A powerful tornado with winds reaching 115 mph cut a path from Montebello to East North Street on Saturday night, uprooting massive trees, tearing apart business facades and leaving thousands without power.
The National Weather Service confirmed the tornado — classified as a strong EF2 on a scale to EF5 — after an assessment Sunday afternoon.
The Botany Woods neighborhood, a community flush with aged oak trees, appeared to be ground zero, where as many as 5,000 people were without power in the concentrated area, but with very few outages or significant damage nearby.
No death or injury has been reported. Power outages had been reduced to 2,000 by Sunday morning.
Roads this morning were blocked off as crews try to repair downed power lines. The sound of chainsaws echoed through the area. Wade Hampton Boulevard was reduced to one lane.
The damage came as a series of three, distinct storm cells followed one after the other across the Upstate, kicking up high winds and pounding some areas with hail, National Weather Service meteorologist Doug Outlaw said.
One consistent theme throughout the Botany Woods area: Consistent with the evidence of a tornado, trees were blown in the same direction — eastward, where the sun was rising.
In its assessment, the weather service reported that the tornado first touched down east of the Montebello community on North Pleasantburg Drive, where it snapped some tree limbs before strengthening as it moved along the highway toward Wade Hampton.
The tornado reached its peak strength as it crossed Rutherford Road with a width of 400 yards and maximum wind speeds of 115 mph. It lifted the roof off a hotel, ripped into businesses on Wade Hampton and jumped into Botany Woods where it uprooted and debarked trees and damaged Edwards Road Baptist Church.
The tornado weakened as it crossed East North Street and lifted from land just before Hudson Road. The estimated total path was 5.5 miles.
‘We felt our ears’
Jennifer and Benji McGaha surveyed the damage to their Wildaire home Sunday morning, where a trampoline was blown onto the side of their house and trees downed through their roof.
The weather service issued a tornado warning at 9:15 p.m., and within minutes, Jennifer said she could hear the wind.
Seeing the aftermath of the deadly Easter Sunday tornadoes that ravaged Seneca and other parts of South Carolina two weekends ago, Jennifer said she grabbed her two young daughters to go downstairs for shelter.
Then, the pressure dropped — and her and her husband’s ears popped.
“We felt our ears, then after that all I heard was glass,” she said.
A tree had fallen through the dining room and sunroom.
The damage comes at a time when Jennifer is trying to keep her business – Burn Boot Camp, a gym for women – viable during the novel coronavirus economic shutdown. Her business was deemed nonessential by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, and her four locations have been closed since.
She’s holding out hope for May 11.
The virus is worse than the storm, she said.
“This is really nothing,” she said. “I have so much prep work to do to get the businesses back up and running, and now this going to take a lot of time, too. So I don’t know.”
Alyssa Lampe said she still felt her nerves rattled as she drank coffee talked with neighbors about the damage outside her apartment in the Williamsburg at Botany Woods complex. A large tree crashed into both her car and her mother’s car, and it crushed three others.
One car, belonging to Lampe’s next-door neighbor, had a bumper sticker that read “Trees Rock,” which elicited a small, dry crack of humor at the irony.
“There’s no reason to be ticked off or sad, because honestly it’s not going to make the situation better,” she said. “It is what it is at this point.”
Lampe said she heard the storm, then felt it and carried her son downstairs and sheltered in the bathroom.
“It seems like everything went by in slow motion, but it all happened so quick at the same time,” she said.
It was a relief, Lampe said, that the tree didn’t topple into the apartments, which were mere feet from the driveway.
“The wind could have pushed it just a little bit forward, and it would have been very different,” she said.
Farah Apicella was sitting in the front yard of her Wildaire home on Briarwood Street with a table set up and she and her children serving coffee and Krispy Kreme donuts for neighbors.
The McGahas’ home was in sight just down the street.
But while the back yard is a mess, Apicella otherwise suffered no significant damage and her power was back on by morning.
The good fortune gave her a chance to provide for her neighbors in a natural disaster, she said.
It’s a relief in some ways, she said, with the invisible natural disaster of the coronavirus that in contrast doesn’t allow for more-tangible actions.
“This just brought to light what’s important,” she said. “Humanity is what’s important, and taking care of people.”
by Eric Connor (2020, Apr 25 | Updated 2020, Apr 27) Greenville News
