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Tuesday storm creates some lodging, green snap

By Staff | Jul 7, 2011

FORT?DODGE – Southern Webster County and Northern Boone County reported some crop damage Tuesday night after a late-afternoon thunderstorm rolled out of the north with heavy rains and wind gusts of 65 miles per hour.

Most of the crop damage – consisting mostly on lodged corn and some green snap – was in isolated areas and not widespread.

Grant Klever, an agronomist for NEW?Cooperative, in Otho, said “there was some minor hail in the storm, but it just added insult to injury because it fell where hail hit a week earlier.”

That earlier storm wiped out some acres of soybeans. “But there was nothing like that this time,”?Klever said.

Klever said there was lodged corn that he expected would stand back up and some incidences of green snap.

He said he expected that in this pre-tasseling development of corn, the plants surrounding the snapped stalks would likely make up the yield differences.

Klever estimated that yield loss could amount to 20 percent or less in those fields that were hit Tuesday.

“But there are no reports of people losing half their crop,” Klever said.

Reports also surfaced of a hog building destroyed near Barnum, in northeast Webster County, but the Webster County Sheriff’s office had no reports of that incidence.

Other reports of sheds and bins damaged in Tuesday’s storm in northern Boone County were also unconfirmed at press time. The Boone County Sheriff’s office said it had no information about property damage from the weather.

The system of thunderstorms moved through an area stretching from Burt, in Kossuth County, to Dayton in southern Webster County.

A tornado warning was issued for the Dayton area, but there were no immediate reports of twisters touching down.

Contact Larry Kershner at (515) 573-2141, Ext. 453 or at kersh@farm-news.com.

At the peak of the storm, a power outage in Fort Dodge affected 3,627 MidAmerican Energy customers, according to Tina Potthoff, a spokeswoman for the utility. Most of those customers were on the north and northeast sides of town.

The outage began at about 5:30 p.m. and Potthoff said power to all but 270 customers had been restored by 10 p.m.

Potthoff said the outage was caused by the severe weather, but added that repair crews had not determined precisely what went wrong.