NC tornadoes

[kodydog]

Hay Bobby and all our other NC friends. Hope all is well considering the bad weather your state had Saturday.

[JuneC]

Yep... hope all is well with you guys.  Check in with us when you get a chance.  And I thought we had it bad with hurricanes  :-[

June

[Mike8560]

I beard there were 5 peow killed in the storms

[hdflame]

Hey everybody!  Thanks for asking about us.  My immediate family is OK.

We were lucky.  Tornadoes went through just about 2 miles from our house and devastated a large part of a sub-division.  A large part of NC was hit and has major damage.  I can't ever remember of such widespread damage from tornadoes in NC.

I was in Fayetteville, which is about 30 miles from Sanford, teaching a motorcycle safety class.  We had finished riding for the day and were in class.  I started getting text messages from our local emergency services center.  The first one said there was a funnel cloud spotted in Tramway, about 5 miles from my house.  Five minutes later I got one that said a tornado had touched down in St. Andrews Subdv. demolishing several houses.  That was only about 2 miles from my house!  That's when I started making calls to find out if my parents were OK.  They live across the pond from my house.  My family was not home, so I wasn't worried about them.

Several large factories and businesses in Sanford were completely leveled, including our Lowe's Home Improvement.

It took me about 2 hours to get home, normally about a 35-40 minute drive.  There was a large power outage across NC.  From Fayetteville all the way to Sanford, none of the traffic lights were working!  I barely had enough gas to get home because all of the gas stations were closed. 

There are still a lot of local roads that are closed.  My wife just left for work and was going to have to make a big detour just to get to work on the other side of town.  Luckily, this is Spring break, so schools are out this week.  If this had happened at night there would have probably been more lives lost.

We all feel very lucky not to have had any damage to our us or our personal property.

[hdflame]

My wife just sent me this picture of a house about 5 or 6 miles from my house.  This was on here "Detour" to work.  This was taken from her cell phone.

Notice the tractor trailer overturned.

[fragged8]

hiya

we've been seeing the damage on Tv in the UK. The power of those
things is awsome.

Glad to hear all is well with you all..

Rich

[Saddleman]

Bobby, glad you and yours had no problems. 

A 20 year anniversary of the below is coming up next week.  Our house was at about the center right side of the photo.  One BIG NASTY F5 did the destruction.  We were very lucky and walked away without a scratch, having road the storm out in an undergroung storm shelter as it went right over the top of us.

I have been feeling real buggy this year about storms...more so than years past. 



http://media.kansas.com/smedia/2009/03/26/15/768-1991wichita19065.slideshow_main.prod_affiliate.80.jpg

At 4:30 in the video is when it was passing over us.  BIG and NASTY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDn_aL6RIfo

[jsquail]

Glad to hear yall in NC are ok. The one in VA passed 2 miles from my house. Lots of damage just down the street. We lost a school to the thing too.