90 mph tornado toppled camper with a person inside during Charlotte-area storms
An EF-1 tornado packing 90-mph winds toppled a camper with a person inside on a 7-mile trek in three Charlotte-area counties Friday night, a National Weather Service damage assessment team said.
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The person had minor injuries, according to the team’s report released Saturday afternoon on the website of the NWS office in Greer, S.C.
The tornado touched down near Casar in Cleveland County at 6:49 p.m. and uprooted numerous trees and damaged homes racing east into Lincoln and Catawba counties. The twister carved a path 150 yards wide, NWS meteorologists said.
“Several large pine trees were uprooted or snapped near the tops of their trunks” along Parker Road near Jesse Mountain Road, according to the report.
NWS damage inspectors found the most concentrated damage where the tornado tracked east across Dirty Ankle Road and Ankle Road.
“Numerous trees were uprooted or snapped, and several homes sustained primarily minor damage,” the report stated.
The twister shoved a porch several feet from its manufactured home, according to the report.
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“Trees fell in a convergent pattern, supporting the determination that the damage was tornadic,” the team reported.
After overturning the camper, the tornado darted east into far northwestern Lincoln County, damaging trees near N.C. 10 before dissipating at 7 p.m. near the Lincoln-Catawba county line.
EF-1 tornadoes are the second least intense among six on the NWS Enhanced Fujita Scale for tornado strength and damage.
About 21,000 customers lost electricity when storms swept through the Carolinas Friday afternoon, prompting severe thunderstorm warnings and pummeling the Charlotte area.
Roughly the same rural areas of eastern Cleveland and western Lincoln counties have spawned destructive, even deadly tornados for many decades. A tornado on May 5, 1989, killed four people, The Charlotte Observer reported at the time. Then-Gov. Jim Martin visited the area to console people, landing in a helicopter on N.C. 10 in Vale.
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