ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Powerful storms ripped through parts of Michigan overnight Tuesday into Wednesday morning, damaging two ice arenas and uprooting trees near the University of Michigan’s main campus.
National Weather Service crews were surveying damage in places including Ann Arbor to determine if one or more tornadoes touched down, but none had been confirmed as of Wednesday morning. Instead, the damage appears to have been caused by a line of thunderstorms that moved into Michigan from Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois, meteorologist Sara Schultz said.
A 70 mph (112.6 kph) wind gust was reported at 1:49 a.m. Wednesday at the university’s football stadium, while gusts of 69 mph (111 kph) and 62 mph (99.7 kph) were reported at Willow Run Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Schultz said. Another round of strong storms with potentially damaging winds was moving into the area Wednesday from states to the west.
Streets and neighborhoods in many southeastern Michigan communities also were left flooded Wednesday.
Some public school buildings in Ann Arbor suffered structural damage and many lost power. The district was closed Wednesday because of a fiber outage impacting fire, phone and camera systems, and building access.
Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor said structural engineers were assessing damage to a wall at the city’s Veterans Memorial Park Ice Arena. Part of the roof was torn from the university’s Yost Ice Arena.
PHOTOS: Thunderstorms rip across Michigan and damage 2 ice arenas, other structures
Ripped away roof, fallen tree
Seungjun Lee was feeling fortunate. A hulking tree outside the rented home he shares with six others barely missed his upstairs bedroom when the storm uprooted it.
“If the tree fell down a couple more feet, I would not be standing here,” said Lee, a 20-year-old junior at U-M. “I’d be in the hospital. So, I’m feeling very lucky that … the roof stopped it.”
Lee and his roommates were awakened by a siren, then an alert blasted from their phones between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., urging them to take shelter.
“As soon as I came out, everyone else was coming out of their rooms and everyone’s like, ‘What’s going on? This is crazy,’ ” said Lee, of Ridgewood, New Jersey. “And then we looked out the window: This tree just fell down. So, we’re like, ‘Oh, crap.’ ”
A friend across the street then walked over to check in.
“He was like, ‘Did you hear about Yost?’ We went, ‘No.’ We were worried about our house. So, we walked over and we checked it out and we were like, ‘That’s crazy,’ ” said Sam Zaruba, a 20-year-old from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
A roommate, Gautam Nigam, 21, said he couldn’t miss class despite the mess: “I have a final presentation later today.”
More rain and dead fish
The storms dumped as much as 2.5 inches (6.3 cms) of rain across parts of southeastern Michigan by Wednesday morning, and more was expected across the Midwest, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions. Flood watches were issued for a big chunk of Michigan’s eastern Lower Peninsula, southeastern Michigan, northern Indiana, northwestern Ohio, the Chicago area and Wisconsin.
In northern Michigan, a power outage during a storm killed 1,750 steelhead trout at a state facility where eggs and milt are collected to produce more fish. Scott Heintzelman of the state’s fisheries division said it was a “devastating event” involving “big, beautiful fish.”
The fish typically are 2 feet (60.9 centimeters) long. They naturally swim into a weir on the Little Manistee River and then move into ponds. Heintzelman said staff discovered Tuesday that a loss of electricity had stopped the flow of oxygenated water, dooming the fish.
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources said it was watching levees around Portage, a city of about 10,000 people, as the Wisconsin River rises. As of Wednesday morning, the river there swelled to nearly 19 feet (5.7 meters), about 2 feet (0.6 meters) over flood state, and could rise to 20.3 feet (6.18 meters), they said.
And after days of rainfall and winter snow melt, a “significant influx of water” is entering Black Lake, upstream of Cheboygan in northern Michigan, the sheriff’s office said.
The lake empties into the Black River and feeds the Cheboygan River that flows through the city into Lake Huron. Officials have been managing that flow through the city’s Cheboygan Dam by raising gates, adding pumps, raising a bridge and closing some riverfront to the public.
Flooding and unsafe travel forced Cheboygan Area Schools to cancel classes and athletic events for Thursday and Friday.
“Conditions are not improving significantly and, in some areas, continue to worsen,” the district said.
Where’s all this weather headed?
Bill Bunting, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center, described a “very dynamic weather pattern” that combines very moist air with a strong jet stream across the central United States and Great Lakes to create conditions for severe thunderstorms.
As of early Wednesday afternoon, the weather service had received more than 400 reports of hail, winds above 60 mph (96.5 kph) or tornadoes, he said.
The system was stretching northward Wednesday night from central Texas into Iowa and southern Wisconsin and then eastward across parts of Michigan, Illinois, northern Indiana and Ohio on its way toward upper Pennsylvania and the Buffalo, New York, area, Bunting said.
Further east, it is expected to be as hot as a furnace, threatening record high temperatures in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., through the weekend, forecasters say.
