Friends of mine live on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids. They were lucky, no major damage. They lost a couple of fence panels when trees dropped on them, and a branch broke the windscreen on their truck.
The worst damage was my friend and his son were coming back from the shooting range and got caught on the highway in the middle of the worst of it. They had to stop because visibility was 0. The wind was picking up gravel from the shoulders and the fields and pelting the cars (others were stopped, as well). Dave said he felt the car start to lift (wind gusts were over 100 mps and he was broadside to the wind) so he got the ass end into the wind so if anything big came out of the fields the seats would protect them.
Gravel from the road scoured a lot of the paint off the rear of the car, broke both side mirrors and pockmarked the hell out of the rear window.
They didn't have power for the better part of 30 hours. A couple of hours after it came on it went off again, turns out that was a damaged line shorted out and caught fire down the street. Power was out for another 8 or so hours.
At one point Alliant energy, which has just shy of 100,000 customers in Linn County (where my friends live) had between 90 and 95% of its customers without power. One of the electric co-operatives with about 10,000 customers had 100% without power.
Friday I got a call from Dave's wife -- she was with a friend who was looking at buying a new Subaru Forester and wanted some pricing advice. Her Forester took a direct hit from a huge tree.
And a Facebook group I'm on had pictures from a Cedar Rapids member who had a 100+ year old tree right in the middle of their 100+ year old house. Huge damage.
The Derecho we had in DC some years ago was a pretty quick even. It just moved through. But the Iowa derecho lasted for over half an hour in some places, which shows how huge and deep that front was.
