Power outages, flight delays subside after jumbo snowstorm

CHICAGO (Sun-Times Media Wire) - The Chicago area was recovering Wednesday from an early-season blizzard that inconvenienced tens of thousands with power outages, canceled flights and sluggish morning commutes.

As of 10:15 a.m., only 702 ComEd customers remained without power, according to a ComEd report. Of the total still suffering power outages Wednesday, about 78 were in Chicago and 479 were in Cook County.

At its peak on Monday, the storm had affected more than 363,000 customers, the utility service said. The company deployed 250 workers from the East Coast to tend to the outages.

Chicago’s two major airports have also mostly bounced back from storm-induced service issues. There were nine cancellations reported at O’Hare International Airport and only two at Midway International Airport about 10:15 a.m. Thursday, with delays averaging less than 15 minutes at both airports, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation.

The situation was much worse Monday afternoon, when 1,254 flights were canceled at O’Hare as of 3:50 p.m. with delays averaging 79 minutes, according to the aviation department. Midway International Airport was reporting 71 cancelations with delays averaging less than 15 minutes.

The end-of-Thanksgiving weekend blizzard proved to be the fifth-largest November snowfall in Chicago’s history, according to the National Weather Service. At O’Hare International Airport, 8.4 inches of snow fell from Sunday to Monday.

The largest two-day snowfall the city has seen in the month of November happened in 1895, when Chicago got a foot of snow from Nov. 25-26.