Like many others in the area, the howls of the high powered gusts blowing past her walls and the pelting of hail drumming on her roof kept Dowagiac’s Terri Meiser awake as she laid in bed Tuesday night.

Around 9 p.m., as she struggled to fall asleep inside her residence on Clinton Street, she heard a “really weird” whistling noise coming from her attic, she said.

“I told myself it was going to be a bumpy ride tonight,” Meiser said.

Minutes later, though, she heard one of her neighbors shouting outside her window, asking if she was OK. Thinking the question strange, Meiser went to step outside to ask what they meant.

She had barely made it out the door when she realized the massive tree that had once stood in her residence’s lawn had fallen, collapsing atop of her roof and crushing her fencing and the rear windshield of her vehicle.

Standing outside her home the morning after alongside her daughter, Diana Wheeler, Meiser surveyed the destruction wrought on her home once more, with a combination of frustration and sadness in her eyes.

“I have lived here 50 years and I have never had this crap happen before,” she said.

Meiser was just one of many Dowagiac residents combing through the damage that morning, sifting through fallen foliage and debris in the wake of the massive storm that cut a path of devastation across southwest Michigan Tuesday night.

The storm

Area meteorologists from the Northern Indiana Forecast are classifying the storm that ripped through the Michiana area around as an intense line of thunderstorms.

Across Niles and Dowagiac, winds reached up to 70 miles per hour, representatives with the weather service said. Hail measuring an inch in diameter, as well as gusts of rain, also pelted the area for about 30 minutes to an hour.

Two meteorologists began a survey of the damage in both the Niles and Dowagiac area Wednesday morning to assess whether or not the storm could be classified as a tornado.

According to Jeff Logsdon, a science and operations officer at the Northern Indiana Forecast, one of the factors that meteorologists study in this instance is the way that debris is scattered. If the materials seem to have fallen in the same direction, this would be a sign of straight-line winds, while more randomly scattered debris could mean a tornado had struck the area.

Tuesday night’s storm started culminating over the plain states, Logsdon said.

An area of low air pressure and a humid and unstable air mass and strong upper atmosphere winds created the formula for the powerful storm, which tore across parts of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan.

Meteorologists do not typically see a storm like this in the wintertime, Logsdon said.

“Usually this type of a system is more indicative of the middle of spring, not the middle of winter,” Logsdon said.

Dowagiac was one of the regions in the area most impacted by the storms, said Cass County Emergency Manager David Smith.

The high-speed winds knocked over trees and power lines across stretches of the city, causing both power losses and damage to several properties, said Dowagiac Deputy Police Chief Jarrid Bradford, who was out Wednesday assessing the damage caused by the tempest.

Most of the damage occurred during the late evening hours Tuesday, with an initial gust sweeping through around 9 p.m. followed by a second burst a few hours later, Bradford said. City police and firefighters were dispatched throughout the night, with officials making door-to-door stops in areas most impacted by the winds to ensure the welfare of residents.

While several residents — such as Meiser — were asked to evacuate their homes due to damage from trees or danger from fallen power lines, police had not received any reported injuries from residents as of Wednesday morning, Bradford said.

“We were very lucky in that regard, considering the amount of trees that fell,” Bradford said.

The storm’s wrath was mostly contained to around 10 city blocks, stretching from Riverside Cemetery to the railroad crossing on High Street, Bradford said.

“If you look at the rest of town, it barely looks like a storm had passed through,” Bradford said.

The aftermath

Third Avenue, in particular, was rocked by the storm, with many properties experiencing heavy damage, with several properties have trailers overturned or having portions of chimneys blown off.

Ken Ottinger was one of the residents of Third who experienced the power of the storm Tuesday night. Ottinger, who is staying with his cousin, Pam, at her residence at the corner of Third and Beckwith, said he and his family member were forced to take cover in the hallway of the home around midnight due to the powerful gusts sweeping by the house.

“It was so powerful, you feel the windows rattling as it passed through,” he said.

Ottinger said the storm felt more like tornado than anything else, and was by far the most powerful he has ever experienced.

“I have seen a lot of storms in my life, but none have ever scared me until this one,” he said.

While residents took stock of what they had gone through the night before, city crews were out in full force Wednesday morning working to clean up the damage and restore power to homes impacted by the storm.

As of around 10 a.m., the city’s crews had fully repaired fallen lines, with most residents in the impacted streets having power restored to their homes, said City Manager Kevin Anderson.

“Everyone in condition to get electricity to their homes should have it by now,” Anderson said.

There were a handful of homes that still lacked power due to damage caused to electrical systems on their side of the electric dial, the city manager said. Once these issues are fixed by the homeowner, the city should be able to reconnect them to the system, Anderson said.

Over the next several days, crews will be making rounds through city roads, picking up foliage and debris left curbside by residents, Anderson said.

While many residents may already be back on their feet, others, such as Meiser, are left stranded as they await repairs to their homes — and, in Meiser’s case, also separated from her two pets, who remain in her home while she stays with her daughter in Decatur.

“I don’t like being away from my home,” Meiser said.