GAYLORD, Mich. — A tornado that killed at least two people and injured dozens of others dropped out of the sky in far northern Michigan Friday and onto a mobile home park before tearing a three-block hole through the small city of Gaylord.
“It all just flashed before my eyes,” said Logan Clayton, 18, who was at home in the Nottingham Forest mobile home park, where the deaths were reported, when the winds became so intense that one window shattered.
As cleanup began Saturday, and as more than 40 people were treated for injuries, officials struggled to make sense of the damage in a region where tornadoes are rare. One person remained unaccounted for, and crews were searching through wreckage from the EF3 tornado, which the National Weather Service said had maximum winds of 140 mph.
Forecasters had warned of the potential for severe weather Friday, but the tornado that hit Gaylord, population 4,300, still came suddenly. A severe thunderstorm warning issued in the afternoon was quickly upgraded to a tornado warning. The city has no tornado sirens, officials said, but people in the area were alerted to the storm by emergency notifications on their cellphones.
Within minutes, a tornado was on the ground, tearing apart the mobile homes and then charging across city limits.
More than 40 people were treated at hospitals for their injuries, and officials said it was possible that many others were hurt but had not sought medical attention.
Tornadoes are far less common in Michigan than in many other Midwestern states. John Boris, of the National Weather Service office in Gaylord, said the state averaged about 15 tornadoes a year. Most of those occur well to the south of Gaylord, which is about 60 miles from the northern tip of the state’s Lower Peninsula.
Lt. Derrick Carroll, a spokesperson for the Michigan State Police, said that power outages continued in parts of Gaylord on Saturday and that a curfew would remain in place that night. Both people known to have died were in their 70s, he said. One of them was found overnight Friday during a search of the mobile home park with a cadaver dog.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .