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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Overnight storms unleashed their fury on parts of Michigan from Tuesday into Wednesday morning, causing considerable damage to two ice arenas and uprooting trees near the University of Michigan’s main campus.
Teams from the National Weather Service were on the ground in areas like Ann Arbor, assessing whether tornadoes had struck, though no confirmations had been made by Wednesday morning. Instead, meteorologist Sara Schultz indicated that the damage seemed to be the result of a strong line of thunderstorms that swept in from Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
At 1:49 a.m. Wednesday, a powerful wind gust clocked in at 70 mph (112.6 kph) at the university’s football stadium, while nearby Willow Run Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Airport recorded gusts of 69 mph (111 kph) and 62 mph (99.7 kph) respectively, according to Schultz. Another series of potentially damaging storms was expected to approach the area from the west on Wednesday.
Many communities in southeastern Michigan experienced flooding on streets and in neighborhoods as a result of the storms.
In Ann Arbor, several public school buildings faced structural damage and power outages. The district announced closures on Wednesday due to a fiber outage affecting critical systems like fire alarms, phones, and security cameras, as well as 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.
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.
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