Bob Hartig
EF5
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.
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.