At least 23 people were killed after a “family” of violent tornadoes roared through the city of Raleigh and across the heart of North Carolina Saturday afternoon and evening, state officials said Sunday. The storms also severely injured 130 other people and leveled or damaged hundreds of homes, demolished a big-box store and a trailer park, plucked trees out of the earth, and left more than 84,000 people without power.
Chris Keane/Reuters
Residents looked at a tree that fell on to a home in Raleigh, N.C., on Sunday.
Chris Keane/Reuters
Police officers outside the entrance to a mobile home park where three people died as a result of a tornado in Raleigh, N.C.
The tornadoes were part of a storm system that first struck Oklahoma Thursday night and then swept through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, killing at least 43 people before heading out to sea.
The North Carolina toll would have been far higher had it not been for a canny manager of a Lowe’s home improvement store in Sanford, 40 miles southwest of Raleigh. Patty McQuillan, a public information officer for the state’s Division of Emergency Management, said the manager, who was not immediately identified, hustled more than 100 customers and workers into the more fortified rear of the store into offices before the front of the cavernous store collapsed. Witnesses said much of the store had been flattened, with jagged beams and siding poking out of the rubble, though no one was seriously injured.
“It was really just a bad scene,” Jeff Blocker, a Lowe’s regional vice president, told The Associated Press. “You’re just amazed that no one was injured.
Three children from the same family were killed in a trailer park in Raleigh, a city of 400,000, and major avenues downtown were blocked by fallen trees. Several residents of the Stoney Brook Trailer Park, a cluster of about 100 trailers in a pocket two miles from downtown, described how they hid in bathrooms and kitchens and shielded themselves with pillows to ride out the fiercest stretch of the storm. Angelina McCaizie told The Associated Press she had been cooking when she saw the winds and rain mount to frightening proportions. She shepherded her children, nephew and brother into the kitchen and squatted on the floor.
When the storm had passed, she went outside and saw neighbors outside their mobile homes bleeding or nursing broken limbs. One resident, she ran up to her crying, “Please help me! Please help me! I need 911.”
Eric Curry, a spokesman for the government of Wake County, which includes Raleigh, said Sunday that the three deaths were all that had been confirmed so far in Raleigh. “We still have crews checking homes and making sure all folks are accounted for, but right now those are the only deaths we have,” he said.
But the worst-hit county was Bertie, a swath of fertile farmland 130 miles east of Raleigh where 21,000 people live and where cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and soybeans are grown. At least 10 people were killed and 50 seriously injured in Bertie, many of those critically, Ms. McQuillan said.
With seven counties devastated and tens of millions of dollars in damage, Gov. Beverly Perdue declared a state of emergency, an order that permits large supply and utility trucks to enter the state and help in the rescue and cleanup. Ms. McQuillan said the series of tornadoes was the worst to strike the state since March 1984, when 42 people were killed.
Scott Sharp, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Raleigh, said the devastation was due to “a family of tornadoes” that were part of the same thunderstorm system, with one rotating updraft cropping up after another had dissipated. At least eight twisters were confirmed in North Carolina, he said, with one forming south of Raleigh and heading through the southeast quarter of the city and out through the north. There were three deaths reported in Raleigh and four just outside the city.
Mr. Sharp said in spots, the storm was laced with hail the size of golf balls or eggs.
At least four people were killed by a tornado and flash flooding in Virginia, while earlier seven people were killed in Arkansas, seven in Alabama, two in Oklahoma and one in Mississippi.
In Bertie County, Zee Lamb, the county manager, said he had spoken to an Iraq war veteran astonished 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,” Mr. Lamb told The Associated Press.
The effects could be felt as far away as New York City on Saturday night, when furious, rain-packed gusts measured at 50 miles an hour struck coastal and riverside roadways.
© 2011nytimes.com
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