Tornadoes hit Dundee early Sunday morning, causing widespread damage. They were part of a series of storms that tracked across Lenawee and Monroe County and into Essex County in Ontario.  The National Weather Service has a June 6th Tornado Event Summary with photos.

Tornado tracks are produced through a careful collection of media reports, on the ground photography and personal accounts. Getting an exact track is hard, because the storms are erratic and the standard historical reporting formats are imprecise enough to not tell you whether a tornado track went down one street or the next one over.

This links collection features an interactive and editable storm map produced with Google Maps with push-pins linking to accounts and photos of storm damage, in the hopes of creating a more complete account of the event than any one person or news organization could gather.

Reconstructing the path of the storms

The Tornado History Project has historical tornado tracks from 1950 to 2009.

For current tornado activity, tornadopaths.org maps the last 48 hours of activity in the U.S. It is run under the direction of Perry Samson at the University of Michigan, who was one of the founders of the weather service called the Weather Underground.

Mapping the accounts of storm damage

This Google Map is editable; it shows the path of the severe weather across Lenawee and Monroe counties and across Lake Erie into Ontario's Essex County. The map does not show the further storms in northern Ohio.

The map is interactive, and it has links to news coverage from the affected areas.

1:48 a.m., Rome Center

Rome Center is in Rome Township in Lenawee County, about 45 miles southwest of Ann Arbor and 10 miles northwest of Adrian. A tornado was on the ground for four minutes, covering 2.5 miles with estimated speeds of 90 mph. News reports come from the Monroe News and the Toledo Blade. The Adrian Daily Telegram has photos. Damage to Jerry Van Brunt’s home on Onsted Highway was substantial, with a barn collapsing on a classic car collection and on tractors to be used for soybean planting.

Also check out my previous article on Lenawee County links for more local news coverage. Quite a few of the smallest of the small town newspapers in the county are weeklies and were not doing any updating during the storm.

2:11 a.m. - 2:27 a.m, Dundee

Dundee and Dundee Township are in Monroe County, about 25 miles south of Ann Arbor. A tornado was on the ground for 16 minutes, traveling 13.5 miles to the east southeast with estimated speeds of up to 135 mph. The Monroe News has a storm track map.

The best newspaper reporting for the area is being done by the Dundee Independent, an independent weekly newspaper which is only available in print. That website link only has cursory information, including an extensive essay on why the Independent is not on the Internet. What they did have, though, was a hastily created Facebook presence for the Dundee Independent, which has accumulated 489 fans and hundreds of photos. The Independent says they are operating on a generator now, and that they go to press this evening with papers expected to show up at 11 a.m Wednesday. You can bet that they will sell out of their press run.

Also doing exemplary service in Dundee was the Village of Dundee, which put together a remarkably useful, thorough, and competent Twitter feed and Facebook page for citizen communications. Over 1,100 people are fans on Facebook, and the village has been using it to coordinate volunteer cleanup efforts, deal with rumors, and keep in touch with people, many of whom have had no power for extended amounts of time.

2:38 a.m: DTE Fermi 2 shut down

DTE Energy's Fermi 2 nuclear power station is located in Frenchtown Township in Monroe County, about 25 miles due east of Dundee. In news accounts look for Newport, Detroit Beach, Estral Beach, Stony Point and Woodland Beach, which are all within two miles of the plant.

At 2:38 a.m., the plant shut down automatically. Here is the DTE news release sent at the time:

"The Fermi 2 Power Plant automatically shut down at 2:38 a.m. today, when strong thunderstorms blowing through the area affected one of two offsite power feeds to the plant. The plant is designed to automatically shut down as a precaution when one of those power feeds is interrupted. The plant operated exactly as designed during the shutdown and is in a safe, stable condition. These events led plant operators to declare an Unusual Event, the lowest of four emergency classifications, at 2:53 a.m. The second offsite power feed is still sending power to the plant. All safety systems are functioning at the plant. In addition, operators declared an Alert, the second lowest emergency classification, at 4:17 a.m. today. The Alert was declared based on potential physical damage to a building inside the plant's Protected Area. Siding on a plant building appears to have blown off during the storm, but plant personnel are investigating now."

The Monroe News story has detail of the storm track, from National Weather Service accounts, as does this Toledo Blade story.

Unlike the Village of Dundee, which started communicating with the public directly, quickly, and in earnest as soon as it could get back online after the storm, the DTE Energy Twitter feed was completely silent about any issues with Fermi 2.

On to Canada

The storm continued on across Lake Erie and hit parts of southern Essex County. The Windsor Star reports that storm damage could top $75 million (in Canadian money) and that an F1 tornado hit Leamington. The "Sax With Matt" blog reports that ferry service was cancelled, which normally takes people to Pelee Island.

We almost lost Detroit, 1966

Gil Scott-Heron's We Almost Lost Detroit is a song about Fermi 1, a breeder reactor at the site that suffered a nearly catastrophic failure in 1966. It is based on a book by the same name by John G. Fuller, which was reviewed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1975. "A significant book and well worth reading," writes the reviewer.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission report on Fermi 1 gives the official, dry, condensed account of the incident. The American Nuclear Society's "Fermi-I : new age for nuclear power : a history of the Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Project, the first large fast breeder reactor electric power plant, and its contributions to the development of a long-range source of energy" has been digitized and is in storage at the University of Michigan libraries.

Edward Vielmetti watches storms from his dry and somewhat musty basement for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.