Tornado spawned by Debby kills 1 person, damages buildings in Wilson County, NC
READ MORE
Debby’s impact on the Triangle & NC
Tropical Storm Debby drenches the Triangle and North and South Carolina. By Thursday afternoon, it was downgraded to a tropical depression. Here are stories on the impact of the storm.
Expand All
A tornado that spun out of Tropical Storm Debby early Thursday killed one person and damaged several structures, including a middle school and a church.
Wilson County officials confirmed that one person was killed by a tornado that struck a home near Lucama. The person’s identity was not immediately available.
“Debby has been a stubborn storm with unrelenting wind and rain, and unfortunately it’s not over yet,” Gov. Roy Cooper said in Wilson County on Thursday, warning of the potential for “significantly more” flooding from heavy rains throughout North Carolina.
Tropical Storm Debby made its second landfall overnight in South Carolina, with bands of heavy rain spreading across Eastern North Carolina. The storm also generated several tornadoes, with the National Weather Service issuing several warnings for Wilson County between about 2 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Debby was downgraded to a tropical depression by late Thursday afternoon.
‘That’s where my family lives’
When the tornado warnings said an extremely large and dangerous tornado was on the ground, Elizabeth La Pierre pulled up a weather app. She watched as it described the tornado passing through roads whose name she didn’t know and then, terrifyingly, roads whose names she did.
“That’s where my family lives,” she thought.
La Pierre had checked with her father, Phil Hawley, to make sure he was seeking shelter with her mom. He was, he told her, and was keeping an eye on the storm.
Then the updates stopped.
A call from Hawley was the next thing La Pierre received.
“We lost it all,” Hawley told his daughter.
Adrenaline was pumping, so it was some time before Hawley realized he’d sustained a deep cut when picture frames shattered in the hallway where he and his wife had sought shelter from the storm. Hawley was hospitalized Thursday afternoon, receiving treatment for that cut.
As she paced a long driveway Thursday afternoon, the white double-wide where La Pierre grew up was on her left, shifted off of its foundation.
To La Pierre’s right, two large trees nearly crisscrossed each other, just feet from landing on the brick home where her father had grown up and where her grandmother was sleeping when the tornado passed. An awning on the front was collapsed, and a side door had been broken down so emergency workers could reach her grandmother, who was not injured.
Its roof was blown off. Pieces of wood and shingles were scattered up and down a field to the home’s west.
“They don’t prepare you to lose your entire childhood place at one time,” La Pierre said.
That debris seemed to form a trail up the road to to the crumpled home where a man was killed during the storm.
As she paced, La Pierre gripped a stack of three phones: her own, her mother’s and her father’s. While Hawley was receiving treatment at a Greenville hospital for the cut he sustained, La Pierre fielded call after call.
After one of those, an update on Hawley’s condition, relief volunteers stopped cutting trees and gathering the family’s personal belongings to form a circle and say a prayer.
A few moments later, La Pierre said, “Tornados touch what they want to touch and leave alone what they want to leave alone.”
Like ‘an explosion’
La Pierre attended Springfield Middle School, where the tornado’s winds clawed away part of the front and a few sections of roof.
“The impact appears to be focused on the 6th and 7th grade halls where sections of the roof and walls are missing or compromised,” Lane Mills, the Wilson County Schools superintendent wrote in a Facebook message.
Cooper made an unscheduled stop at the school Thursday, surveying the damage with county officials.
“What was amazing to me was, a strong brick structure, how many different bricks were everywhere. It was — an explosion is the best way to describe it because this tornado came up and directed itself all the way through this school. Devastating damage, chairs everywhere, insulation hanging from the ceiling, light bulbs hanging. Really devastating,” Cooper said.
Former Gov. Hunt homestead damage
The tornado also damaged the Rock Ridge home where former Gov. Jim Hunt grew up, as well as a roughly 90-year-old dairy barn on the property. Winds from the storm hurtled a piece of the dairy barn into the roof of County Commissioner Rob Boyette’s home, about 300 yards away. The smell of freshly cut pine hung heavy in the air.
Hunt, former NC first lady Carolyn Hunt and Boyette all made it through the storm uninjured.
Jimmy Hawley, the Hunts’ son-in-law, lives nearby and received an alert around 3 a.m. telling him to seek shelter immediately. The storm lasted less than a minute, Hawley said.
He needed to clear tree limbs so he could make it up a road to check on the Hunts, using excavators.
Thursday morning, a tarp was on the roof and tree limbs lined the road leading to the white-sided home, which was mostly used as a repository for the former governor’s memorabilia from his political career.
Inside the home, water was dripping from the ceiling, evidence of where a chimney had been blown off. In the living room, a tree limb poked through a corner of the house, daylight visible around its edges.
This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and Green South Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. If you would like to help support local journalism, please consider signing up for a digital subscription, which you can do here.
This story was originally published August 8, 2024 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Tornado spawned by Debby kills 1 person, damages buildings in Wilson County, NC."
