RALEIGH, N.C. — Amber Parker watched on television as the storm near her home grew into a tornado threat. Then, when the roaring wind outside suddenly fell silent, she grabbed her two toddlers and rushed to get under the stairwell.
“We just got inside the door frame when I was pushed inside . . . then everything went,” said Parker, tears welling in her eyes as she described the chaotic scene during a brief discussion with reporters near her demolished home in central North Carolina.
Neighbors helped Parker, 36, and her two children — a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old — out of the ruins, and the three survived with barely a scratch.
“We’re blessed,” she said.
The powerful storm system that swept through the Southeast and the mid-Atlantic states late Thursday and into early Friday produced two tornados. In North Carolina, the storm left one person dead, several injured and scores of homes and businesses damaged.
The National Weather Service reported preliminary indications that a tornado in Greensboro clocked in as a category EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning the funnel was packing winds between 111 and 135 mph.
Thursday, an apparent tornado wrecked a shopping area in Mississippi and strong winds flipped a mobile home in Alabama. In south-central Tennessee, at least four homes and a few barns were reported damaged.
The storm made its way to Virginia and Maryland late Thursday and early Friday, leaving between 75 and 100 homes in northeastern Virginia damaged.
