Tornado Swarm Deals Death, but Also Miracles
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
Joshua Dunlow, 6, rested Monday near his family's home in Askewville, N.C., while this parents sorted through their belongings. More Photos »
By KIM SEVERSON
Published: April 18, 2011
Multimedia
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Richard Burkett/Bonnie Burkett, via Associated Press
A tornado moving through Colerain, N.C., on Saturday. The photographer took the picture shortly before taking cover in a closet under a staircase. More Photos »
Karen Tam for The New York Times
Molly, back in her own pasture Monday after being lifted away by Saturday's tornado. More Photos »
And there was Molly, a graying donkey who for years has starred in the town Christmas pageant. People say they saw her lifted into the funnel cloud when the storm hit Saturday night. They thought she was a goner.
But Sunday morning, her owner, Jake Dunlow, 75, found her on her back in a ditch about 300 feet away. A day later, she was grazing in her own pasture, oblivious to the splinters of seven mobile homes all around her.
Yes, 11 people died in those dark and deafening 10 minutes. Dozens were hurt and homes were destroyed.
As people picked through the mess and showed up with water and fried chicken at temporary shelters Monday, everyone seemed to mix their grief and shock with a sense of marvel that a mile-wide tornado that blew through this land of peanut fields and chicken houses with 165-mile-an-hour winds didn’t do worse.
“We’re lucky, that’s all I can say,” Mr. Dunlow said.
The deaths here in Bertie County were the last of 45 in several Southern states attributed to the unusually large storm, which claimed its first life in Oklahoma on Wednesday before chugging east.
Around 7 p.m. Saturday, it sent a ferocious tornado — or possibly two — to the ground here, the storm’s last fatal act before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean.
As far as people can tell, it first touched down in a cow pasture in this little town in the northeast corner of the state, about a half-hour’s drive from the beaches of the Outer Banks.
It is one of the poorest parts of the state, and one of the least populated. But people know each other here in Askewville, named after a prominent local shipping family and pronounced ASK-yu-ville. They stock their yards with tidy martin houses and fish for striped bass in the river and discuss whether cotton is going to do better this year than the famous Bertie County peanuts.
It was just another slow spring Saturday night when the tornado hit that field, sending Molly into the air and taking out seven of the mobile homes that Mr. Dunlow owned and used for retirement income (that money is gone for good because he did not carry insurance).
It skipped up over some trees, hit a mobile home just north of town and killed the woman who lived there alone. Traveling at maybe 60 miles an hour, it plowed on to Morris Ford Road, where Ava Moore Daniels, 47, runs a pair of group homes for residents with physical and mental challenges.
Her nephew, Mr. White, was helping take care of six people in one house when he saw two funnels coming toward him. He ushered everyone into the bathroom, then watched the tornado take off the roof. It was over in maybe 15 seconds, he said.
Everyone was O.K., so he went outside and saw that the group home next door had collapsed.
He ran over and heard, despite the raging hail and wind and thunder, screams of “Glen, help!” A hand was waving from under a collapsed wall.
“I picked that wall up just like it wasn’t there,” he said. “I don’t know where I got the strength.”
He held it until some people from the first home and a good Samaritan who was driving by rushed over to help him prop it up and pull out the shaken residents.
Four residents and a staff member survived, but a woman in her late 60s and a 52-year-old man were dead under the rubble.
The tornado then bore down on a little house across from a cornfield that James Levon White, 58, shares with his wife, Hattie White, 49. He works at a farm equipment center. She is a correctional officer.
The sky darkened suddenly. All he could think of was to head to the bedroom closet. She got down on the floor. He crouched over her. They held each other.
“All of the sudden I heard the screech, like when nails get pulled out of wood, and that really loud roar,” he said. “We closed our eyes, and when we woke up again we were outside.”
The tornado blew their entire house, except the porch, into the trees. They tumbled through the air, flying about 30 feet. The storm dropped them in the backyard, bruised and cut, shoulders sprained.
“When we landed out there we were just two feet away from each other,” he said. “I could reach over and touch her. We were blessed.”
Others were less fortunate. In the next few minutes, the tornado would move on to U.S. 42 and kill a couple and the elderly mother who lived with them. A man died on Nowell Farm Road, along with two more people on nearby Harrell Road, said Jennifer Stalls, 29, an emergency medical worker who was out helping save the injured and recovering bodies that night. The last life was lost near Glovers Cross Road, firefighters said.
Then the storm turned north, clipped Virginia and headed out to sea.
There will be cleaning up to do and funerals to plan. People will wait to see if insurance will help them rebuild. They will count their blessings as they mourn their losses, and talk of God’s plan and God’s work. And they will cheer the resilience of the town’s most famous donkey.
“Molly’s going to make it to one more Christmas play,” said Tiffany Everett, 44, who had driven to the destroyed group home to lend a hand.
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