KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A loud rumble woke up make people living on the city’s south side.
An early morning storm blew through neighborhoods like Waldo and Rolling Meadows early Friday morning, leaving damage to homes and trees behind.
FOX4’s Joe Lauria said that storm delivered straight line winds with gusts measuring 60 mph.
The high-pitched squeal of chainsaws and the smell of sawdust are impossible to miss. A crew with power tools went to work around 1030 a.m., cleaning up Latanya D. Robinson’s home near 85th and Highland.
Robinson said she’d asked her neighbors to trim the big tree in the front yard of their rental house. Instead, the storm blew parts of it onto Robinson’s roof and cars, bashing a hole in the roof of the house, producing a loud booming sound.
“Cut your trees down so other people won’t be out of pocket! This could have been avoided,” Robinson said.
Just west of there in Waldo, Gloria Burggraf heard a loud crash, too. A large tree crashed into her house’s back deck, turning the wooden structure into a pile of kindling.
“It’s pretty significant. It tore down my whole deck, glass tables, furniture, planted pots, flowers. All of that is demolished,” Burggraf said.
Friday was the second day in a row summer storms have blown through the Kansas City metro.
Crews from Evergy had to restore service to 23,000 customers on Friday. Chris Kurtz, the utility company’s senior director of emergency services, said the company had already restored power to 30,000 customers after Thursday’s storms.
Evergy crews usually dispatch from a centralized location, but due to the pandemic, Kurtz said the company can’t do that.
“The coordination of that, as you can imagine, is massive,” Kurtz said. “Many of those crews are actually dispatching from their homes today. That’s something we would not have thought possible a year ago. I think we’re doing it very effectively. We want to continue to work until all of that power and all of those lights are back on.”
You can track Evergy’s progress to restore electricity by using this interactive map.
