The roofs and walls of a busy commercial stretch were turned into tangled rubble. Mobile homes were destroyed. Tornadoes are so rare in northern Michigan that Gaylord doesn’t have a siren system to warn people of dangerous weather.
The town of 4,200 people began to clean up on Saturday. a day after a tornado 140 mph winds slammed into Gaylord, killing two people, injuring more than 40 and shocking residents who are more familiar with blizzards than spring gales.
One utility company reported great progress in restoring power, though thousands still lacked power. Some roads remained clogged with fallen utility poles and other debris.
“We have a lot of debris to clean up,” said state police Lt. Derrick Carroll.
Two people in their 70s who lived in the Nottingham Forest mobile home park have died, state police said. It was one of the first sites affected by the tornado, which was rated EF3 by the National Weather Service on a scale of 0 to 5.
“There have been trailers picked up and dumped on top of each other. Just a very large debris field,” said Otsego County Fire Chief Chris Martin. Martin said crews used heavy equipment to conduct a secondary search of the area.
He said “there’s probably 95% destruction there.”
Gaylord, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) northwest of Detroit, is a popular destination for skiers and snowmobilers in the winter and golfers in the summer. It doesn’t have tornado sirens, though anyone with a cell phone received a “code red” warning from the weather service about 10 minutes before the tornado hit, Carroll said.
Video posted online showed a dark funnel cloud approaching as anxious drivers watched or slowly drove away on area roads.
“Everyone in Michigan will embrace those families and everyone who is working together to get back on their feet here,” Michigan Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist said during a visit.
Betty Wisniewski, 87, avoided injury even though the tornado significantly damaged her home, said her son Steve Wisniewski, who lives next door.
“Fortunately she was fine, rosary in hand,” he said from a ladder as he put plastic on his windows. “She was praying. Pretty impressive.”
Gaylord Police Chief Frank Claeys said the immediate moments after the tornado hit were difficult for first responders.
“We were looking in places where we knew the occupants. We were calling them by name,” Claeys said. “It’s so much more personal when our officers get to know the people who live in those homes.”
John Boris, of the weather service post in Gaylord, said the tornado passed through the community in about three minutes, but was on the ground in the region for 26 minutes, a “pretty long” time.
“We don’t have a lot of tornadoes,” said Boris, the science and operations officer. “In the state of Michigan, in general, we usually have an average of about 15 (a year) and more of them are in the south of the state than in the north. It is quite unusual.
In fact, the last notable wind storm was in 1998 when 100 mph straight-line winds hit Gaylord.
Boris said warm 80-degree air early Friday and strong winds moving east across Lake Michigan were the key conditions that produced the tornado.
A link to climate change probably doesn’t fit, he said.
“It’s very difficult to attribute something as specific as this to a large-scale signal like that,” Boris said. “If we had these more often, that could be a sign.”
Reference-ktla.com