Alamance man, mom hide in tub as tornado rips home apart

By Kasey Cunningham and Gilbert Baez, WRAL reporters

Snow Camp, N.C. — An Alamance County man spend Monday afternoon picking through debris that had been his home until an early morning tornado demolished it.

Javhel Glover, 20, said he was awakened Monday by an alarm on his phone indicating a tornado warning, but he admits that he turned the alarm off and went back to sleep. As t he winds outside began to howl louder, he said he got his mother up and went with her and their dog, Zeus, into the bathroom, where they rode out the storm in a bathtub.

“Just stay alive,” Glover said of his thoughts at the time. “Just stay positive, stay alive and, hopefully, we’ll make it out.”

The tornado ripped the roof off the house as rains poured in. Nearby treetops were sheared off.

Glover described the experience as “super scary.”

“It’s really just a lot of wind and then debris falling everywhere,” he said. “[I was] just hoping it doesn’t fall on your head.”

The family escaped unharmed, but many of their belongings, including a portion of Glover’s prized vinyl record collection, were destroyed.

“We’ll get past this,” he said. “The world is kind of crazy right now, but after all this passes, it will be fine.”

Storms cause damage across Sandhills

The storm system knocked down trees and caused sporadic power outages across the Sandhills region.

Gerald Hayes said he was getting ready to walk out the door of his Moore County home when the wind started picking up.

“I was watching Channel 5 news, and I saw were they said there was something happening in Southern Pines, and they were widening out to Whispering Pines, and about that time, I heard trees start cracking,” Hayes said.

The trunk of a tree brushed the side of the house, but many of the branches ripped holes through the roof.

“We were just so scared,” Elizabeth Hayes said. “It knocked pictures off the wall, light fixtures – busted light fixtures. There was water coming through the ceiling.”

Strong winds also peeled back the canopy at a nearby convenience store, and several windows at Keith’s Hardware Store in downtown Carthage were blown out.

In Cumberland County, a large oak tree wiped out the front of a house at the intersection of Graham Road and Silvertone Court.

Joseph and Teresa Humphery, who live across the street, said they heard the tree when it fell and ran to see what happened.

“I talked with the gentleman that was outside. I asked him if he was all right. He said, ‘Yeah, everybody’s all right,'” Joseph Humphery said.

In addition to ripping down trees, several communities in Moore and Cumberland County were without power. At the peak of the storm, about 15,000 customers were without power in Cumberland County, but most customers were back online by Monday evening.