The Strongest Winds Ever Recorded Around Macomb County

Every roof in Macomb County is a wager against the wind, and the odds are written down. The closest long-running official observation point to most local roofs is the airfield weather station at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township, with National Weather Service stations at Detroit area airports filling out the picture. Those instruments have logged decades of gusts, and the strongest entries in that logbook are the numbers your shingles were, or were not, built for. This note reads the wind record the way we read a roof: line by line, against the ratings.

01 /The measuring stick: what counts as strong wind here

Meteorologists draw the first line at 58 mph. A thunderstorm that produces a gust at or above that figure is classified as severe by the National Weather Service, because 58 mph is roughly where structural damage begins. The second line is 74 mph, the threshold for hurricane force wind. Southeast Michigan will never see a hurricane, but it does not need one. Thunderstorm downbursts and the big low pressure gradient wind events that rake the region in spring and late fall have both pushed area gusts past that line.

Those two thresholds matter because of where shingle ratings sit relative to them. Older three tab shingles commonly carry wind ratings of 60 to 70 mph, which means a single ordinary severe thunderstorm can meet or exceed the rating printed on the wrapper. We walk through the physics of exactly what wind speed starts lifting tabs in our companion note on shingle wind thresholds versus real gusts.

02 /The ledger: peak gusts on the area record

We hold this page to the same standard we hold a damage report: no number goes in the ledger without a station observation behind it. The entries below are the events every Macomb County roofer knows by name, with the specific peak gust figures reserved for the verified station records. See the National Weather Service Detroit/Pontiac office records.

Two events anchor the modern record. The March 2017 windstorm was a gradient wind event, hours of sustained wind rather than a brief storm gust, and it stripped shingles and knocked out power across southeast Michigan on a scale the region still talks about. We wrote a full retrospective on what the March 2017 windstorm taught Macomb roofs. The second is the August 2023 severe storm sequence, which damaged enough of the region that the federal government issued major disaster declaration FEMA DR-4757 covering Macomb County. A wind event that earns a federal file number is, by definition, on the record.

03 /Measured against what your shingles are rated for

Shingle wind resistance is graded under ASTM D7158, and the classes are blunt about their limits. The record gusts above make those limits interesting:

Read the two ledgers together and the story writes itself. Any severe warned thunderstorm, 58 mph by definition, lands inside the rated range of a typical three tab roof, and the strongest area gusts on record have run well past it. Modern architectural shingles rated Class G or Class H hold a comfortable margin over almost everything the local record contains, and building codes set a design wind speed for this region that new roofs are engineered to meet. What that design number is and how it is derived is its own subject, covered in our note on what wind speed Michigan roofs are actually built for.

04 /What to do with the record

Use it as a screening test. If your roof is a three tab system more than a decade old, the area wind record says it has already been pushed near or past its rating, possibly several times. That does not mean it failed, but it earns a look from someone who knows what a creased tab and a broken sealant bond look like. Our inspections are free, no cost and no obligation, and you get the photos either way. Most wind findings are repairs, not replacements, and repairs run $350 to $3,200, with larger or complex repairs running higher. If you want a full picture of replacement math first, the 60 second cost calculator uses the same published ranges.

If a specific storm on this ledger is the reason your roof needs work, the date of loss matters to your carrier, and the station record is how you establish it. Our storm damage and insurance claims guide walks the process, and we can meet your adjuster on site. We never promise what a carrier may approve, but we can make sure the file is complete. Start at the storm damage service page, and if water is coming in right now, we answer 24/7 for emergency tarping.