(Radio Iowa) –  Today (Thursday) marks one year since an extremely rare, very powerful December derecho swept across Iowa, killing one person and causing widespread destruction. Meteorologist Mike Fowle, at the National Weather Service, says the massive, long-duration storm is cemented in state history and will, hopefully, never be matched. Forty-nine of Iowa’s 99 counties were declared disaster areas and the storm spun off 63 tornadoes, the most Iowa’s ever seen in a single day.

It was the second derecho to hit Iowa in two years, following another on August 10th of 2020, which placed the term “derecho” into the vocabulary of everyone in the state. The 2020 storm packed extremely powerful winds, peaking at 140-miles an hour near Cedar Rapids. Coincidentally, Iowa had a derecho earlier this year, in July, but it was nowhere near as destructive as the previous two.