Tropical Storm Isaias spawned tornadoes and dumped rain during an inland march up the U.S. East Coast on Tuesday after making landfall as a hurricane along the North Carolina coast, where it piled boats against the docks and caused floods and fires that displaced dozens of people.
At least two people were killed when one of its twisters hit a mobile home park.
Royce Potter, a fifth-generation seafood purveyor and owner of Potter’s Seafood in Southport, said he rode out the storm on a boat docked near his business after he got the impression from forecasters that his area would be spared.
They got this wrong, he said, visibly shaken. I’ve ridden storms out here for years.
Instead, the storm surge and wind gusts left dozens of boats piled up against the docks, and many decks facing out on the water were smashed. People were out Tuesday morning raking debris or picking it up with their hands and dropping it in trash cans.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that one person was killed and others injured when a tornado hit a mobile home park in Bertie County, about 200 miles northeast of where Isaias made landfall. Bertie County officials said on Facebook that the tornado touched down in Windsor. State and local officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for details. Bertie County Commissioner Ronald Wesson confirmed that a second victim was found in the damage.
The hurricane’s eye moved over land near Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, just after 11 p.m. on Monday with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (136 km/h), and its top winds dropped to 70 miles per hour (117 km/h) by early Tuesday. But forecasters said hurricane-force gusts were likely in the Chesapeake Bay region, and tropical storm conditions were expected across New England Tuesday night.
Potentially life-threatening urban flooding is possible in D.C., Baltimore and elsewhere along and just west of the I-95 corridor today, the National Hurricane Center also warned.
We don’t think there is going to be a whole lot of weakening, we still think there’s going to be very strong and gusty winds that will affect much of the mid-atlantic and the Northeast over the next day or two, hurricane specialist Robbie Berg told The Associated Press.
At least two other tornadoes were confirmed by the national weather service, near Kilmarnock, Virginia, and Vienna, Maryland. As the heavy rains and wind felled trees, power outages spread Tuesday. More than 650,000 customers lost electricity, most of them in North Carolina and Virginia, according to PowerOutage.US, which tracks utility reports.
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