Severe storms that moved into Mid-Missouri on Friday night left thousands of people without power across the region, with the hardest hit areas reporting outages in the thousands as winds and hail threatened more damage.
At 8:30 p.m., 7,470 electricity customers in Morgan County were without power, including 5,199 Co-Mo Electric customers and 2,271 Ameren customers. Another nearly 4,500 households in Benton County were dark, among them 1,678 Co-Mo Electric customers, 2,578 Southwest Electric customers and some Central Missouri Electric customers. Camden County had 2,178 households without power, including 464 Co-Mo Electric customers and 1,009 Southwest Electric customers. In Macon County, outages had already fallen to 176 by 8:13 p.m. after peaking at about 752.
The storm threat was serious enough for the ABC 17 Stormtrack Weather Team to issue a Weather Alert Day for Friday, and most of Mid-Missouri was under a tornado watch by Friday evening. Gov. Mike Kehoe also preemptively declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon, a move that underscored how quickly the weather could turn from severe to damaging.
The numbers tell the story of a night when the power grid could not keep up with the storms. Morgan County alone accounted for more outages than either Benton or Camden, while Macon County’s steep drop suggested some communities saw the worst of it earlier in the evening. The immediate question for residents is how quickly crews can restore service after a round of storms that already forced officials to brace before the first outages climbed.
