Statewide Iowa — This past Thursday marked one year since an extremely rare and very powerful December derecho swept across Iowa, killing one person and causing widespread destruction.
Meteorologist Mike Fowle at the National Weather Service says the massive, long-duration storm is cemented in state history and will, hopefully, never be matched. Forty-nine of Iowa’s 99 counties were declared disaster areas.
While tornadoes can happen any day of the year, it’s very unusual to have one in December, let alone 63 in a single day. That one storm accounted for more than half of all tornadoes (114) statewide that year. A derecho is characterized as a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms. The December 15th derecho was the second one to hit Iowa in two years, following another on August 10th of 2020, which placed the term “derecho” into the vocabulary of everyone in the state. The August 2020 storm packed extremely powerful winds, peaking at 140 miles an hour near Cedar Rapids.
The power was knocked out to more than 140-thousand homes in the December storm, and the one person who was killed was a truck driver whose semi was blown into a Benton County ditch. Before the derecho the previous August, most Iowans had never heard the term, but forecasters knew it well.
Coincidentally, Iowa had a derecho earlier this year, in July, but it was nowhere near as destructive as the previous two.
