Two dead after tornado spawned by Isaias hits mobile home park in northeastern NC
A tornado spawned by Tropical Storm Isaias killed two people Tuesday morning in a Bertie County mobile home park, local officials said.
Bertie County Sheriff John Holley said the two were found amid at the Cedar Landing mobile home community — known locally as “The Neck” — on Morning Drive.
Emergency crews that arrived during the storm struggled to help residents in the dark, wind and rain, county officials said. At least 12 people were taken to the hospital with injuries, they said, and another 10 people were taken to local shelters.
The tornado appeared to have hit at least three clusters of homes in an area southeast of the town of Windsor, including three mobile home communities and a neighborhood of stick-built houses. It flattened a group of seven homes at the edge of a peanut field on Middle Tract Road, including three single-wides and two double-wides, all of which were unrecognizable as anything but the bits and pieces of dwellings Tuesday afternoon.
A boot, a waterlogged book, a set of doorknobs fastened only to a strip of a door — it all lay strewn across the ground or plastered to nearby trees.
“I’m just as hurt as anybody can be just looking at it,” Rajneesh Swain said, walking gingerly though splintered 2-by-4s, shattered bathroom fixtures and mirror shards. One of Swain’s relatives was in one of the mobile homes, and was in the hospital Tuesday with injuries sustained when the storm blew the home apart.
Another of Swain’s relatives was killed in a larger trailer park that was pummeled by the high winds, she said.
Family members gathered at the property on Middle Tract Road and mourned the loss for a bit, then began picking through the remnants for belongings they could salvage.
Gov. Roy Cooper announced late Tuesday that he would visit the area to survey the damage Wednesday.
Area of devastation
The physical devastation appeared to be limited to an area two or three miles wide, but the grief will likely be felt across the rural county, which is broad but sparsely populated.
“This is bad. ... It’s pretty much wiped out,” Holley said.
Rescuers searched for a mother and two children who were thought to have been in one of the mobile homes hit by high winds, but they were found safe Tuesday afternoon. Local residents brought water, soft drinks and peanut butter sandwiches for law enforcement officers who blocked off roads leading to where the worst damage was and where the missing people were thought to be.
Bertie is in wide-open northeastern North Carolina, marked by big fields of peanuts, cotton and tobacco.
Jeffrey and Sharee Stilwell, who recently moved to Bertie County from Connecticut, said they were asleep when their son saw a crawler on the TV screen during a wrestling match he was watching around 1:15 or 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.
“Get up!” Sharee Stilwell said he shouted. “We’re having a tornado!”
The family gathered in a central hallway while the storm passed by, shaking the house but taking nothing with it but a few shingles.
The storm’s aftermath
About four miles northwest of Middle Tract Road, Tyanna Gilliam and Montel Craig were asleep in the single-story home they moved into just three months ago. A loud bang woke them up around 1:30 a.m.
Craig and Gilliam didn’t know it at the time, but that sound was a falling tree ramming into their house, ripping a hole in the white siding.
As Gilliam opened her eyes, she saw the sink from her master bathroom moving toward the bed. Craig, who was in bed next to her, described hearing what he said “sounded like 40 trains coming through here.”
“We just immediately got in the closet,” Gilliam said Tuesday afternoon. “We said, ‘We have insurance.’ We were just praying, making sure we could get out of there.”
Gilliam’s mother lives in a brick house adjacent to her daughter’s. While they were hiding in the closet, she was calling over and over, urging them to come stay with her. When the winds seemed to die down for an instant, the couple rushed over, crossing a small foot bridge and sprinting across the lawn into the brick building.
As they ran, Gilliam tried not to see the damage that had been done.
“I didn’t even want to look at it,” she said Tuesday, standing in her backyard, surrounded by dozens of fallen trees.
Those branches, limbs and trunks were the remains of a small forest that had hours before separated the house from a nearby field.
Power lines snaked across the yard to a fallen pole. A white picket fence buckled in waves across the yard’s western edge. Somehow, in the midst of all of the disruption, a clothesline was still standing.
Most painful, though, was the loss of Gilliam’s beloved white Cadillac, “White Diamond,” a car she’d driven since she was 16 years old. The car was barely visible Tuesday, shrouded in fallen branches.
“I was sad about that,” Gilliam said.
About two more miles northwest, Brenda and Earl Wilson were asleep in their Woodard Road home when the storm woke Brenda Wilson up around 1:30 a.m. But she didn’t hear the almost-ubiquitous rush of a freight train. Instead, she heard the damage being done by the winds.
“We could hear nothing but glass and trees and rain that was pouring through the kitchen because the whole back had been torn out of the home,” Brenda Wilson told The News & Observer Tuesday afternoon.
Upon seeing the damage, Earl Wilson decided it was extensive enough that he wouldn’t even put buckets out to catch the rain that was cascading into their kitchen. Figuring there wasn’t much else to do, he went back to sleep.
Brenda Wilson sat awake in the still-dry master bedroom, trying to think about what comes next instead of the storm that was still howling around her.
“It was something you never want to remember again,” Brenda Wilson said.
When dawn broke, the Wilsons found their backyard sprinkled with specks of white insulation that looked like someone had blown artificial snow out of a gaping hole in their roof.
The couple had long disagreed over the fate of a large tree in their front yard, with Brenda wanting to keep it for shade and Earl wanting it to come down. Isaias’ winds splintered that tree, toppling the upper reaches of its canopy into the front of their house.
But, Brenda said, “I still don’t want to get rid of it.”
A large trailer sat near the Wilsons’ driveway Tuesday, a loan from their pastor who knew they would need somewhere to stay for at least the next few days.
As crews put a blue tarp across the hole in their roof, Brenda said, “We are here, and that’s what is most important.”
‘All kinds of damage’
Cally Edwards, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross’ Eastern North Carolina region, said the agency is helping an unknown number of tornado victims. The Red Cross will be helping some people as they are released from the hospital, she said at a news briefing Tuesday afternoon.
Edwards also described passing through the affected area.
“As we were driving what roads we could get through, there was a number of power lines down, trees down, we saw some roofs blown off of homes, we saw what appeared to be a deck in a backyard against trees. There is all kinds of damage,” Edwards said.
Commissioners Vice Chairwoman Tammy Lee said she was visiting a command center set up at Siloam Baptist Church, eight miles east of Cedar Landing, when she learned about the second death.
“I think there were two or three trailers left standing. ... Everything else was gone. These people have lost everything they owned,” Lee told the News & Observer.
She urged people across the state to think about the tornado’s survivors.
“Unfortunately for Bertie County, housing is an issue, so these people trying to relocate elsewhere, that will be an issue,” Lee said.
Anyone who has been displaced by the storm can call 252-794-6144, county officials said.
“We are extraordinarily grateful for the assistance of community non-profits, churches, and local law enforcement agencies who continue to assist us,” Bertie County Commissioners Chair Ronald Wesson said. “We had so many area agencies standing at the ready to spring into action. Our hearts are heavy as we continue to survey damage and get the big picture about what transpired, and just how many were impacted.”
The National Weather Service is expected to arrive at the scene Wednesday to analyze the debris and provide more information about the size of the tornado that struck, Bertie County officials said.
How to help and how to get help
Mail monetary donations: Bertie County at P.O. Box 530, Windsor, NC 27983
For more information of if you’ve been displaced: 252-794-6144
Staff writer Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan contributed to this report.
This story was originally published August 4, 2020 at 8:32 AM with the headline "Two dead after tornado spawned by Isaias hits mobile home park in northeastern NC."
