Powerful thunderstorms blew through the Kansas City area overnight, downing trees and power lines and knocking out power to tens of thousands of customers.
As of 6:15 a.m. Thursday, nearly 27,000 customers were without power, according to the electric companies that serve the metro.
Evergy reported to 34,503 of its customers across its service area, which includes the Wichita, Junction City, Topeka and Kansas City areas. Kansas City’s subway accounted for nearly 21,000 of those outages.
Nearly 12,000 of its customers in Jackson County were without power, followed by nearly 4,800 customers in Clay County, more than 2,900 in Johnson County, nearly 300 customers in Platte County and 21 customers in Wyandotte County.
“As of 11:45 p.m., major wind damage affected customers in the Salina, Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City areas,” the utility said. “We had almost 110,000 customers without power.”
Restoration work was expected to begin as soon as it was safe to work on the outages, Evergy said. It expected delayed restoration times in Kansas City. People were advised to stay away from downed power lines.
In the meantime, have Kansas City, Kansas, Board of Public Utilities reported that more than 1,840 customers were without power and Independence Power & Light had nearly 4,000 customers without power.
The strong overnight storms hit hard and wind speeds between 60 and 70 mph were reported. Winds reached 81 mph in Wyandotte County and the upper 70s in Leavenworth County.
The high winds destroyed some small tents and moved larger canopies at the Leavenworth County Fairgrounds and uprooted trees and snapped utility poles in other parts of the metro area, according to storm damage reports to the National Weather Service.
As the storms moved across the metro, the weather service warned in a tweet that 80 mph winds were blowing through the metro.
“Get away from the windows, enter your home, stay indoors!” the weather service said on X, formerly Twitter.