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The Oakland Press/TIM THOMPSON Tami Mapiatt near her corn field that was leveled during storms on Tuesday. The storms knocked down a power line near her home on Seymour Lake Road east of Sashabaw in Brandon Township.
The Oakland Press/TIM THOMPSON A large tree branch down in front of the Brandon Fire Station on Sashabaw Road near Seymour Lake Road in Brandon Township.
The Oakland Press/TIM THOMPSON Geoffrey Zinn, left, and Mike Layou with a big branch down in Brandon Township, near Sashabaw and Seymour Lake roads.
The sky got inky black around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday near Tami Piatt?s home in Brandon Township.
?It started to rain, coming in east to west and my boys and I were running around trying to shut windows,? said Piatt, referring to her sons Micah, 6, and Noah, 9, standing next to her at their Seymour Road home just east of Sashabaw.
?We saw things flying, branches breaking and then it was over. Then I heard humming from a (downed) power line on Rock Ridge and that scared me more than anything else.?
After a sudden storm blew through a section of Brandon Township, people debated just what might have hit them.
Piatt and her sons pointed out a strange sight in a side yard ? the corn plants Tami had planted in May were all lying flattened, their tops all pointing northwest.
Oakland Press nature columnist Jonathan Schecter, a Brandon resident, said people stopped to tell him they saw a funnel cloud.
But it was that flattened corn, he said, that made him think they might be right.
Meteorologist Deb Elliott, who works at the National Weather Service in White Lake, said her radar showed no circulation ? there was not a tornado, she said.
?They probably just had really strong straight-line winds coming out. ... We had a severe weather warning out for quarter-sized hail and 50 mph winds in that area,? said Elliott. ?We did get some reports of heavy rain and wind being out there, but there was no rotation.?
Elliott added that the strange movement of the clouds probably made the clouds resemble a tornado. Continued...
?When one cloud base is moving slower than the other, it can resemble rotation because the clouds are moving at different speeds,? Elliott explained. ?Lower-level clouds ? we call them scud clouds ? that are hanging lower than others can be mistaken for appendages (that look like the tail of a tornado).?
Brandon Township Supervisor Kathy Thurman said she received reports that the storm produced an apparent tornado that touched down between 1 and 2 p.m.
?From my understanding, it uprooted some trees, but I don?t believe there were any homes damaged,? said Thurman.
A half dozen trees were damaged and some had been cleared by the time Brandon Township Fire Chief David Kwapis talked to reporters.
?What we responded to was a couple of trees that were downed and a (power) wire downed with a few trees on top of it,? said Kwapis.
What had happened, said the fire chief, was a resident who was in the area thought it was a tornado that was overhead. The severe weather did rip out a patch of trees in about a square-mile area and downed a power line, which caused a limited string of power outages near Rock Ridge Drive, just east of Seymour Lake Road.
No injuries were reported in the severe weather gust, Kwapis added.
Around the corner from Rock Ridge Lane, Sgt. Billy Starr with Brandon Township Fire Service No. 2 said he and other firefighters were called out to deal with the downed wire and trees down near the station.
On Lake Knolls Drive, one street south of the station, Geoffrey Zinn and Mike Layou, workers with Wilcox Lawn Sprinklers in Troy, had just pulled up to a home that had a massive tree split open on the front lawn.
?It looks like lightning hit it,? said Layou, examining a blackened spot on the trunk. Continued...
?We were here to check on the sprinklers but looks like that isn?t going to happen today.?
Source: http://theoaklandpress.com/articles/2013/07/23/news/doc51eed1ceabb03181728030.txt
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