Tornadoes in Southeast cause extensive damage
Deadly storms continued to tear across the central and eastern U.S. on Thursday, unleashing tornadoes, large hail and inflicting widespread damage, especially across Tennessee and North Carolina where at least three people were killed and at least a dozen injured.
The multistate outbreak of heavy storms and tornadoes began Monday.
One person died in the storm Wednesday after a tree fell on a car, according to officials in Gaston County, outside Charlotte, North Carolina. Another person was rescued and taken to the hospital.
Hazardous weather caused severe damage to several towns and left nearly 45% of customers without power, prompting the county to declare a state of emergency.
In northeast Tennessee, a 22-yearold man died after a tree fell on his vehicle Wednesday morning, authorities said. In Maury County, about 50 miles southeast of Nashville, a tornado left one person dead and injured four others, including one person who was hospitalized in serious condition.
Tennessee officials conducted rescues through the night as people were trapped in floodwaters. By early Thursday, between 5 and 7 inches of rain had fallen in some part of the state. At least five local streams rose 6 to 8 feet in a matter of hours, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Nashville International Airport was temporarily under a ground stop.
The National Weather Service also confirmed two tornadoes in Alabama on Wednesday night.
More than 150,000 households and businesses remained without power across parts of Tennessee and North Carolina on Thursday morning, according to a USA TODAY outage tracker. Other states also reported high outage totals, including Georgia with 42,000 outages and South Carolina with 32,000. Storms almost entirely knocked out power in Gilmer County, Georgia, and Reynolds County, Missouri.
Contributing: Doyle Rice, Dinah Voyles Pulver, Minnah Arshad, USA TODAY; Iris Seaton, Citizen-Times; Juan Buitrago, Diana Leyva, The Tennessean; Rebecca Sitzes, Shelby Star