An EF2 tornado ripped through Three Rivers on Friday with estimated peak winds of at least 130 mph, according to preliminary information from the National Weather Service.
The weather service’s initial survey efforts Saturday focused on the area of Michigan 60 and West Broadway Street, where several commercial structures were damaged. Only a small portion of the possible track has been assessed so far, so the path length, maximum path width, and specific start and end locations and times remain to be determined.
This comes a day after a supercell thunderstorm produced damage across portions of Cass, St. Joseph and Branch counties in Michigan.
Further details, including more precise information about the Three Rivers tornado’s path and characteristics in Three Rivers, are expected to be released on Sunday. Authorities plan to continue analyzing damage along the suspected track to refine estimates of the tornado’s intensity and impact.
On Friday, social media users shared videos of a twister causing damage in the Three Rivers area, including ripping the roof off a Menards store, pulling apart a storage unit and lifting a car in the parking lot of a strip mall along US-131.
Lindsey Whitaker of Goshen, Ind., filmed a tornado ripping through Three Rivers at 3:52 p.m. while her husband was driving south on U.S. 131. The couple was making their way home from a doctor’s appointment.
“We had gotten alerts on our phones that there were tornadoes coming, and at first we were like, ‘What? There’s nothing going on,'” Whitaker said. “We got a little further down the road, and the clouds were moving in a weird way. And we got a little further, and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s definitely a tornado.'”
The tornado caused extreme damage to a Menards and storage units. Whitaker said the twister “annihilated” a nearby Dollar Tree.
Earlier Saturday, the National Weather Service confirmed that an EF3 tornado with estimated winds of at least 150 miles per hour hit the Union City area Friday afternoon. The tornado near Union Lake, west of Union City, killed three people and injured 12 others, three of whom were hospitalized. Another person, a 12-year-old, was killed in neighboring Cass County near Edwardsburg, close to the Indiana state line, where several additional injuries were reported.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Three Rivers endured EF2 tornado that damaged buildings
Reporting by Kevin J. Hardy, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
