We were eating dinner on our front porch as the thunder started rolling in. Nothing alarming, just a little bit of rain, a few flashes of lightning and sharp but seemingly distant cracks of thunder off to the west.
Then I got an alert from the National Weather Service on my phone. A tornado was spotted west of Bellaire. It said to seek shelter on the lowest level of a sturdy building.
We learned later that it was not a tornado but a waterspout, or, even more specifically, a "tornadic waterspout" because it touched both water and land. And it was blistering across Torch Lake, headed straight for the village of Bellaire.
Luckily, it dissipated shortly after making landfall.
Local farmer Larry McSweeney-Steffes and his wife Caitlin were outside when the alarm came in.
"I was looking for eggs in the barn," Larry McSweeney-Steffes said. "Caitlin hollered from the porch 'There’s a tornado, come inside!' I looked around and I’m like, I’m fine."
They actually saw one of the three tornados that touched down on Monday, but he said his pigs and chickens weren’t concerned about it, so he wasn’t all that concerned either.
"If they would have been freaking and running around, I would have been a little more suspicious into what was going on," he said.
No injuries or property damage were reported. This year, 33 tornados have touched down in Michigan. The National Weather Service office in Gaylord hopes to issue an incident report later today.
