N.C. tornado kills at least 8

RIEGELWOOD, N.C. —  A tornado ripped through this Cape Fear River crossroads at dawn Thursday, killing at least eight residents and crushing more than 30 trailers and brick homes just as residents were waking for jobs and school. More than 20 people were hospitalized, four of them children, officials said.

A dark brown funnel cloud roared past the white double-wide trailer of Cissy Kennedy as she brushed her teeth at daybreak. She saw it flatten two double-wides and a single-wide next door, killing five of her neighbors but leaving her own trailer untouched.

“I can’t believe I’m still alive,” Kennedy said Thursday afternoon, her head bowed as she stood amid the scattered debris that had once been her neighbors’ trailers.

The twister continued down muddy Pretty Branch Road, skipped past the rest of the Old Farm mobile home park and tore a path through a stand of longleaf pines. It pulverized the red brick ranch home of Martin Brown on Old Stage Road as he cowered under his kitchen table, having lost his grip on his refrigerator when the appliance flew through a rear wall.

“I’m blessed -- I had a wall fall on me and all I got was a couple of bruises,” Brown said, poking through the soggy remains of his home to retrieve a rain-soaked armload of clothes.

The tornado struck at 6:44 a.m., 15 minutes after the National Weather Service posted a tornado warning for Riegelwood, a rural community dominated by a massive paper plant. It flipped cars and pickups into ditches and left the trailer park and surrounding forest littered with insulation, window frames, kitchen chairs and toys.

Two of the dead were reportedly children.

“It’s a major catastrophe,” said Chris Batten, the Columbus County sheriff, his eyes red and raw beneath a blue ball cap. As he spoke, search-and-rescue teams led dogs through wrecked homes and down piney footpaths, searching for bodies or trapped survivors.

Batten said he knew of no specific missing people, but that it was possible that all residents had not been accounted for. “We’re covering every inch of the area,” he said.

Authorities set up a shelter for people whose homes were destroyed. A staging area at the Acme Presbyterian Church was just down from a Piggly Wiggly grocery store where relief workers bought provisions.

The sheriff said the tornado “totally demolished” a swath a half-mile wide and a mile long near the Cape Fear River, about 20 miles northwest of the port city of Wilmington.

“It troubles you in your heart,” Batten said of the destruction. “You have to keep these people in your heart and prayers.”

He said his officers had been told to spread the tornado warning as soon as it was issued, but they had no time to act. “There’s no time for warning with a tornado,” Batten said.

County Commissioner Sammie Jacobs described stepping across corpses as he helped emergency workers make their way through heavy debris to reach victims in the trailer park.

The tornado spun off from thunderstorms that punched across the Southeast on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. In Louisiana, a 43-year-old man was killed when a tornado demolished his trailer. Two deaths in North Carolina car crashes in heavy downpours also were blamed on the storms.

Kennedy, an anesthesiologist’s assistant, said her five neighbors apparently died instantly when their trailers were obliterated by the tornado. Two children inside survived, she said, and were taken to a hospital.

Yet less than 100 yards away, even the flimsy chicken coop in Kennedy’s backyard was still intact.

“It’s miraculous,” she said. “You better believe I’ll be in church Sunday morning.”

Brown said he was alone in his three-bedroom brick home, watching the movie “Troy,” when he heard what he thought was thunder.

With his household lights flickering, he looked outside and saw “a big dark brown cloud with water all twisted up inside it.”

He ducked by his refrigerator, he said, but it was torn from his grasp by winds that sent his roof flying into the woods and shattered every window.

He crouched under his kitchen table as the home’s brick walls caved in, one of them crashing down on the table.

“It was all over in about one minute,” he said.

“It sounded like a train coming in, and a big old vacuum cleaner going out, just sucking up everything.”

Stepping over debris in what had been his bedroom, Brown recovered a framed photo of himself that survived the storm.

“I’m a lucky man,” he said, staring at the photo.

“This could have been my obituary picture.”

david.zucchino@latimes.com