Last night, residents throughout the state of Kansas lost power as severe weather hit the state. Heavy windstorms roared through the cities, hitting Topeka and its surrounding areas especially hard. In Topeka alone, an estimated 100,000 people lost power throughout the night. For most, power was cut off by around 11:00pm. Power had to be cut by the electric company due to concerns about the high wind speeds and thunderstorms that moved in the northeast direction through Kansas.

In Kansas, there are two main power providers, Evergy and FreeState Electric.

Evergy reported the nearly 100,000 Kansans who were without power going into Friday morning. In total, they experienced about 512 outages around the state. Topeka in particular experienced 161 outages. FreeState Electric, a much smaller electricity provider in the state reported approximately 1,500 of their own customers without power in the state. These power outages spread throughout at least four counties.

Each company now reports power on for come.

Throughout the night, power slowly began to be restored as weather concerns weakened. However, there are still thousands waiting for their own power to come back on. From their latest report, Evergy claimed there are still approximately 36,000 Kansas residents without power.

The storms were quite heavy in many parts of the state, with trees and power lines going down. From some of these events, it is clear that the precaution of cutting the power as a smart choice to make. Furthermore, some events such as trees falling are even what caused certain power lines to go out, as trees and other large things that were knocked down by the wind force fell into power lines. This then caused In South Park, a 70 foot Hackberry tree was completely uprooted. This actually happened as the storm started to roll in heavily on Wednesday.

As we head into the weekend, many residents worry about how long the extreme weather will continue and put their power at risk. Some are hopeful that the worst has passed and now they will only have, mostly, clear skies; however, some worry the thunder and windstorms were only the beginning of a worse storm pattern.