Raleigh, NC – A furious storm system that kicked up tornadoes, flash floods and hail as big as softballs has left at least 37 people dead on a rampage that has stretched for days as it barreled from Oklahoma to North Carolina and Virginia.
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Emergency crews searched for victims in hard-hit swaths of North Carolina, where 62 tornadoes were reported from the worst spring storm in two decades to hit the state. Ten people were confirmed dead in Bertie County, county manager Zee Lamb said.
In the capital city of Raleigh, three family members died in a mobile home park, said Wake County spokeswoman Sarah Willamson-Baker. At that trailer park, residents lined up outside Sunday and asked police guarding the area when they might get back in.
Peggy Mosley, 54, who has lived in the park for 25 years, said she was prepared when the storm bore down on the trailer park. She gathered small pillows and other material and hunkered down in her small bathroom.
“I went and got into my small bathroom and just sat in there and cried and prayed until it was over,” Mosley said.
Gov. Beverly Perdue said Sunday that state emergency management officials told her more than 20 were killed by the storms in North Carolina. However, the far-flung damage made it difficult to confirm the total number of deaths. The emergency management agency said it had reports of 22 fatalities, and media outlets and government agency tallies did not all match. The National Weather Service said 23 died in the state, including one in Johnston County, but an emergency management chief there told The Associated Press nobody died in that area.
The governor planned to travel by helicopter to hard-hit areas of the state Sunday to survey damage.
The night before, Perdue announced there was an unspecified number of confirmed deaths in Bladen, Cumberland, Lee and Wake counties.
Meanwhile, at least four deaths were reported in Virginia. Authorities warned the toll was likely to rise further Sunday as searchers probed shattered homes and businesses.
The storm claimed its first lives Thursday night in Oklahoma, then roared through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Authorities have said seven died in Arkansas; seven in Alabama; two in Oklahoma; and one in Mississippi.
In North Carolina, the governor declared a state of emergency and said the 62 tornadoes reported were the most since March 1984, when a storm system spawned 22 twisters in the Carolinas that killed 57 people — 42 in North Carolina — and injured hundreds.
Daybreak brought news of a horrific death toll in Bertie County, a place of about 21,000 people about 130 miles east of Raleigh. The tornado moved through about 7 p.m. Saturday, sweeping homes from their foundations, demolishing others and flipping cars on tiny rural roads between Askewville and Colerian, Lamb said.
One of the volunteers who scoured the rubble was an Iraq war veteran who told Lamb he was stunned by what he saw.
“He did two tours of duty in Iraq and the scene was worse than he ever saw in Iraq — that’s pretty devastating,” Lamb said.
As dawn broke, dozens of firefighters, volunteers and other officials were meeting in a makeshift command center to form search teams to fan out to the hardest-hit areas.
“There were several cases of houses being totally demolished except for one room, and that’s where the people were,” he said. “They survived. Pretty devastating.”
In Virginia, Department of Emergency Management spokesman Bob Spieldenner said one apparent tornado ripped across more than 12 miles through Gloucester County, uprooting trees and pounding homes to rubble while claiming three lives. Spieldenner said another person was killed when a vehicle ran into flash flooding near Waynesboro. Another person was missing and a third was rescued.
He reported homes and mobile homes damaged and destroyed in a series of other Virginia counties and flash flooding west of Charlottesville that prompted water rescues — including four people rescued unhurt from a car that had plunged into deep water flowing over a street.
Scenes of destruction across the South looked eerily similar in many areas.
At one point, more than 250,000 people went without power in North Carolina before emergency utility crews began repairing downed lines. But scattered outages were expected to linger at least until Monday.
Among areas hit by power outages was Raleigh, a bustling city of more than 400,000 people where some of the bigger downtown thoroughfares were blocked by fallen trees early Sunday.
Police and rescue crews began conducting house-to-house searches later Saturday at a mobile home park in north Raleigh, where the storm snapped some trees in half, ripped others out of the ground and tossed some trailers from one side of a street to the other.
In Sanford, about 40 miles southwest of Raleigh, a busy shopping district was pummeled by the storms, with some businesses losing rooftops in what observers described as a ferocious tornado. The Lowe’s Home Improvement Center in Sanford looked flattened, with jagged beams and wobbly siding sticking up from the pancaked entrance. Cars in the parking lot were flipped by the winds.
“It’s very, very bad here,” said Monica Elliott, who works at the nearby Brick City Grill. “We saw a tornado that just rode up over the restaurant.”
Remarkably, no one was seriously injured at the Lowe’s, thanks to a quick-thinking manager who herded more than 100 people into a back area with no windows to shatter.
“It was really just a bad scene,” said Jeff Blocker, Lowe’s regional vice president for eastern North Carolina. “You’re just amazed that no one was injured.”