Trapped people evacuated from FedEx facility after tornadoes hit Michigan

The county was hit by several tornadoes Tuesday evening, leaving about 15 to 20 people with minor injuries and no fatalities, Kalamazoo County public information officer Andrew Alspach said.

The twisters also impacted a mobile home park in Pavilion Township as well as numerous residences and businesses, he said. The National Weather Service will conduct an assessment of the tornadoes’ strength Wednesday, he added.

FedEx said the company was monitoring the situation. Part of the roof of its Portage facility collapsed after the tornado struck, mlive.com reported. Photos showed walls caved in.

“We are grateful there were no serious injuries as our team members sheltered in place inside the facility on Portage Road during the storm,” Davis said. “We are implementing contingency plans, including diverting incoming shipments to lessen the impacts on service.”

The storm caused “extensive” damage in several areas of the city, leaving more than 20,000 of roughly 49,000 residents without power, officials said. In a news release, the city said officials expect that most customers will be without power until late Wednesday night.

Police were assessing the damage, “but with so many trees and wires down, travel is slow,” Portage Mayor Patricia Randall said Tuesday evening. By 10 p.m., she had issued an emergency declaration to secure state and federal resources.

Across the state, more than 30,000 people in Michigan remained without power as of 7 a.m. Wednesday, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.

The city of Portage urged residents in affected areas to remain at home on Wednesday.

“City crews will be working in the hardest-hit areas of the city to assess the tornado damage,” the city said in an update shared on social media late Tuesday. “We expect many downed power lines, damage to many residential and commercial buildings, and trees blocking roads.”

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) declared a state of emergency and thanked first responders.

Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller said in a recorded video message shared overnight that about 176 homes were damaged at the mobile home park in Pavilion Township, in addition to between 15 and 17 that had been destroyed. Around 16-20 people were injured and went to the hospital, although none were in a life-threatening condition, he said.

“At one point we probably had around 100 rescuers inside the mobile home community,” he said, adding that they found “homes in the roadway, we found homes in neighbors’ homes, we found large trees in homes, we found many vehicles that have been smashed by large trees or homes.”

Residents Vanessa Perkins and Kavin Fletcher said the walls started shaking, trees outside bent and flattened, and they heard a noise like a train thundering through their home as the tornado hit.

They gathered underneath a mattress with their two young daughters, Fletcher’s adult nephew, and Perkins’s father, aged 70 and on oxygen, they said, speaking after they had relocated to a hotel because of a gas leak caused by the tornado.

Their neighbor’s porch slammed into their home, denting it, but theirs was one of the few that emerged relatively unscathed, they said.

Fletcher and his nephew set out to help and the first thing he saw was a pickup truck crushed by a tree. “And then after we got past the tree, that’s where you see all the carnage,” he said. “It was really like something out of a movie.”

He saw homes flipped over and ripped apart, a car on top of a roof, and a trailer scooped up and deposited onto a tree, he said. A little girl had been hit in the leg and he helped her family carry her to find medical attention.

The couple had secured their mobile home about three years ago after a six-month period of living unhoused. It was “our own little square of privacy, our own little square of us,” Fletcher said, calling it a “miracle” that it still appeared livable after Tuesday night.

In Portage, a barbershop shared photos on social media showing extensive damage to the building. Walls and most of the facade had been ripped off, with only interior framework remaining, while one image showed a room with pink insulation piled up on all surfaces. “Luckily, everyone is safe,” it wrote.

Twisters were also confirmed in Arkansas, West Virginia, Indiana and Ohio as storms swarmed the Great Lakes, Midwest and Ohio Valley. The Weather Service received more than 20 twister reports and tornado watches stretched from southern Kentucky into southern Michigan on Tuesday evening.

In Michigan, one large tornado was seen crossing U.S. Route 131 near Kalamazoo just after 6 p.m. Significant damage was reported just to the south in Portage. A second tornado was also observed near Portage a little more than an hour after the first. The National Weather Service issued “particularly dangerous situation” warnings for both storms, which are reserved for confirmed large and extremely dangerous twisters.

Earlier in the evening, a rare tornado emergency was hoisted by the Weather Service for another storm that tracked through Union City in south-central Michigan and probably produced either a long-track tornado or multiple tornadoes that touched down intermittently for more than an hour.

The tornadoes struck the Midwest, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley just one day after a violent EF4 tornado on the 0-to-5 Enhanced Fujita scale for intensity devastated parts of the city of Barnsdall in northeast Oklahoma, killing one person.

A warm front extending east from the low pressure zone served as the main conduit for the tornado-producing thunderstorms in southern Michigan.

At one point there were multiple concurrent “particularly dangerous situation” tornado warnings in addition to the tornado emergency for Union City. More than 100 tornado warnings were issued Tuesday.

Large hail was also observed from the rotating thunderstorms that erupted throughout the Midwest. Around 100 reports of large hail were logged by the Weather Service, measuring up to four inches in diameter in Union City.

The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center warned that the extreme weather could continue across a number of states on Wednesday.

“Numerous severe thunderstorms appear likely Wednesday from parts of the mid Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee Valleys into the southern Plains,” the center said in an update early Wednesday. “All severe hazards, including tornadoes, very large to giant hail, and potentially significant damaging winds are possible. Some of the tornadoes may be strong.”

Tuesday marked the 13th day in a row with tornadoes in the Lower 48. As the active storm pattern persists, additional twisters are possible in the Tennessee Valley and Mid-South on Wednesday. Scattered severe storms could hit the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast on Thursday, before a break in severe weather Friday through the weekend.