4 critically hurt after tornado associated with Helene hits Eastern NC city

A tornado associated with Hurricane Helene, now a tropical depression, touched down in a Nash County city on Friday, Sept. 27, injuring 15 people.

Around 1:30 p.m., the tornado struck two restaurants with people inside, and several other buildings near North Wesleyan Boulevard and Benvenue Road in Rocky Mount, emergency officials said.

“We’ve had multiple injuries, with four of those being critical,” Nash County communications director Jonathan Edwards said at 2:30 p.m.

Edwards said EMS was triaging patients and taking those who required hospitalization to UNC Health Nash. He said they didn’t have reports of other serious damage to share yet.

Hing Ta Restaurant suffered heavy damage, with a back wall crumpled and a piece of wood pointing through the roof. Bricks were strewn throughout the surrounding parking lot and several cars in the area had their windows blown out.

The steel frame of the auto repair shop next door was crumpled and one wall was almost entirely blown out, though a gold colored car remained on lifts inside what remained of the business.

A medical supply store had crumbled into a pile of bricks nearby, and El Tapatio Restaurant also suffered damage. The city is still taking stock of the scene.

“We are just manning the area, checking in, making sure buildings are cleared,” said Catina Phillips around 4:30 p.m., a spokesperson for the Rocky Mount Fire Department.

Rocky Mount is about an hour east of Raleigh. Another potential tornado touched down in Garland, about 80 miles south of Raleigh in Sampson County. The National Weather Service is sending teams to both scenes to assess the damage.

K&W cafeteria becomes a refuge

Tonya Ward was at work inside the K&W Cafeteria around 1:30 p.m. Friday when her manager shouted to look at the tornado outside.

“You saw the trees and the leaves and everything was rotating. It was dark, it was jet black,” Ward said.

Then she saw the sign.

Across the parking lot, about 200 feet away, a sign for Precision Tune Auto Care had been ripped from its post and was twisting and turning in the air. Ward didn’t wait around to see where it would land, rushing to huddle in an interior hallway near the bathrooms along with everyone else in the K&W.

Ward described hearing the tell-tale freight train noises and other sounds of destruction. But the tornado seemingly did not damage the K&W.

“It seemed like it hopped over us,” Ward said.

When the sound ended, chaos set in.

Customers and workers from Hing Ta restaurant next door streamed into the K&W, tending their wounds and looking for family members. As Ward considered heading over to Hing Ta to help, the first emergency vehicles arrived.

A short while later, she saw the yellow and black Precision Tune sign again.

It ended up landing next to her car, shattering on the asphalt. Somehow, it didn’t cause any damage.

‘I got lucky. Some people didn’t get lucky today.’

Dean Holmes was at work Friday afternoon when he heard a tornado had damaged Hing Ta restaurant. He immediately knew that his home on Short Spoon Circle, less than half a mile away, would have suffered damage, too.

So Holmes wasn’t surprised when he came down the street about 4 p.m. and discovered a tree crew at work, the air filled with buzzing from chainsaws and beeping from a small excavator carrying loads of branches to the street.

Short Spoon Circle backs up to a golf course, its comfortable two-story homes surrounded by large, mature trees. The needles scattered across the road — and woody smell in the air — proved that many of those trees are pines.

Ribbons of blue metal were scattered throughout the neighborhood, wrapped around trees and strewn across yards. Holmes believes they must have come from one of the businesses hit by the storm.

A post in a local Facebook group said the storm had carried a sign from Hing Ta into a yard on Short Spoon Circle, but Holmes didn’t know whose.

In Holmes’ backyard, his son’s trampoline was still standing, although it was buried underneath a heap of fallen limbs. One of the two windows in his attic was broken, a set of closed blinds serving as the barrier between inside and outside.

Still, as Holmes gathered fallen leaves and pine needles Friday evening, he knew some of his neighbors had been hit much harder by the storm.

“I got lucky. Some people didn’t get lucky today,” Holmes said.

‘Worst is over’

Helene, which was downgraded to a tropical depression around 2 p.m. Sept. 27, brought heavy rainfall and strong winds to portions of North Carolina. Areas in the west of the state are dealing with flooding and dangerous road conditions in the wake of the storm.

The threat of tornadoes for central North Carolina was over by 2:30 p.m., though wind and flood advisories remain in effect, according to Jonathan Blaes, meteorologist-in-charge for that National Weather Service in Raleigh.

“The worst is over for sure,” Blaes said around 3:30 p.m. “The sun’s even poking out spots, so things are ramping down pretty quickly.”

Flooding could continue to cause issues for several days as rivers crest.

“It’s been so wet of late that much of the rain that fell is just washing and draining into creeks and streams,” Blaes said. “So that is a worry.”

The National Weather Service Forecast Office in Raleigh issued tornado warnings for most of the Triangle as the band of storms passed through the area at midday, including in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina.

Helene and its remnants have caused two deaths in North Carolina , Gov. Roy Cooper said during a morning briefing Sept. 27.

One person died Thursday, Sept. 26, following a motor vehicle crash on a flooded road in Catawba County. Another died Sept. 27 when a tree fell on a house in Charlotte.

Check Triangle power outages as Tropical Depression Helene moves through the state

A day of tornado warnings across the Triangle, with 2 twisters reported on the ground in NC