The National Weather Service says there was no indication of rotation, damage done by straight line winds
MONTMORENCY CO., MI -- Montmorency County residents were cleaning up hundreds of uprooted and broken trees, questioning just exactly what stormed through Wednesday afternoon.
Substantial damage was seen near Long Lake, about 10-miles northwest of Hillman.
Residents here are not convinced it was just wind.
"I had looked outside and the sky was green, and I knew that this storm was not a normal storm because I had seen it before several years ago," explained Bonnie Zervas, who lives on Long Lake.
Bonnie has witnessed a tornado before and she was home alone Wednesday afternoon when the storm rumbled in from the west.
“Lord, I said spare me, spare my house, and spare my flowers, and spare my trees," said Zervas.
She took cover in the bottom of a bathtub.
She calls it the most intense 10 minutes of her life and couldn't believe her eyes when she looked outside. Her house was perfectly intact, her flowers were unscathed, not one petal was ripped, but 30 feet away, several huge oak trees, were twisted and turned and down on the ground.
"I’m very convinced that it was a small tornado, a twister, or whatever you want to call it," Zervas admits.
She calls it an anomaly. There’s an area of trees bashed but then so much seemingly untouched.
"There was stuff just blowing, and it was like what you've never seen," said Long Lake resident Bob Radulski.
Two huge trees were toppled at Radulski's house. One landed on the electrical line, another on the corner of his house. A crater is all that was left of that tree. Throughout the area, several trees were broken off, one landed on this house and van, some fell across roads, blocking them temporarily.
"What lifted it off of there, I have no idea, but the latter in the tree, it's not very conclusive there," said Rose Swain, who lives about two miles from the lake.
Swain’s barn had some extensive damage. The roof was torn off, still in one piece, laying 10 feet away in a pasture. A latter from inside the barn was in a tree dangling.
“To pick up a roof and just set it down like that is ungodly," said Swain.
But the Weather Service isn't convinced it was a twister. They believe it was straight line winds busting through at more than 70 miles per hour. In an e-mail, they said there wasn’t an indication of rotation involved with the storm nor have they received any reports of spotters seeing a funnel cloud or a tornado. Right now, they do not plan to assess the damage.
