They say if you don’t like the weather in eastern North Carolina, just wait five minutes and it’ll change. That was really the case this week as some localities had snow and ice. But the next day it was windy and warm as a thunderstorm moved through eventually spawning a tornado in Carteret County. The potential for severe weather didn’t come as a surprise to meteorologists who had been keeping tabs on the system days before its arrival. John Cole is the Warning Coordination Meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Newport.
“We were alerting people of severe weather, and possibly a tornado for the southern coast over the weekend into Monday.”
On Tuesday morning, a line of thunderstorms approached the Crystal Coast. At the same time, meteorologist noticed a small mesoscale area of low pressure developing east of Cape Lookout and moving toward Carteret County, making conditions favorable for tornadic activity.
“On the right side of the low pressure area that was approaching from the south, we saw a couplet as we call it that would indicate a circulation within the thunderstorm itself. A very well defined couplet of rotation. It’s only a very small scale like five nautical miles or so in diameter. But we were tracking that as it was coming in off the waters.”
By necessity, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for eastern Carteret County at 8:43. The tornado moved across Core Sound and came on land in an area between Stacy and Davis.
Shortly after the warning was issued, the National Weather Service was flooded with calls from residents who spotted the funnel cloud. And at 8:51, the first reports of damage started coming in. Cole says the tornado toppled trees and destroyed Luther Lewis Crab Company as it continued to move over four miles across land toward Open Grounds Farm.
“It moved across an area just off of highway 70 and destroyed about five telephone poles and snapped them. So the tornado was definitely on the ground there as well. So four to five miles even northeast of where it first impacted the Davis/Stacy area.”
Anytime a tornado impacts the region, the National Weather Service office in Newport deploys an assessment team to survey damage and determine the strength of the twister.
“And that was composed of me, another forecaster and one of our met interns.”
Their job could be compared to crime scene investigators. They go into an area where storm damage has occurred and they use evidence at the scene to paint a picture of what happened. Cole says the team was sent out just a couple hours after the damage was reported. The survey team’s first stop was in the Morehead City/Beaufort area, where wind gusts as high as 81 miles per hour were reported nearby at Fort Macon.
“We saw a lot of shingle damage, we saw some minor structural damage, signs down, things like that that would indicate we probably had 60 to 80 mile per hour winds down there.”
After surveying damage along the Beaufort waterfront, the team was able to quickly conclude that it had been hit with strong straight line winds, judging by debris scattered throughout the area. Cole says if it had been tornado, there would have been a defined path of destruction.
“You’re going to see debris tossed at different ways maybe at right angles to where the tornado was moving because of the counterclockwise circulation which is typical in a tornado.”
From Beaufort, the survey team traveled to Down East Carteret County to evaluate the Luther Lewis Crab Company on Highway 70 in Davis. The first step in assessing tornado damage is determining what type of structure they’re dealing with- from small barns and outbuildings, to metal structures and warehouses. Based on the type of building, its condition, and the quality of construction, meteorologist can estimate the strength of the winds based on the degree of damage.
“It definitely, on the south side of it where that tornado came in, there were walls that were collapsed, a good portion of the roof was gone. The anchors were lifted up out of the ground and the structure was actually moved.
Based on the damage and the strong rotational signature picked up on the radar, Cole says the team was able to classify the tornado as a strong EF-1 or low EF-2, with winds in excess of 110 miles per hour. Originally, it was estimated the tornado was on the ground for 30 seconds. But the team was called to an area near Open Grounds Farm where five telephone poles were snapped in half. With this new information, they were able to determine the tornado traveled more than four miles and was actually on the ground for 10 minutes.
Given the tornado’s duration and strength, the damage could have been a lot worse. Fortunately, no injuries were reported because the tornado traveled over mostly agricultural land. Cole says the last tornado touch down in Carteret County in February was in 1950.
