Powerful storms devastated northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin this weekend, leveling trees, telephone poles and leaving nearly 70,000 homes and businesses without power.

The weather also decimated four Rockford TV stations, two of which still can’t broadcast to DeKalb.

“The line of storms that hit, known as a ‘derecho,’ is a very intense, long-lived squall line of severe storms,” said Gilbert Sebenste, NIU staff meteorologist. “During the summer, there is so much unstable air that the storms can remain severe all night long. There was so much heat and humidity that the storms, referred to as microbursts, not only remained, but intensified over the night of July 4.”

As of press time, all Rockford TV stations and more than 30,000 were without power. Commonwealth Edison has called on additional crews and hopes to restore most of the power by Monday night.

WQRF (FOX)

Kevin Neumann, general sales manager at WQRF, Rockford’s FOX affiliate, said the station still is without power and is unable to broadcast.

The station uses separate facilities to produce and transmit. Although it has the power to produce, workers are waiting for ComEd to restore its power supply.

WIFR (CBS)

One of WIFR’s master control operators came into work early, during the storm, and realized that the station had lost power.

Fortunately, the generator already was working. Unfortunately, he found the station’s 40-year-old, 731-foot tower crumpled to the ground.

“We weren’t able to broadcast until we found a way to do it without our tower,” news director David Smith said.

For the time being, WIFR has set up a microwave link through Insight Cable that serves Rockford, Belvidere and Freeport.

“Most of our viewers can’t watch us anyway until the power is restored,” Smith said.

A back-up portable tower has been ordered and WIFR plans to install that on the WQRF tower. It will take six to eight months for a new tower to be designed and built. According to Smith, the National Weather Service came to survey the damage.

“They found evidence that there were straight-line winds estimated at around 100 mph.”

WTVO (ABC)

Gwen Kinsey, president and general manager of WTVO 17, was called at 4:15 a.m. with what she described as her worst nightmare.

“I was told that the power at the station was down, and we weren’t sure if we could broadcast,” said Kinsey, who immediately rushed to the station in the storm to assess the damage.

Workers pulled two of the live trucks up to the building and used extension cords to get basic electricity into the building.

By 7:30 a.m., they were able to update wtvo.com, which was the only way to communicate with community members.

“By that time, it became apparent that this wasn’t a simple outage,” Kinsey said. “We then starting looking for a generator large enough to get us on the air, and got tower inspectors to come out on a holiday weekend to assess our damage, seeing as the CBS tower had fallen over completely.”

By 3:30 p.m. Saturday, WTVO was on the air.

WREX (NBC)

WREX, didn’t have generator-produced power until 7 p.m. Saturday.

“ComEd said that the power should be on sometime late Monday, but we don’t know,” reporter Pat McCraney said. “Once power was restored by the generator, we put on the NASCAR race NBC was showing and had a five-minute news cut in at 9 p.m. and then ran the normal 10 o’clock news.”