Storm Drops Hail, Knocks Out Power

A late Wednesday night storm knocked out power to hundreds of residences and dropped pea-sized hail in parts of the Chicago area.

About 1,900 ComEd customers were knocked offline when the storm passed at about 11 p.m. By 3 a.m. Thursday, power crews had the number of outages down to about 1,400, the utility said, with the bulk of them in Cook, Lake and McHenry counties.

What looked like small patches of snow in some streets were actually clusters of hailstones.

"It was extremely loud. I didn't know what it was at first -- gunshots? I wasn't sure," Uptown resident Willow Harrison said of the hail.

That sort of hail isn't the type to do much damage, but National Weather Forecasters forecasters warned that super cell storms likely to pop up later Thursday could produce hail as big as 2 inches in diameter.

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