What Do I Think About Those "Epic" Tornadoes That Recently Ripped Through 8 Southern, Redneck States Including NORTH CAROLINA, Unfortunately Killing 44 People?
GOD Isn't Mocked & Karma Does Exist For Acts Of RACISM Demonstrated Against Pres. Obama & Other BLACK People!!
It Time For America To STOP Practicing Discrimination Against People Of Color.
"A Nation That Continues Year After Year To Spend More Money On Military Defense Than On Programs Of Social Uplift, Is Approaching Spiritual Doom."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
At least 40 killed in U.S. storms, as many as 14 in one NC county
Powerful storms that have ripped across the Southeast killed as many as 44 people over the past three days, according to the National Weather Service and reports from several states.
A CNN meteorologist called the storms' impact on North Carolina "epic."
There were 14 deaths in Bertie County, North Carolina, a rural area in the northeast part of the state, the weather service said Sunday.
Zee Lamb, Bertie County manager, told CNN that he could confirm 11 fatalities.
"Reports are still incoming," said Mike Sprayberry, deputy director of the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management.
The death toll across seven states includes 23 total in North Carolina; four in Virginia; seven in Alabama, two in Oklahoma, seven in Arkansas and one in Mississippi.
"When the storm count is finalized, this will likely be an historic tornado outbreak for North Carolina," said CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras. "It is quite unusual to have this many supercell tornadoes of this intensity strike the area."
North Carolina normally gets about 19 tornadoes a year, according to the National Climatic Data Center. There are 90 preliminary reports of tornadoes in the state in the latest storm system. A single tornado often gets multiple reports, so it is not immediately clear how many there were, Jeras explained. "But regardless, this is an epic event."
The deaths in North Carolina included three people in Raleigh who were killed in mobile homes, the weather service said. In eastern North Carolina, two people died near Ammon, one was killed in the Bladenboro area and another died in the Benson and Black Creek area, the weather service said.
North Carolina state Rep. Mike Stone reported two additional deaths in Lee County.
At Camp Lejeune, according to a news release, an unknown number of base residents suffered injuries and nearly 30 homes were damaged following a series of tornadoes that touched down near a housing area Saturday evening.
One seriously injured child was taken to a nearby hospital, according to the statement.
The storm rendered five homes uninhabitable and prompted officials to set up a temporary shelter at a nearby elementary school, the statement read.
CNN affiliate WTVD broadcast images of damaged homes and vehicles in Smithfield, North Carolina, as local residents and emergency workers surveyed the damage.
Gov. Bev Perdue declared a state of emergency for the entire state, according to the North Carolina Division of Emergency Management.
"We've been assured we'll have whatever federal support we'll need," Perdue told reporters late Saturday.
The governor said that as of late Saturday, the number of storm-related power outages had dropped from 250,000 to 143,000.
The service said more than 100 twisters have been spotted across the region during the recent storms.
In South Carolina, a tornado cut through Berkeley County, destroying a church and injuring six people, the weather service said.
Meanwhile, emergency crews in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama worked to assess the damage after the storm system moved north through the Carolinas and up into southern Virginia.
In Virginia, three Gloucester County residents died and 64 suffered injuries from the fast-moving storms Saturday, according to Bob Spieldenner, director of public affairs for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
A tornado also ripped the roof off a school in the county, felled trees that blocked multiple roads and severed power lines, leaving 9,300 people without electricity, according to Spieldenner.
In the Shenandoah Valley, in the western part of the state, a child died after being swept away in a flash flood, according to the National Weather Service. Spieldenner said authorities rescued another flood victim, but a third is missing.
The storms were the latest in a round of severe weather that has hit parts of the Midwest and South since Thursday. They left a trail of downed trees and power lines, scattered cars and crushed homes as it moved east.
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Southeastern Storms leave 43 dead in destruction's wake
A devastating storm system spawned dozens of tornadoes as it barreled from Oklahoma to North Carolina, decimating communities in six states and leaving at least 43 people dead in its wake.
North Carolina officials reported that 22 people died as a result of Saturday afternoon's severe storms that swept across the state over a six-hour stretch.
North Carolina Emergency Management said the deaths occurred in Bertie, Bladen, Cumberland, Harnett, Johnston, Lee and Wake counties.
Half of the deaths occurred in Bertie, a rural county in the northeast corner of the state with more than 700 square miles of land and just 21,000 residents.
The storm cut a wide swath across the county, flattening houses and tossing around farm equipment and vehicles, said Zee Lamb, Bertie's county manager.
"We had several fatalities at the same location but they weren't all at the same location. They were spread out over several miles," he said. "A lot of them were in their homes ... there are homes that are just totally leveled. Anybody who was in those homes could not have survived."
The fatalities included several elderly residents of an assisted living facility that was in the path of the storm, Lamb said.
Across the state, more than 80 people have been transported to local hospitals, some with severe injuries. Gov. Bev Perdue declared a state of emergency for all of North Carolina on Saturday evening.
The declaration is a prerequisite for asking for federal disaster assistance. More than a dozen North Carolina counties have also declared local states of emergency, including Wake, Cumberland and Bertie counties. Initial damage estimates say 60 homes have been completely destroyed and more than 400 others sustained damage across the state.
Emergency crews searched for victims Sunday in hard-hit swaths of North Carolina, where 62 tornadoes were reported the night before from the worst spring storm in two decades to hit the state.
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.
Farther up the street, Angelina McCaizie was also among those hoping to get back to their homes. She said she had been cooking when she saw the winds and rain pick up. She grabbed her children, nephew and brother and brought them into the kitchen, where everyone ducked until the storm passed.
When the storm was over, McCaizie, her husband and her brother went outside to check on neighbors. She said she saw several people bleeding and others with broken bones. McCaizie also said one resident ran up to her shouting, "Please help me! Please help me! I need 911."
"It was horrible," McCaizie 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 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. At least five died in Virginia.
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. At least three of those who died were from the same family, he 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."
The aftermath of the storm left the county commission chairman unable to recognize areas from the county where he grew up, graduated high school and lived most of his life.
L.C. Hoggard said the storms were another terrible blow to the county of just 21,000 people that was devastated by flooding last October. The water submerged the county seat of Windsor, damaging 200 homes and businesses. No one lost their lives in the flooding. But Hoggard said the tornado was going to have a staggering emotional impact.
"You might not recognize a name. But you recognize faces and families," Hoggard said. "That's how it is in rural communities."
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 two others were killed when a vehicle ran into flash flooding near Waynesboro.
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.
At the Cedar Creek Mobile Home Park in Dunn, one woman died while another man was critically hurt when a car was blown atop him outside his home, said Police Chief B.P. Jones.
More than half the 40 homes in the park were unrecognizable piles of debris Sunday morning. A bulldozer was scooping up wood beams and piling them up in a different part of the park. In one home, all that was left was the seat of a recliner — the back gone — and a bathtub.
In Bladen County, the dead included a 92-year-old father and his 50-year-old son. They were killed when they were thrown from their adjacent mobile homes in the town of Ammon. A 52-year-old woman also died in Ammon, and a 50-year-old man died in Bladenboro — both also thrown from their homes, County Medical Examiner Kenneth Clark said.
Bladen County emergency management chief Bradley Kinlaw said 82 homes were damaged and 25 destroyed in Saturday's storms. The path of destruction was narrow — but at least six miles long, he said.
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.
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."
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Sources: Brainy Quotes, CNN, McClatchy Newspapers, MSNBC, WALA, WRAL, Youtube, Google Maps
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