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Wind-whipped waves slammed into coastal towns in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, forcing thousands of people to leave beachfront homes by boat or even in the buckets of bulldozers. Atlantic City was newly isolated from the New Jersey mainland for five hours by waves that flooded highways, tore away a 100-ft. section of the Boardwalk and left the lobbies of three gambling casinos sodden from ocean water. Scores of people who had been evacuated from their homes sat on the red carpets of the city's mammoth convention center, drinking coffee and nibbling sandwiches supplied by a New Jersey food concession; one casino served ribs and asparagus to 100 of the temporarily homeless. On Cape Cod's Nauset Beach, the 473-ft. Maltese freighter Eldia rammed aground. A Coast Guard helicopter flew through 40-to-60-m.p.h. winds to carry the Eldia 's 23 crew members to safety, two at a time. A dozen deaths throughout the Northeast were attributed to the storm.
Nowhere, however, was the terrible power of weather so destructive as in the Carolinas. Tornadoes are among the most awesome of all natural phenomena. Their surface winds have been known to reach 400 m.p.h. The air pressure in the center of a twister drops so low so fast that buildings sometimes explode under the force of the normal air pressure contained within their walls. The cause of tornadoes seems to be an unusual disparity between cold temperatures in the upper air and warm ones near the ground. The warm air rushes upward with exceptional power and has a whirling motion imparted to it by the rotation of the earth. The centrifugal force of the whirling creates low pressure and suction at the center in an upside-down version of the whirlpool formed by water pouring down a bathtub drain.
Last week's Carolina twisters skipped along erratically, touching here and there, missing big cities by pure chance but devastating small towns and farming areas into the northeast corner of North Carolina. The first tornado touched down in Newberry, S.C., at 5:15 p.m. Peggy Wilson, owner of the Wilson Dance Academy on Main Street, was giving a lesson to seven children when, she recalls, the sky took on an eerie greenish hue. "A few seconds after that I heard what sounded like a million trains coming. The children ran to us and grabbed us around the legs and started screaming 'I don't want to die!' " Wilson and her sister Linda Busby herded the children under a staircase, where they survived as the academy exploded in a hail of broken brick. Says Busby: "The pressure was so strong from the wind that my eyelids were peeled away from my eyes."
Truck Driver Norwood McClain, 41, pulled into a truck stop Wednesday evening to phone his home near Winnsboro, S.C. His son Jeromy, 14, answered and suddenly shouted,' "Daddy, the house is shaking!" Said McClain: "I told him to get out. That's the last I heard of him." Jeromy turned up in a hospital in critical condition with broken back, arms and ribs. On Thursday his father poked through the rubble of his home, too heartbroken to pick up some family pictures he found. Said McClain, pointing to an area 30 yds. away: "I lost my 2½-year-old son over there. They found him in a ditch."