This was taken from Vaughn Towers (press box area) at NCSU's Carter Finley Stadium. If you'll look closely, you can see the first row of red seats are completely under water and there's water rolling over the edge onto the lower level.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Saturday afternoon once we were home from the NCSU Red and White game, we put the kids straight to bed and then Brian and I were just relaxing. He had done a few things in our yard and talking with the neighbors when the storms started rolling in. We had seen in the news all week that we'd have "severe thunderstorms", but we weren't prepared in any way for what was coming.
I called Brian in and we watched the news as tornadoes popped up all over southeastern North Carolina - many right in line to hit us and my family down in Clinton - NOT GOOD! Not much we could do, but wait and pray and see what happened... We had our safe spot picked out (the coat closet under the stairs and/or downstairs bath if we needed more room), but we never actually went to it - that probably wasn't too smart in hindsight.
It was a little scary to see the storm blow up so quickly, all black and crazy lightening - looked like it was just past our neighborhood as we could see it over the school behind our house. And, after everything was said and done, that's exactly where it was. It tore through about a mile from us and hit a dairy farm. Lots of trees were down and all over the houses, but made more of a mess and some structural damage to the roofs, but still inhabitable. I stopped on Sunday to see if those folks needed anything, like clothes / food / whatnot, but the guy said they were all very lucky and didn't lose anything - just made a big mess. So very thankful they are all okay!
There were areas that unfortunately were not as lucky and had severe damage with folks losing their homes and some their lives. It's crazy the things folks are finding that the storm blew around, for instance, a Cary lady found a yearbook from a senior that lives in Sanford (which is just under 40 miles away). More than 25 tornadoes touched down dozens of times 32 North Carolina counties on Saturday, April 16, 2011. Twenty-two people were killed, around 130 homes destroyed, and more than 700 homes damaged.
We were so very fortunate, no damage here, nor at Mama and Daddy's - nothing that can't be fixed at least. I heard that this would most likely go down as the deadliest storm system in NC history. We haven't had tornadoes here like that since a bad storm in 1984. I don't remember the actual storm then, but I do remember riding around with Daddy and seeing all the damage / trees down / etc...
Here's a link of photos from Sanford's damage - it completely leveled a Lowe's Home Improvement store there. The store manager saw it coming and got all the employees / shoppers to the back of the store and no one was hurt - amazing!
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