This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When a derecho slammed into the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in 2020, Diana Lokenvitz had time for exactly one glance out her window.
A wall of clouds had poured in from the west, swallowing Palo, Iowa, in darkness. “It was like it was pitch black night,” the senior systems engineer at the plant recalled.
Then, the alarm began to sound.
Within seconds of the storm hitting the plant, 130-mile-per-hour winds had severed all six of its external power lines, triggering an automatic emergency shutdown.
Backup diesel generators roared to life, and large control rods slid into the reactor core to halt the fission reaction driving the plant’s energy production.
With the reactor core still dangerously hot, safety systems kicked in to help stabilize the reactor and vent excess heat, a process that lasted for hours.
“It wasn’t until we went outside afterwards that we realized that the cooling towers were gone,” Lokenvitz recalled.
Twelve water-cooling towers once watched over the plant like two rows of soldiers, releasing steam from water used to cool the nuclear reactor. The storm toppled them.
The derecho, a thunderstorm characterized by high wind gusts spanning several hundred miles, had swept across the Midwest, causing widespread power outages and catastrophic damage to buildings, trees and millions of acres of crops.
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