The blizzard warning issued early Friday was expected to last through Saturday evening but had been downgraded by the National Weather Service to a hazardous weather outlook by late Saturday morning. On Sunday, accumulating lake-effect snow swept across the area.

Meteorologist Jim Keysor at the National Weather Service office in Gaylord said that two things decide whether the weather is a storm or a blizzard: one is that visibility must be less than one-quarter of a mile and the second is that there must be 30-mile-per-hour or higher winds.

Both conditions must also stay consistent for at least three hours, which the weekend weather had not managed.

“There were some points over the weekend that Presque Isle and Alpena had that level of visibility, but it was non-consecutive,” Keysor said. “It might have been a little bit here and there, but it’s hard for it to stay consistent. I will say, it was a very strong winter storm.”

News Photo by Mike Gonzalez The Alpena County George N. Fletcher Public Library is snowed in after a strong snowstorm on Jan. 13.

Keysor said the weather service expected about 12 to 18 inches of snow for Northern Michigan, but said that it missed the mark by just a little with an actual range of 12 to 15 inches.

He said that one of the things that did not meet expectations was wind levels. According to Keysor, the forecast said that winds should go to 60 miles per hour, but that did not happen.

“The wind in some areas reached 50 miles per hour, but it didn’t really hit that 60 that we were expecting,” Keysor said. “No matter what, there were some really strong winds, but they went on for an hour and then usually stopped.”

Keysor mentioned that Northeast Michigan received heavy snowfall from Presque Isle County down to Harrisville, but that once the storm hit southern areas of Michigan there was a combination of rain and snow coming down.

The winter storm that slammed Northeast Michigan Friday night through Saturday morning caused several vehicle wrecks throughout the area and knocked out power to more than 4,500 customers as it dumped several inches of snow blown and drifted by high-speed winds.

None of the wrecks caused serious injuries, police said, though there were multiple slide-offs and rollovers.

By Saturday afternoon, most power had been restored, according to Alpena Power Co.’s outage map and a news release from the Presque Isle Electric and Gas Co-op. Most of the outages occurred in the areas south of Alpena.

Presque Isle Electric and Gas Co-op officials said that there is only one location that is still experiencing outages from over the weekend, but that the outage started yesterday. All outages should be fixed by the end of the day.

According to Alpena Power Co. officials, all outages from the storm that affected residents are taken care of.

In the aftermath, Northeast Michiganders worked to dig themselves out of snowdrifts sometimes a couple of feet thick to return to normalcy.

The National Weather Service office in Gaylord said that it is currently in the process of compiling all of Northern Michigan’s weather data from the weekend onto one document.