March goes out like a lion with Carolina twisters and a howling nor'easter
Hazel Taylor and his wife Yvonne joined hands in terror as the tornado funnel raced toward their mobile home in Abney, S.C. The winds tore the trailer apart, lifted up the Taylors and whirled them 100 ft. through the air like two figures from the second circle of Dante's Inferno. Rescue workers found them lying in a field, dazed but alive—and still holding hands.
The Bell family of Winnsboro, S.C., had no such luck. Ulese Bell, 52, and his son Ulese Jr. dived under a bed as the funnel approached. But Maude Bell, 48, wanted to see the storm's awful majesty. "She just walked out of the room and into the den to watch the hail fall," says Ulese. "Within three or four seconds, wham! The house just collapsed." Ulese dug his wife of 28 years out of the rubble, but she never regained consciousness.
By week's end 60 lifeless bodies had been pulled from the wreckage of small towns along a 300-mile arc through the Carolinas. Some two dozen tornadoes had touched down during a six-hour period Wednesday, leveling houses, stores and barns and tossing tractor-trailers through the air like children's toys. The death toll from tornadoes was the highest in the U.S. since April 1974, when 300 people were killed in the South and Midwest.
At least 1,050 people were injured last week in the Carolinas, and perhaps 3,000 more were left homeless. "It looked like the hand of God reaching down to crush us," said Joyce Leonard of the funnel that ripped through Mount Olive, N.C. She and her two children survived by taking cover in a ditch. Said North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt: "We have never seen a disaster like this before, and we pray to God we never see one again."
The Carolina twisters formed the front line of a monster storm system that turned into a howlingly lethal nor'easter as it moved up the Atlantic Coast. On Thursday, the tenth day of spring, and on into Friday morning, heavy, wet snow, sometimes mixed with sleet and accompanied by thunder and lightning, fell from Virginia to Maine. Up to two feet of snow piled up in central New York State. Snowplows clearing runways at Boston's Logan Airport occasionally ground to a halt when their drivers were bunded in whiteouts of whirling flakes.
Winds frequently reached hurricane velocity of 70 m.p.h. along the coast; the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in Massachusetts recorded one gust of 108 m.p.h. The winds blew down enough power lines to leave 250,000 homes and businesses, mostly in Massachusetts and Connecticut, without light or heat. After being stranded at La Guardia Airport in New York City, Walter Mondale canceled plans to campaign upstate.