Dexter Tornado

[purklize]

In all my years here in Ann Arbor I have never seen anything like the storm I saw today. Non-stop lightning, like a strobe, for 2 hours, three strikes in my parking lot (?!) at least 45 minutes of hail ranging from pea to quarter size (golf ball to softball nearby, a lot of people had their cars wrecked). Heavy flooding in some areas... and not to mention the F3 tornado... it was surely on the upper end of F3 as it leveled homes. I've seen damage like this before and it was eventually reclassified as F4... I can't believe this was less than 200mph winds we saw. To put it in perspective, the winds when Katrina made landfall were at 140mph, and they weren't angular like those of a tornado... buildings stand up much better to straight winds. Angular winds tend to pick at the corners of buildings and shake and peel them apart. Thank god it didn't hit downtown. Hundreds or thousands would've died. The old slummy apartments are crammed with sometimes as many as a hundred in a single building and they have no basements.

 

A lot of people lost everything today. This was a major event. The national media has picked up the story. We are in for a rough year. We're supposed to have snow, not tornadoes, right now.

 

My thoughts go out to all those affected by this... and I'm sure I'm not alone. My best wishes... this was a truly terrible day. So sorry to see this happen to good people...