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Powerful winds and heavy rain swept through the metro area Tuesday night, prompting emergency officials to sound warning sirens and issue flood advisories and causing significant power outages.

The gusts even flipped a small plane at Eppley Airfield, according to reports to the National Weather Service.

But the real danger, meteorologists warned, was the overnight threat of flash flooding.

“We’ll see storm after storm (into this morning), and I’m pretty concerned that we’re going to have a lot of flooding,” said Dave Samuhel, meteorologist with AccuWeather.

As the second wave of storms moved through, the weather service issued a general flood advisory for the Lincoln area and for portions of the Omaha area due to radar estimates of 2 to 3 inches of rainfall.

In Omaha, the storms caused at least 17,000 Omaha Public Power District customers to lose power. At 2:45 a.m., about 3,500 customers were without power, the utility said.

MidAmerican Energy Co. reported 4,000 customers in western Iowa without power, and by 10 p.m. had whittled that number down to about 1,500.