Detroit's first tornado in 29 years cuts a three-mile path as regional storm outbreak rolls into the Southeast

A tornado tore across Detroit's Lower East Side on Thursday afternoon, splintering trees, collapsing at least one building and cutting power to tens of thousands of homes in the city's first confirmed twister in nearly 30 years. The storm was one piece of a sprawling, multi-day severe weather system that has knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of customers from the Great Lakes to the Mid-Atlantic and, by the weekend, was pushing into the Southeast.

The National Weather Service office that covers southeast Michigan confirmed Friday that the tornado reached EF-2 strength on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with estimated peak winds of 115 mph. It touched down at 4:14 p.m. near Mount Elliott and East Vernor, about two miles northeast of Comerica Park, and lifted four minutes later after cutting a 3.5-mile path across the Lower East Side that ended on Belle Isle, the 982-acre island park in the Detroit River. At its widest point, the damage swath measured roughly half a mile across.

It was one of three tornadoes tied to the same storm system. A brief EF-0 tornado with winds near 70 mph touched down in Lincoln Park that same afternoon, and a separate EF-0 had struck St. Clair County near Marysville the night before. Together they brought Michigan's tornado count for 2026 to 28, a total that follows a record 33 confirmed twisters across the state in 2025.

Detroit's first tornado in 29 years

Detroit had gone without a tornado touching down inside its boundaries since July 2, 1997, when a twister tore through the city's north side, caused close to $100 million in damage and injured roughly 100 people, though no one died. Thursday's storm ended that 29-year streak while producing, by comparison, remarkably little human toll: city officials confirmed a single serious injury, a man who was hospitalized with a dislocated shoulder after a tree crashed through his home as he shielded his newborn child. Mayor Mary Sheffield said at a briefing Friday that no other injuries had been reported.

"Aside from the young man, we still today have not received any reports of serious injuries to date," Sheffield said, adding that residents were "dealing with a lot with the effects of this storm."

The tornado struck as part of a broader pattern that had been building since Tuesday, when a dome of heat settled over the central Mississippi Valley and pushed a corridor of unusually moist, unstable air north into the Great Lakes. That setup repeatedly triggered thunderstorm clusters capable of damaging winds, large hail and isolated tornadoes across a stretch of the country from the Dakotas to Delaware. Wind gusts as high as 75 mph raked a corridor from Michigan's Thumb across the eastern Great Lakes into Ohio, Pennsylvania and western New York; a separate tornado touched down near Somerset, New York, northeast of Buffalo, where a waterspout moved onshore, and flash flooding struck parts of eastern Pennsylvania. At its broadest extent, the system's threat zone covered more than 50 million people, and Philadelphia faced an elevated severe-thunderstorm risk for three consecutive days, the city's first such stretch in September since 2023.

Neighborhoods picking up the pieces

Sheffield signed an executive order Friday declaring a local state of emergency for a roughly two-square-mile section of the Lower East Side bounded by Sylvester Street to the north, East Jefferson Avenue to the south, Chene Street to the west and McClellan Street to the east. The declaration gives the city expanded authority to mobilize resources for debris removal and to coordinate aid with county officials and the state's emergency management division. Detroit's fire department logged 65 storm-related calls in the roughly 20 hours after the tornado passed.

• Around 80 trees were reported down across the damage path, with an estimated 20 properties damaged, mostly roofs and walls
• A building near Concord Avenue and St. Paul Street partially collapsed
• Nearly 100 traffic signals lost power; crews had restored all but 48 of them by Friday evening, and the city asked drivers to treat the rest as four-way stops
• Gabriel Richard Park lost more than 20 mature trees, damage the city said would take several weeks to fully address

The tornado also knocked out electricity across the Lower East Side, adding to outages that had already spread across the broader region since Tuesday's storms began. Across the multi-state system, more than 450,000 utility customers lost power at various points, and DTE Energy, Michigan's largest utility, said roughly 388,000 of its customers were affected at the peak of the storms in its service territory. The company said it had restored power to about 80 percent of those customers by Saturday morning, with more than 4,000 workers — including some 1,000 line crews brought in from other states — assigned to the repair effort. By Saturday, that had climbed further; by early Sunday, fewer than 40,000 Michigan customers remained without service, with the heaviest concentration in Oakland County.

"The damage that I am seeing here is one of the — if not the most significant damage due to a weather event in my career," said Brian Calka, DTE Energy's senior vice president overseeing distribution operations.

Calka said the company has been investing heavily in grid resilience for years. "We are investing in our grid every single year, we're investing billions of dollars — to trim trees, harden the infrastructure, to put technology up that allows us to do a lot of restoration without the need for crews," he said, adding that "time without power has a material impact on everyday life, for homes and for businesses."

What happens next

DTE said it expected to restore the remaining customers in its territory by the end of the weekend. In Detroit, cleanup crews were continuing to clear debris, board up damaged buildings and repair traffic signals, and the city said the state-of-emergency declaration would remain in effect while damage assessments continue.

Meanwhile, the severe weather system that spawned the tornado has not finished moving. Forecasters at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center placed the southern Appalachians and coastal Southeast under a slight risk of severe weather Sunday, with widespread damaging wind gusts expected as strong heating combines with a moist, unstable air mass across Georgia and the Carolinas. Forecasters said the broader pattern, in place since Tuesday, was expected to gradually weaken over the following days as the heat dome driving it breaks down.

For now, the storm has left a visible mark on a stretch of Detroit that had not seen a tornado in almost three decades — one more entry in what has already become an unusually active year for tornadoes across Michigan, with 28 confirmed statewide before the summer had even fully ended.