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Jul 31, 2023

High winds, downbursts and a tornado: How violent combination led to 'catastrophic event' in Lansing area

LANSING — For 12 minutes on Thursday night, an EF-2 tornado tore its way through the eastern edge of Ingham County, following the path of Interstate 96 before crossing into Livingston County. It left

LANSING — For 12 minutes on Thursday night, an EF-2 tornado tore its way through the eastern edge of Ingham County, following the path of Interstate 96 before crossing into Livingston County.

It left behind a roughly 12-mile trail of destruction from Wheatfield Township to south of Fowlerville, carving a path as wide as 500 yards in some places. Trees snapped apart. Siding pulled off homes.

Areas further west weren't spared either. Devastating high winds that preceded the tornado hit Grand Rapids first before they knocked over large trees across Eaton and Ingham counties, including one in Lansing that killed an 84-year-old woman.

Four days later, thousands woke up to a new week in the Lansing area still without power. The Lansing Board of Water and Light hoped to have 90% of power restored by the end of Monday, and Consumers Energy hoped to have all its Lansing-area costumers back up.

Restoration has taken longer than both companies predicted, and officials from both say that last week's storms could have been much worse.

"This was a catastrophic event for us, at nearly 200,000 customers (without power)," Greg Salisbury, a vice president of electric distribution engineering for Consumers Energy, said Monday at a news conference just outside Lansing in Windsor Township.

"What was unique about it was the density of it. It was a very narrow (storm) band tracking along I-96 from Grand Rapids into this area and beyond. And the tornado activity wasn't forecast until the last minute so I think what was unique about this one was the way that it accelerated so much in the last few hours before it hit."

Consumers initially reporter that more than 40,000 customers in the Lansing area were without power.

Dick Peffley, general manager for BWL, which had 33,000 customers without power initially, said "we have never seen winds like this" and added that damage from last week's storm has been "considerably worse" than the 2013 ice storm that left 38,000 customers without power, some for nearly two weeks.

On Thursday morning, Peffley said BWL was already preparing for the storm. They'd notified crews out of the area that their help might be needed.

The storm system began to the west, along a cold front, before moving into the area and developing into the kind of system that can quickly form tornados.

Then came the the downbursts, said Scott Thomas, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Rapids.

Downbursts are powerful winds that descend from a thunderstorm and spread out quickly once they hit the ground. They can create 65-100 mph wind speeds and cause damage similar to a lower-level tornados, but are a separate kind of weather system, according to the NWS.

As the storm advanced on Lansing, Thomas said wind speeds hit 70 mph in Charlotte and 71 mph at the Lansing airport in DeWitt Township, speeds already exceeding those of a severe thunderstorm, which start at 58 mph.

The area also saw 1-2 inches of rain.

Peffley said from his home Delta Township he witnessed the high winds, which lasted only 15 minutes but matched the intensity of a tornado as the storm continued to move eastward.

Then, just before 9:30 p.m. the tornado formed about 3 miles southwest of Williamston.

From there, it moved onto Interstate 96, where motorists sought refuge under overpasses, and continued for about 1 1/2 miles before it turned southeast, crossing M-52 just south of the I-96 before heading east into Livingston County where it ultimately dissipated.

Twelve minutes, 12 miles, hundreds of trees snapped, barns destroyed and homes with roof, siding and window damage.

It was one of seven tornados that hit Michigan that night and had a peak wind speed recorded at 125 mph.

In the aftermath of the storm, Peffley said BWL had identified at least 41 broken electric poles, plus trees older than 100 years or taller than 60 feet that had either been split apart of knocked down completely.

And it's the fact that entire trees knocked out energy infrastructure, as opposed to a limb knocking out one wire, that officials have said attributed to the scale of power loss and the time its taken to get lights back on.

For example, Peffley said some BWL crews were blocked from some repair sites due to a downed tree, which needs another crew with different equipment to remove it before eclectic repairs can begin

And some areas got hit much worse than others — Peffley pointed to south Lansing and Delta Township — the storm hit the entire BWL service area, not some narrow swath.

BWL has been triaging its repairs, starting with downed infrastructure that would bring the most people back on line at a time. Officials with Consumers Energy said it started with hospitals, schools or public safety facilities.

Salisbury, the vice president at Consumers, said updates to circuit systems on the energy grid, which allow them to isolate downed circuits, helped stem the total outages. Smaller circuits also meant if one went down it might impact 50 people as opposed to 500, he said.

And lessons learned from the 2013 ice storm, and proactive measure started in its wake, helped BWL manage this storm, Peffley said. The aggressive tree trimming and other vegetation management programs helped the city avoid a possible "disaster," he said.

Without those measure, he estimated that area power outages after last week's storm might have lasted a month.

He added that by Wednesday or Thursday the hope is that single homes without power will be all that's left, and that the bit of rain forecast for Tuesday won't cause more problems.

Contact reporter Matt Mencarini at 517-377-1026 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MattMencarini.