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Thunderstorms rip across Michigan damaging 2 ice arenas, other structures

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Thunderstorms rip across Michigan damaging 2 ice arenas, other structures


ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Powerful storms ripped through parts of Michigan overnight Tuesday into Wednesday morning, damaging two ice arenas and other structures, and uprooting trees near the University of Michigan’s main campus.

National Weather Service crews were surveying damage in places including Ann Arbor to determine if one or more tornadoes touched down, but none had been confirmed as of Wednesday morning. Instead, the damage appears to have been caused by a line of thunderstorms that moved into Michigan from Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois, meteorologist Sara Schultz said.

A 70 mph (112.6 kph) wind gust was reported at 1:49 a.m. Wednesday at the university’s football stadium, while gusts of 69 mph (111 kph) and 62 mph (99.7 kph) were reported at Willow Run Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Schultz said, and another round of strong storms with potentially damaging winds was moving into the area Wednesday from states to the West.

Streets and neighborhoods in many southeastern Michigan communities also were left flooded Wednesday.

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Some public school buildings in Ann Arbor suffered structural damage and many lost power. “Safe passage for walkers and buses is compromised across much of the city due to downed power lines, flooding, water main breaks, gas leaks, and felled trees and debris,” the district said Wednesday on its Facebook page.

District schools and offices were closed Wednesday due to what officials say is a fiber outage impacting fire, phone and camera systems, and building access. It wasn’t immediately clear if the fiber outage is related to the storm.

Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor said structural engineers were assessing damage to a wall at the city’s Veterans Memorial Park Ice Arena. Part of the roof was torn from the university’s Yost Ice Arena.

A wall, torn off of the Veterans Memorial Ice Rink following a severe storm, is seen Wednesday, April 15, 2026, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Credit: AP/Mike Householder

Two blocks from where utility workers were dealing with the twisted pieces of metal littering the ground outside Yost, Seungjun Lee was feeling fortunate. A hulking tree outside the rented home he shares with six others barely missed his upstairs bedroom when the storm uprooted it.

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“If the tree fell down a couple more feet, I would not be standing here,” said Lee, a 20-year-old junior at U-M. “I’d be in the hospital. So, I’m feeling very lucky that … the roof stopped it.”

Lee and his roommates were awakened by a siren, then an alert blasted from their phones between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m., urging them to take shelter.

“As soon as I came out, everyone else was coming out of their rooms and everyone’s like, ‘What’s going on? This is crazy,’” said Lee, of Ridgewood, New Jersey. “And then we looked out the window: This tree just fell down. So, we’re like, ‘Oh, crap.’”

Storm damage is seen at the Argus Building in Ann...

Storm damage is seen at the Argus Building in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Wednesday, April 15. 2026. Credit: AP/Jordyn Pair

A friend across the street then walked over to check in.

“He was like, ‘Did you hear about Yost?’ We went, ‘No.’ We were worried about our house. So, we walked over and we checked it out and we were like, ‘That’s crazy,’” said Sam Zaruba, a 20-year-old junior from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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As for classes on Wednesday, Zaruba said he’s not going. But roommate Gautam Nigam, a 21-year-old junior, also from Grand Rapids, has to.

“I have a final presentation later today,” he said.

The storms dumped as much as 2.5 inches (6.3 cms) of rain across parts of southeastern Michigan, bringing flood watches to a big chunk of the eastern Lower Peninsula, southeastern Michigan, northern Indiana and northwestern Ohio.

An evacuation notice was issued late Tuesday to low areas in northeastern Michigan’s Cheboygan County following a levee breach in the Little Black River watershed. The breach, in an area northwest of Cheboygan and west of Lake Huron, is not related to efforts to force flow from the Cheboygan Dam toward the lake as water continues rising following days of rainfall and winter snow melt, the county’s emergency management office said on its Facebook page.



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Over 40,000 without power after storms push through West Michigan

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Over 40,000 without power after storms push through West Michigan


Over 40,000 Consumers Energy customers are currently without power after strong storms pushed through West Michigan on Tuesday.

The outages, according to a map provided by Consumers Energy, are peppered from as far east as the Lake Michigan shoreline and over to Gratiot County.

This comes as storms producing strong winds, along with severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, push through the area.

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News Channel 3 is tracking these storms and will provide updates.



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Max Bullough brings lineage and lessons for Michigan State defense

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Max Bullough brings lineage and lessons for Michigan State defense


East Lansing — It’s 6:30 a.m. but the energy is high inside Michigan State football’s practice facility as Max Bullough barks out orders to his group of linebackers who watch him with rapt attention. At 34 years old, the Traverse City native looks as though he could go through these drills himself. He probably wants to. 

Now, the former two-time MSU captain Bullough returns to East Lansing. To the same stomping grounds where his grandfather Hank once plodded the sidelines for Duffy Daugherty. Where his father Shane once captained a team for George Perles. Where he and his brothers Riley and Byron each played for Mark Dantonio, including Max’s captaincy of the 2013 team that won a Big Ten championship and earned a ticket to the Rose Bowl.

A Rose Bowl he never got to play in.

With Bullough, it felt like a matter of when, and not if, a homecoming would occur on the sidelines. And with that reunion would come the inevitable question: Why did his career end a game early, suspended from the Rose Bowl his senior season? 

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“Yeah, you’ve been dying to ask that one,” Bullough said. “Here’s my answer to that one:

“That was 13 years ago, right. So my focus and my energy and my attention is on the 2026 Spartans, and my beautiful wife, Bailey, and my four boys Rocky, Teddy, Banks and Murphy. We’ll leave the past where the past is. It has nothing to do with what we’re doing moving forward, and so let’s talk about the 2026 Spartans.”

Now that that’s out of the way.

As much as Bullough doesn’t want to talk about the past, it’s what his very hire harkens back to. He’s here to help revive a storied program that means so much to him that he has “Spartans” tattooed across both arms. He gets to raise a family where his family has played and coached, and where his grandmother, Lou Ann Bullough, still gets to every Michigan State basketball game she can. What would it mean for his grandfather to know he came back to join the coaching ranks?

“I don’t know how much he would tell me or not. You never got that much out of him that way,” Bullough said. “But I think at the end of the day, I think it would mean a lot.”

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The first thing you notice about Bullough is his intensity, especially for Michigan State football. At least that was the case for new head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who had Bullough wrap up the first team meeting of the year for a new group trying to rise above 4-8 mediocrity a year ago.

“I gave him 90 seconds, I think he went 15 minutes,” Fitzgerald said Feb. 4. “Getting to know Max through the evaluation process when I was putting the staff together, you could sense very quickly his pride — beyond the double bicep — for the Spartan football program, the state of Michigan, his time here, and what he wanted to bring back, and that was toughness.”

Bullough’s part in an illustrious past for this program — in four years he went 40-12 and captained the Spartans his junior and senior years, an honor that means a great deal to him — is a major cultural building block for a staff trying to reestablish principles of the era of Dantonio, who is around more often since Fitzgerald got the job. Thankfully it all worked out, Fitzgerald says.

“He’s got a bright future ahead of himself in his career, and we wanted to make sure,” Fitzgerald said, “coming here is obviously easy to say of course, he’d want to come home. But it also had to fit looking at his three-, five-, 10-year plan for his career.”

Bullough was brought in for the next two seasons on a contract paying him $750,000 per year. When he stepped on campus as an assistant coach was only the second time he’d stepped food on campus since he graduated. The other time was when he was an honorary captain in 2015.

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“There’s a lot of new buildings, this whole place,” Bullough said. “That’s the question y’all should ask. This place looks completely different.”

In Bullough, though, there’s a connection to history that feels further and further following four straight losing seasons.

“He’s brought energy, brought enthusiasm. He brings a lineage,” defensive coordinator Joe Rossi said April 7. “He understands what it means to be a Spartan, not only him but his family. So it’s been awesome.”

As an understudy to Rossi, Bullough is listed as a co-defensive coordinator in addition to his role as linebackers coach. Not only does that free up Rossi to “roam” around practices and observe his entire defense (last season, Rossi filled that linebackers coach role), Bullough also gains experience for later in his coaching career that has been impressive through stops at Notre Dame and Alabama. He’s a riser, of whom coaches and players speak highly.

Playing for Mike Vrabel while with the Houston Texans watered the genetic coaching seed in Bullough. It was at Notre Dame that Bullough really fell in love with being a college coach. 

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“Once I was able to get to Notre Dame and have my own room,” Bullough said, “which is where the magic comes for me, like when you’re able to coach your own room and have your own guys. Like the connection that you’re able to build with guys that are this 18 to 22 years old, especially when we’re able to bring (our) own guys in. Watch them come in, watch them develop, and see what they turn into in terms of football players and in terms of men.”’

Men who make mistakes, like he did with whatever incident caused him to be suspended for the biggest game of his career, as perhaps the most important player to that team. That’s not an incident he uses as an example for his players who face trying times, he says, but he does use his life experience as a model for the young men following him, including linebacker Jordan Hall, who likely will be a two-year captain just like his coach this upcoming fall.

“The message to Jordan is, people are drawn to you, brother, what energy are you giving back?” Bullough said. “Because you gotta be on it all the time. There isn’t any time where you can where it’s like you can be down. You have to be on it all the time.”

Bullough said there was one incident early in spring ball that Hall was frustrated he got pulled for a teammate to play. He got frustrated, didn’t handle it well. The next time it happened, Bullough says Hall became an asset on the sidelines.

“I think that’s a testament to the kind of guy he is and the teammate he’s striving to be,” Bullough said. “… He made a mistake the one day, and he got better from it. He’s helped me a lot. And, I mean, I can admit that. I know he and Coach Rossi are very close and that he knows Coach Rossi’s defense like the back of his hand. I have no problem asking ‘Jordan, how do y’all see this? How did we do this last year?’”

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“If you guys notice, any of the drills he’s like right behind us, almost mirroring everything that we do,” Hall said March 17. “Very passionate. I mean, just a great ball-knower.”

cearegood@detroitnews.com

@ConnorEaregood



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Former Eastern Michigan football player stands outside Lions facility, asks for chance on the field

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Former Eastern Michigan football player stands outside Lions facility, asks for chance on the field



Former Eastern Michigan football player Freddie McGee III went viral on Monday, doing anything he possibly could to get the Lions’ attention for a tryout to make the team.

“I felt I just needed to take matters into my own hands,” said McGee.

The Canton, Michigan, native, and reigning Defensive Player of the Year in the Arena Football League, says he arrived at the Lions practice facility in Allen Park at 8:45 a.m. Monday to beg for a chance to walk onto the Lions, just like how he walked onto Eastern Michigan’s football team a few years ago. 

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“This morning was a little nerve-racking, you know, this is definitely stepping outside of my comfort zone,” said McGee. “Just wanted to come out here, maybe catch the right scout, the right personnel person pulling in here, maybe take a look at the sign I have and get to know my story a little bit, maybe give me a shot today.”

Former Eastern Michigan University football player Freddie McGee stood outside the Lions facility in Allen in hopes of an opportunity on the field.

CBS News Detroit


McGee’s brave pitch to the Lions is that he’s not just a dreamer; he dominated the AFL last year with 14 interceptions and 25 pass breakups. And his story is one that he says exemplifies everything Dan Campbell and the Lions should be looking for: grit. 

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“Other than just being a local kid and growing up loving the Lions, I feel like I’m the epitome of grit, like my career hasn’t been easy, I’ve overcome a lot of adversity,” said McGee.

CBS News Detroit reached out to the Lions organization for comment and is awaiting a response.



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