The weekend storm system that dropped tornados across a number of West Michigan counties hit the heavily populated City of Wyoming hard. WGVU surveyed the damage on Golden Street SW near the Byron Center Road and 36th Street intersection.
“Wow, this is bad, a lot of damage.” Art Bushart has lived in Wyoming about 25 years. He’s says this is the worst storm he’s ever seen.
“In Wyoming here, yah. I’ve gone through a tornado before but not nearly as bad as this is.”
“This is crazy. I don’t even know what to say.” Stacey Wright sttod before the damaged home she’d lived in since the 6th grade. “When you see it in this condition, what are your thoughts?” “It’s been destroyed. We’ve got a trampoline that went through he back of the garage. The siding is completely ripped up. We’ve got a couple broken windows. We’re lucky to have as many windows as we have. Trees all over the yard. Yah, this is crazy.” And heart breaking.
“I just live around the corner there and I’ve got a tree this big and it went through the neighbor’s roof, his garage. I have several trees out. I haven’t seen one like this in Wyoming. No.” Bushart will be 80 in two weeks, “So I have a lot of work to do.”
Neighbors are busy with chainsaws clearing downed trees and limbs blocking roadways.
Bushart is surveying the damage where power lines are down and a toppled tree crushed the car next door. I asked, “When it was passing through, we all have those moments, what was yours?” “Uh, I went downstairs because I had my radio on and they were saying it was coming close to Byron Center Road and 36th Street and I was thinking I better go downstairs. And I could look up the basement window and I could just see the trees and then all of a sudden I heard something, I thought ‘Oh, no! There goes my house.’ But it was that big tree, the neighbor’s that went into his garage roof…And I was watching the wind and the rain and I thought, ‘It’s been a long time since I seen one like this.”
“We were working the last storm, my crew and I, the last tornado, this is terrible.” Lieutenant Ted Westerman and a detail of City of Wyoming Firefighters are securing neighborhoods one home at a time. “Isolate power lines, tape them off, so that the public is aware of what’s going on. Try to open up streets so there’s at least one way in and out everywhere. There are several power lines here that we couldn’t get to from the other side so we had to come in this way.”
If a tornado is confirmed, this will be Wyoming’s second tornado in the past three years. How does Lieutenant Westerman compare the two? “Oh, this is terrible, much worst, more widespread all the way from 76th street, that region is where it came down in that area, I’m not sure how far west but it goes all the way through our whole city all the way up to the north end almost to Chicago Drive. So it’ll be interesting to see what they call it?”
In Wyoming, Patrick Center, WGVU News.