August’s Derecho Thunderstorm Was Costliest In US History

The August 10th storm, which hit Iowa the hardest and also impacted us here in Illinois, along with Ohio, Minnesota, and Indiana, resulted in damages of around $7.5 billion.

I can't personally claim that kind of loss from the storm, but my daughter's car had a really bad day when the derecho came rolling through the Rockford area (so did the tree in our front yard).

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), August's storm is the fourth-most expensive severe storm since 1980, and the second-costliest disaster so far in 2020. Hurricane Laura, which slammed the Gulf Coast in late August, resulted in about $14 billion in damages.

The August derecho grew out of a cluster of thunderstorms ranging from southeast South Dakota to Ohio. In a 14-hour span, it traveled east 770 miles across the Midwest, hitting Iowa the hardest with windspeeds of 100-plus miles per hour.

Des Moines Register:

The scope of crop damage has been heartbreaking for Iowa farmers. About 850,000 Iowa crop acres were flattened and an estimated 57 million bushels of Iowa grain storage capacity were damaged or destroyed, heightening the struggle for farmers during a harvest unlike any other before. A total of at least 14 million crop acres were impacted from the derecho, and estimates of crop acres lost are expected to grow.