Both Sun Times and Tribune are reporting storms causing the outtage as well:
Storms knock 911 call center offline
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/22call.html
Channel 5 will report on this confusion, not blaming storma at all...saying something over heated causing the smoke, causing the outage
Can anyone get a weather radar image for 3pm then I could see south of the loop at the time