 
Published Monday
Showers, Cool Weather Wash Over Midlands BY ERIN GRACE
The constant rain that drenched parts of Nebraska and southwest Iowa Sunday didn't give forecasters much cause for flood alarm, but the weather was blamed for traffic tie-ups in Council Bluffs, a flooded Bellevue school and possibly a power outage in Omaha. Because the rain fell consistently without stormy bursts, forecasters with the National Weather Service in Valley were not concerned about significant flooding, though some residents might have seen water where they didn't want to see it, said John Pollack with the Weather Service. The Omaha area hadn't seen much rainfall in 10 days, so the rain that fell came slow enough that a lot of it just soaked in, Pollack said. However, the rain didn't soak into some areas of Council
Bluffs, where some intersections were underwater Sunday.
"You'd be better off with a Hovercraft than a vehicle," Council Bluffs Police Sgt. Bob Brietzke. Rain-flooded classrooms at Bellevue Christian Academy, 1400 Harvell Drive, mean there won't be school today. When Principal Terri Winchell entered the school Sunday, she saw standing water in several classrooms and a hallway. Maintenance workers spent more than six hours pumping water out of the school and cleaning up, she said. Classes for the school's 165 kindergarten through eighth-grade students were expected to resume Tuesday. A lightning strike might have been to blame for a power outage in Omaha that left about 20,000 residents without electricity around 4 p.m. Sunday. Jeff Hanson, an Omaha Public Power District spokesman, said he wasn't sure what caused the outage - though he said lightning might have struck an 80- to 90-foot transmission tower east of 36th and Leavenworth Streets. Power was knocked out for customers in the general area from Dodge to Mason Streets and from 30th to 43rd Streets. It was restored about 6:30 p.m. A strong cold front from the northwest was expected to hit the Omaha area late Sunday, drying up the rain, bringing strong wind gusts and ushering in a week of cooler weather. High temperatures Monday were expected to reach the 50s with a possible high of 60 degrees by Tuesday. A large upper-level storm system expected to settle over the Great Lakes region will keep the Omaha area in a flow of cool and mostly dry air at least through the end of the week, Pollack said, leaving residents with temperatures about 15 degrees below normal. "All the people who thought they were done with their
furnace this season might discover that they need to have it on again,"
he said.
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