SECOND DEATH CONFIRMED IN MICHIGAN TORNADO, ONE PERSON REMAINS MISSING

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. He recalled seeing “someone getting picked up, trailers getting picked up. It all just happened within 10 seconds and then it was gone.”

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.

“We were calling them out by name, trying to see if they were still in their damaged homes,” said Chief Frank Claeys of the Gaylord Police Department. “And when you see that, it’s a lot more personal when our officers know the names of people who live in those homes.”

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, roughly 230 miles northwest of Detroit, 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 from west to east. Cars were tossed on top of one another in a Hobby Lobby parking lot. A truck was upended next to a sign for a Culver’s restaurant. The roofs of several businesses had collapsed.

Clayton said he had heard about the coming storm only because of a call from his older brother, Declan, who was at a Meijer gas station just down the street and saw swirling winds and circling birds. By the time the elder Clayton made it back to Nottingham Forest, debris was blocking the roads into the complex.

“I had to run a block down to our trailer, hopping over trees and rubble, helping people where I could,” said Declan Clayton, 20. “Because there was people crawling out of rubble with injuries. There were people confused. They didn’t know what happened.”