvest. If the stalks snapped, the plant will die. Those fields will be chopped and used as livestock feed.

Iowa Corn Growers Association CEO Craig Floss surveyed the storm damage on his father’s farm east of Des Moines on Wednesday. He found two machine sheds destroyed and grain bins significantly damaged. The corn was flattened and the family home in need of repair.

“The main message out there to folks is this really comes at a time when farmers are already significantly hurting due to the pandemic and trade disputes,” he said.

“There’s a lot of stress in the countryside. … It was already very stressful,” Floss said. “This just adds insult to the injury that was already there.”

Crop insurance programs will help with corn in the field as will a USDA indemnity program. Federal disaster aid could be coming if a presidential disaster is declared.

Bins were full as farmers were hanging on to last fall’s crops in hopes of improved prices. The USDA estimates about about 2.8 billion bushels remain in storage.

“We carried more grain than usual through the springtime and here into the summer, and now the derecho got ahold of some of that grain and we’re going to end up losing a significant chunk of value because it became vulnerable to the weather,” Hart said.

There’s no federal program to help farmers who lost stored grain, he said. Some may have private insurance to help but most will likely wait to see if federal or state programs are initiated.

By RYAN J. FOLEY

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 with 110 mph winds that hit the Rogers Park neighborhood on the city’s north side before moving onto Lake Michigan as a waterspout, the National Weather Service said.

That storm left damage along a 3-mile-long (4.8-kilometer-long) path before reaching the lake and was the first tornado of at least EF-1 strength to strike Chicago since a May 29, 1983, storm, the weather service said.

Another EF-1 tornado that swept through Wheaton, Illinois, knocked over the iconic white steeple atop College Church in the Chicago suburb that is the DuPage County seat.

The weather service also confirmed two tornadoes in southern Wisconsin and two in northern Indiana, including an EF-1 that swept the rural community of Wakarusa, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of South Bend, leaving behind smashed grain bins, damaged barns and farmhouses.

Crews throughout the region have been working around the clock to restore electricity, but they’ve been hindered by large trees that are blocking many roads and sitting on top of power lines. Those trees must be removed before power can be restored.

Iowa’s three largest metropolitan areas of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Davenport still had widespread outages as of Wednesday morning.

Alliant Energy said about 176,000 of its customers are without power, about half of which are in the Cedar Rapids area. MidAmerican Energy said about 139,000 of its Iowa and Illinois customers remain without power, half them in the Des Moines area.

As of late Wednesday morning, ComEd reported that about 200,000 of its Chicago-area customers remained without power. Northern Indiana Public Service Co. reported about 18,500 of its Indiana customers were still in the dark.

Mediacom said Wednesday that it has restored internet service to about half of the 340,000 customers that were offline a day earlier in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana. But many others may be without service until their power is restored, a process that could still take multiple days in places.

The storm caused extensive crop damage in the nation’s No. 1 corn producing state as it tore across Iowa’s center from west to east.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig said Tuesday that about 10 million acres of Iowa’s nearly 31 million acres of agriculture land sustained damage. About 24 million acres of that is land typically planted primarily in corn and soybeans.

In addition, tens of millions of bushels of grain that were stored at co-ops and on farms were damaged or destroyed as bins blew away.

The only known death in Iowa was a 63-year-old bicyclist who was hit by one of several large trees that fell on a bike path outside of Cedar Rapids. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, the storm killed a 73-year-old woman who was found clutching a young boy in her storm-battered mobile home.

Many businesses, including banks, restaurants and a major corn processing plant in Cedar Rapids, remained closed Wednesday due to power outages.

The Cedar Rapids school district reported that over 20 of its buildings had roof and other structural damage, ranging from minor to significant, and that it was considering pushing back this month’s start date.

State Sen. Liz Mathis said she took cover in the basement of her suburban Cedar Rapids home Monday as the storm battered her neighborhood for 45 minutes. She said pictures fell of the wall, water seeped in through windows and she worried the glass would blow in and hurt her.

Mathis said the devastation is widespread across her district, and the “tree damage is unreal.” People are waiting an hour or longer at gas stations to fill up their vehicles and get fuel for chain saws, as some are closed or have run out of gas, she said.

Residents are clearing out their refrigerators and freezers after their food has spoiled. A local utility official told Mathis on Wednesday that it could be a week before everyone’s power is restored.

“The cities are going to look much different without the trees and it’s going to take a while to recover from this,” she said.

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Associated Press reporter Dave Pitt contributed from Des Moines.