Many throughout the state and south central Iowa are cleaning up and rebuilding after a rare weather event pummeled the state of Iowa Monday.

Megan Mulford is a meteorologist with Weatherology, the group that provides updates during Severe Weather Action Team coverage on KNIA/KRLS. Mulford says Monday’s storm is called a derecho, which is a storm that maintains strong, straight-line winds over 250 miles.

She says since 2000, derechos occur in the United States a handful of times per year — but the storm that struck most of the Interstate 80 and Highway 30 corridor from western Iowa to the Great Lakes is one of the most powerful ever recorded in the United States.

Two similarly destructive derecho storms have hit Iowa in the past, according to the National Weather Service. The last was in 2011, when wind speeds upwards of 130 MPH impacted the communities of Vinton and Garrison and continued into Chicago, and in 1998, called the Corn Belt derecho, which had a peak wind gust of 123 mph in Washington.

The storm this week knocked out power to over 500,000 businesses and households in Iowa, and locally, a wind gust\ of 85 MPH was recorded at the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge in Prairie City, 75 MPH in Leighton, and 71 MPH at Knoxville airport. Extensive tree and building damage was reported in both the Pella and Knoxville areas.