RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A furious storm system that kicked
up tornadoes, flash floods and hail as big as softballs has
claimed at least 25 lives on a rampage that began in
Oklahoma days ago, then smashed across several Southern
states as it reached a new and deadly pitch in North
Carolina and Virginia.
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. At least
a half dozen people died just in the Carolinas and Virginia
and authorities warned the toll was likely to rise further
Sunday as searchers probed shattered homes and businesses.
Authorities said at least five people were killed in North
Carolina and at least three more in neighboring Virginia
during the storm's passage Saturday before the sprawling,
potent storm bands moved eastward over the Atlantic.
The storms claimed its first lives Thursday night in
Oklahoma, then roared through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama
and Georgia. Seven people each were killed in Arkansas and
Alabama, two people in Oklahoma and one person in
Mississippi, authorities have said. One of the dead was an
elderly man whose trailer was tossed nearly a quarter mile
across a state highway.
In North Carolina, Gov. Beverly Perdue declared a state of
emergency after reporting fatalities in at least four
counties. But she declined to immediately confirm an exact
number of deaths. She 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.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with everybody in North
Carolina who has been through this horrible day," Perdue
said.
Authorities in North Carolina said they would provide more
details of the death toll later Sunday after checking on the
reports of fatalities in at least four counties and in the
capital city of Raleigh. Search and rescue teams operated
through the night, Perdue said, with damage assessments
starting in earnest Sunday after daylight.
"There's a lot of work that needs to be done in these areas
that are most heavily impacted," said Doug Hoell, the
state's director of emergency management. "There's a lot of
debris out there that's got to be cleaned up."
In Virginia, disaster officials said one apparent tornado
ripped more than 12 miles long through Gloucester County,
uprooting trees and pounding homes to rubble while claiming
three lives. Another person was confirmed dead and another
remained missing early Sunday after flash flooding elsewhere
in Virginia.
Scenes of destruction across the South looked eerily similar
in many areas.
In North Carolina, rooftops were ripped off stores, trees
were plucked from the ground and scores of homes were
damaged, Hoell said.
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 before power was fully
restored..
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.
The storm sweeping into North Carolina moved from the
state's western mountain reaches to the coast on Saturday
amid utter devastation in some places.
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."
Cindy Hall, a Red Cross volunteer and outreach minister at
First Baptist Church in Sanford, said dozens of homes in the
area were damaged.
"It wiped out our St. Andrews neighborhood, which includes
about 30 homes," she said.
To the west, hikers stranded by flash floods had to be
rescued.
In Virginia, Department of Emergency Management spokesman
Bob Spieldenner, said an apparent tornado ploughed through
communities of Gloucester County, destroying or damaging
homes, uprooting trees in a quiet farming and fishing region
along the Chesapeake Bay.
"I know it was a pretty long path," he said of the reported
tornado. "They estimated it was 12 to 14 miles" based on 911
emergency calls.
Authorities said at least three deaths had been confirmed in
Gloucester County and at least 60 were injured, most with
minor injuries. Spieldenner said one person was killed when
a vehicle ran into flash flooding near Waynesboro and
another person was missing and a third 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.
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Associated Press writers Page Ivey in Columbia, S.C., Jackie
Quinn in Washington, D.C., and Jeff Martin and Jacob Jordan
in Atlanta contributed to this report.