Massive tornado outbreak ongoing on Michigan
There's currently a massive tornado outbreak ongoing in Michigan. There have been 12 tornado warnings in the last few hours including the state's first ever Tornado Emergency for Sherwood and Union City. This is part of a hugely destructive system that tore through the Great Plains yesterday. Although the chances of a tornado hitting your particular location are relatively slim this is a good time have a tornado emergency plan. The squall line is heading towards SE Michigan as we speak.
If you want to track the ongoing outbreak I would recommend the following website: https://www.tornadohq.com/
Also follow the NWS tornado feed:
Two tornados touched down in Portage. Hit a brand new FedEx warehouse building just south of I-94 on Portage Rd just north of Pfizer. Looked like half the building is gone, was expected 40-50 workers inside.
EDIT: Removed what I was told by a friend who works there, he thought everyone was safe and accounted for. I should have waited for an official announcment. Sorry everyone.
WWMT (TV 3 in Kalamazoo) reporting just 5 minutes ago that there's one FedEx worker still unaccounted for. Otherwise only some minor injuries in that facility, which is very surprising when you see pics of the damage.
Thanks for the update Rob.
Update on the 11 pm news that all employees are now accounted for. Simply amazing considering the level of damage to that distribution center.
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Stay safe. We had our tornados couple months back in Ohio.
A tornado passed about 1 mile from my house in Portage. It is a war zone over here.
Not far from you, from the pictures and videos I've seen it's pretty bad.
We’re a mile south on Centre. Scary stuff
Shit. Stay safe everyone.
Had a couple touchdown a mile or two south of me in portage, fortunately we didn’t take a direct hit. The FedEx distro center took a big hit😞
Portage here, too. Stay safe
If you're interested in sleepless nights, I'd recommend the following site: https://www.spc.noaa.gov//
The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center produces a very thorough report every few hours, with frequent updates during storms like these.
I've found they're particularly useful about 48 hours out. Longer than that, it's not very precise.
This time of year is always volatile. Gets cool enough with a passing front that the warmer air of our middle-America springs is often trapped. Seems like every 2-3 years there's a month like this, when every front produces severe weather. Really wet spring here in Ohio.
The past couple of years, we've had terrible hail storms, with hail the size of baseballs. One storm was so bad that anyone who parked on the street was on the phone with their insurance companies the next day, trying to get all the dents and cracked windshields taken care of. And those suckers went horizontal and tore holes in the screens on our windows. We had to get them all rescreened.
Tornados are malevolent. I spent part of my formative years in central and south central Oklahoma. Stay safe out there.
Always enjoyed the Climax sign on 94.
Reaching Climax on my way to a Michigan game is always a treat
You don’t want to arrive too early though. Super disappointing!
That's what she said...
Especially if you are expecting to see Orji in the endzone.
I'm not far from there. I think I kicked a field goal. One went to the east of me and two went to the west of me.
I've heard of things like "tornado emergency" and "PDS tornado warning" being issued in places like Oklahoma, but never here. What an evening.
In Portage we had a beauty contest that my girlfriend and a bunch of other girls were in. We were all waiting to see Ms. Climax but she never showed up. I think maybe she didn’t exist in the first place. My girlfriend confirmed that that was the case.
So you were never able to reach climax with your girlfriend?
There's a town in SW KS called climax and there's a town down the road called Protection.
And there's a town in PA called Intercourse, not that that's relevant to anything, but Beavis and Butthead would've gone crazy.
You go through Intercourse to get to Paradise (PA).
It passed through the Chicagoland area, too. Not sure if it did any damage, but we had a tornado watch for a couple of hours. Stay safe everyone!
Impact on Chicago appears to be minimal so far. Was watching the radar earlier and most of the storms had a horizontal path through the area as opposed to a vertical "wall" that swept through this morning. Tornado warnings east of my office in NWI this afternoon while the sun was shining where I was. Storm coming through western burbs as I type this so we'll see. Tom Skilling just gave me a lightning warning on my phone so there's that.
There was a tornado warning up in that area. Mostly it was severe tstorms with hail especially south and southwest. Harvard is waaaaay northwest, close to Lake Geneva, WI.
I was just looking at images from Kalamazoo and Calhoun County. Unreal. Stay safe, those of you in that area.
Nephew lives in Portage and his apartment building has a tree on it.
No deaths have been reported, and I pray it stays that way, but a ton of damage done. Trailer park was trashed according to drone video on the news. At least two tornadoes touched down in Portage and one near Galesburg / West Battle Creek. Another near Colon. Probably others in SW Michigan.
Stay safe y’all
If school has taught me anything its that all you need to protect yourself during a tornado is to hold a text book over your head. Boom, danger averted.
That's fine for a tornado, but if you're facing a nuclear attack it's best to get under the desk.
We did not get under our desks. We ducked and covered in the hallways. I went to school with kids whose dads were B-52 aircrew during the height of the cold war. We knew enough to know it wouldn't matter. They also used us as test subjects for sonic booms. That was exciting.
You have to get under your desk. Duck and Cover.
Thankfully my cat and I are safe and no damage to my house. About 3-4 miles away in Portage is a different story.
I was reading a severe weather message board* this morning ------ yes such things exist ----- and a poster there said today's setup looked A LOT like May 13, 1980. Which is when Kalamazoo got hit by an F3 tornado.
https://stormtrack.org/threads/2024-05-07-event-in-oh-mi-il-ky.32715/
That dude absolutely nailed it with his forecast and the historical analogy.
You don't get higher-end events in Michigan often, only about once a decade. But they can occur. The Grand Rapids and Flint metros have both been hit by F5 tornadoes in the past.
----
*my undergrad degree is in Meteorology, though I don't do anything Meteorology-related at all professionally. Thus the interest.
I was living in Detroit area and in HS when this 1980 tornado hit K-zoo. I remember all the news stories that night about the tragedy. The warning systems back then were often so late that you may be caught in the open. Glad to hear (so far) no serious injuries.
My parents’ neighborhood and the one I grew up in, in Portage, got wrecked. Still collecting info on Facebook on friends and families still there. My parents weren’t home and their house is ok.
Calls to mind the tornado that buzz cut Dexter about a decade ago. Sky south of us turned green, and you were thankful that’s as close as it got (in our case, about 3 miles). If you know where to look, you can still see where a swath was cut through woods.
They can be like that, almost that precise. There was a tornado alert when I was a kid in Flint and we went and hid out (I don't think we had a basement). Later we went for a walk--a block-long stretch of houses two streets over had been wrecked.
It’s all part of the ad campaign for the Twisters reboot….
#toosoon
Good lead times for tornado warnings issued by the NWS in Grand Rapids. Lot of people had time to take cover.
read earlier that yesterday was the first ever NWS declared tornado emergency in MI. 4 tornadoes were confirmed in the state. Weather Channel was calling the Portage tornado a likely EF-2. today is going to be a potentially rough day for OH, KY, IN, IL, TN, MO & AR in what has been a wild week of storms and tornadoes. for anyone traveling through those states, stay safe.
It will always be a rough day for Columbus in late November.
Anybody remember the big tornado that went through downtown Kazoo in 1980? Tore up all the trees in Bronson Park. That was pretty exciting.
The infamous "Green Storm" in the Detroit area was July of that year. Some areas around Ann Arbor and through the downriver suburbs of Detroit experienced 100+ MPH gusts from the derecho and an unfortunate many were without electricity for a week in some cases.
For years, the stump of the willow tree that we lost that day remained in the backyard, mainly as a natural sitting area of sorts.
My sister was working downtown at the RenCen back then. The Republican convention was also going on in Detroit. It was a vicious storm called a derecho. I was in HS and working that morning, during clean-up and pool work at a swim club in Livonia. She had to evacuate to one of the lower floor interior rooms at the RenCen. I remember going into the basement of the swim club freaking out (I was the only one there). Straight line winds hit almost 100 mph. One I'll never forget.