ALTON - A section of Ninth Street in Alton was closed Tuesday morning following severe storms, which rapidly blew through the area overnight.
According to the National Weather Service (NWS) in St. Louis, winds gusted as high as 75 m.p.h. during overnight thunderstorms, which moved in a line from Southeastern Missouri to Eastern Iowa and the Western Illinois border with Wisconsin. That squall line caused many instances of mild to moderate damage across the Riverbend, but no major damage or injuries being reported at this time by local authorities.
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Ninth Street's closure was due to a tree falling onto a power line. Ameren Illinois officials on the scene the morning of Tuesday, March 7, 2017, said as many as eight power lines may have fallen across the area, causing an estimated 2,000 people in the Riverbend to lose power.
As of 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, 50-500 customers did not have power in the areas of Godfrey, Elsah, Alton, Dorsey, Benld and Gillespie. As many as 501-1,000 customers did not have power in areas near Bunker Hill, Dorchester and Staunton, however. A representative on the scene Tuesday said Ameren Illinois worked through the night to restore power to as many as 25,000 customers across the state who were affected by the storms.
A complete map of current Illinois outages can be found here
Charter Spectrum was also reporting several hundred outages in the Riverbend area, with 490 customers without service in Alton and 674 without service in Godfrey, as of 9:35 a.m. Tuesday. Charter also had 63 customers without service in East St. Louis. According to Charter's outage report, the outages were weather-related.
Alton Public Works Director Bob Barnhart said last night's storm was "pretty simple," especially compared to the Dec. 2015 storms, which brought near-record flooding and damages to the Alton area.
"We have a few trees down, and our forestry people and community service teams are out picking up limbs," he said Tuesday. "We have no major road closures or major trees down. We have lots of small debris, limbs and branches on the ground. We're picking that up today."
Edwardsville Public Works Department City Engineer Ryan Zwijack said Edwardsville was even less affected.
"We did not have a single storm related call," he said. "It was pretty quiet. We didn't have any calls for downed limbs, trees or anything."
Captain Will Dimitroff of the Madison County Sheriff's Office said a tree fell and blocked the road at the intersection of Mars and Mercury in Godfrey just before 11:45 p.m. Monday. He also said the sheriff's office received reports of power outages, downed power lines, trees and limbs falling and traffic signals out along Godfrey Road and the area around Homer Adams Parkway.
As of 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, traffic lights along Godfrey Road were still dark.
Dan Brannan also contributed to this story.
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