© AP Photo/The Daily Reflector, Aileen Devlin
People stand among the remains of a mobile home Saturday, April 26, 2014, that was destroyed when a tornado touched down along Black Jack-Simpson Road in Greenville, N.C. on Friday, April 25, 2014.
People stand among the remains of a mobile home Saturday, April 26, 2014, that was destroyed when a tornado touched down along Black Jack-Simpson Road in Greenville, N.C. on Friday, April 25, 2014.
There were also an undetermined number of "walking wounded" who went to the hospital, Beaufort County Emergency Coordinator John Pack told AccuWeather.com.
"The good news is that nobody died. That's remarkable in itself," Pack said.
The National Weather Service at Newport/Morehead City, N.C. reports that an EF-3 tornado was confirmed along Whichards Beach in Friday night's storm.
The tornado was an EF-0 when it touched down near Chocowinity but grew in strength to an EF-3 with an estimated wind speed of 150 mph by the time it reached Whichards Beach, the weather service said.
Comment:
Oregon Dunes "tree holes"
I've run into holes like these while hiking across the Oregon Dunes. One explanation for the holes is that ancient trees that were buried by the sand that decomposed sometimes leave these deep, narrow holes and the holes can persist, under a layer of sand for a very, very long time. I stepped onto such a patch of sand and the sand gave way and I was suddenly in sand up over my knee. When I pulled my foot out and looked down the hole I could not see the bottom. I think I joked to my hiking partner about the holes being created by baby sandworms (the author of Dune, Frank Herbert, said he came up with the original idea for the novel while hiking in the Oregon dunes.) I actually found a reference in another locally-inspired novel that might have even specifically referred to one kind of dune tree hole:
In Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey's fictional novel about a rough logging town on the Oregon coast, a character walking in the dunes at night plummets into the shaft of a buried hollow tree - called a devil's stovepipe.
About "tree holes" in the dunes
About the Oregon Dunes & Frank Herbert connection