Tornado touchdown reported

Published 1:16 am Friday, April 29, 2011

By Jonathan Clayborne

A law enforcement officer reported a tornado touchdown Thursday afternoon in the Wilmar area of southwest Beaufort County, near the Craven County line, said John Pack, Beaufort County’s emergency manager.
The tornado did no apparent structural damage, and its path appeared largely confined to forest land, Pack told the Washington Daily News.
The Beaufort County locations where the most trees had fallen during Thursday’s severe storms were near the intersection of N.C. Highway 99 and Pike Road and N.C. 99 and N.C. Highway 45, Pack said.
By early evening, Pack had dispatched volunteer firefighters to perform damage assessments.
The storm that spawned the reported, unconfirmed Wilmar tornado was the same one that passed over southeast Kinston in Lenoir County and Calico in Pitt County, according to Pack.
He monitored this cell on radar for two hours before it reached Beaufort County.
“There is a long track on that one,” he said.
The National Weather Service will have to confirm whether a tornado actually touched down, he advised.
There also was a report of a funnel cloud over Midway near Bath, but the funnel didn’t reach the ground, Pack said.
With damage evidently minimal from the afternoon’s storms, and Washington Electric Utilities reporting just three homes without power early Thursday evening, Pack said he plans to put a little extra money in his church collection plate come Sunday.
“I really got worried, but it never set down,” he said of the reported Wilmar tornado. “Gee whiz, I don’t know how to explain it.”
This was the second time since April 16 that Beaufort County avoided major damage from tornadic thunderstorms.
On April 16, as tornadoes raged in counties like Bertie, Beaufort County experienced few notable storm effects.
The weather service confirmed a weak, short-lived tornado touched down in the Bath area on April 16.
That tornado knocked over one tree, causing minimal damage to a house, and left some limbs on cars.

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