2011-05-29 REPORTS: MI

[Bob Hartig]

It has been a busy past few days, so I'm just getting around to reporting on last Sunday's round of severe weather in Michigan. Yes, Michigan. Here in the land of cold fronts and veered surface winds, upon occasion we are able to squeeze out an impressive event, and May 29 certainly qualified.

While three tornadoes were verified by the NWS, the real newsmaker was straight line wind damage. When I first hooked up with the advance guard of the storm line along US 131 at the Martin exit, it didn't look like much of anything. But as I busted east and south through the Barry County hinterlands in an effort to get out ahead of the intensifying line and intercept it, a tornado warning went up for Kalamazoo County just to my south.

I wound up working my way into Battle Creek, then dropped south along M-37 through a pronounced divergence couplet. The west wind accelerated abruptly and dramatically, visibility dropped to near zero, and my adrenaline level spiked for the first time in what has for me been a convectively deprived spring.

I was across from the Battle Creek airport, with the big wind finally moving off to the east, when I noticed significant tree damage in the cemetery across from the airport. Scores of large trees had been debranched, snapped clean off at the trunk, or simply blown right over. Turning east on Columbia Avenue, I began to encounter structural damage: road signs flattened, roofs missing, walls torn off of buildings, trees festooned with pink insulation and twisted ribbons of siding. My initial thought was that a tornado had passed through the area, but the unidirectional orientation of blown-down trees pointed to straight-line winds.

But man, what winds they had to have been to do what they did! Certainly in the order of 100 miles an hour and maybe more. Sunday in Battle Creek furnished ample proof that you don't need a tornado in order to experience tornado-like damage. I've seen a couple of humdinger derechoes in Michigan over the last few decades, but I don't recall seeing damage quite as severe or widespread as this. Jopin it wasn't, but it will still take poor, embattled Battle Creek time to recover from Michigan's first hammering of genuinely severe spring storms in 2011.

To view pictures along with a somewhat more detailed description, visit my blog.

 

[Todd Renshaw]

Bob, glad to hear you caught some action near home.

I happened to be in Kalamazoo for a "family thing". Unfortunately, I was stuck in place as the storm went through and couldn't see much. Too many large trees and then heavy, heavy rain obscured everything. We followed the storm back east to Detroit. Along the way we saw many uprooted trees, snapped trunks and branches along I-94, extending roughly from somewhere between Kalamazoo and Battle Creek all the way to about Albion or Jackson. (Power out along part of the way too.)

 

[John Vandehei]

I was in town a few hours after the storm hit. Hearing that I-94 was backed up due to falling trees, I opted to take some back roads to the south of I-94. Big mistake. I ran into an area of utter devastation. So many trees were down the area was impassable. I backtracked and headed further south toward Climax, were I found a clear path east. The I-94 corridor of Battle Creek wasn't too bad, but like Bob said, the Columbia Ave. corridor got hammered. My work is there, and since my boss was vacationing out of state, I figured I'd better check the office for damage. Damage was very minimal, but large mature trees were down everywhere. Since Columbia Ave. was backed up due to gawkers and the lack of functioning traffic signals, I tried to hit the residential streets to get out. Again, big mistake. Although I know these streets like the back of my hand, the neighborhood was almost unrecognizable. Fallen trees were everywhere, often several large trees down on each block. I was like trying to escape from a maze, with almost every street blocked. Like Bob stated, the winds snapped large mature trees in half. However, what made the situation twice as bad was we've had a rainy, wet spring here. A few days before this event, we had a very heavy rainfall, which just saturated the ground. Thus, healthy trees that otherwise would of withstood this storm were simply uprooted. I saw at least as many trees uprooted as were snapped by the wind. While some buildings did suffer damage from the wind outright, I think the majority of the damage was due to trees falling on buildings. This was mostly the case per my observations in the residential neighborhoods. Many homes suffered heavy roof and other damage due to fallen trees. Like Bob said, this is the most storm damage I've every personally witnessed.