MOYOCK, N.C. — Many Moyock neighbors were out Wednesday cleaning up branches, leaves and even parts of their backyard fences after Tuesday evening's severe weather in the area. Damaged fences were a common sight in the area as News 3 saw at least three neighbors with damage.
"I've been through several hurricanes throughout the years, and that appeared to be worse than some of the hurricanes. It was instant," said Richard Richardson, who has lived in Moyock for 21 years.
Richardson was watching TV when he got the tornado warning alert on his phone. From there, all he could do is watch as the storm damaged trees and a portion of his backyard fence.
"It's impressive that there wasn't more damage. Those winds were hard to describe. You literally had to see those winds for yourself to see what they were doing," said Richardson.
Broken fences, downed trees and power lines are all that remained from the severe weather Wednesday, with crews hard at work on the power lines throughout the day. With a tornado warning issued, Jeff Orrock, National Weather Service Wakefield meteorologist in charge, came down Wednesday to investigate.
"It wasn't like it was one individual storm, you had this really massive line of storms, and they get these little kinks in them. So basically that's where it starts to spin along the line. We issued the tornado warning, but it looks like it actually stayed off the ground," said Orrock.
Orrock explained what happened.
"You had a really big blast of straight-line wind, about I'd say 50 to 70 mile per hour wind. The other thing that's really telling here is that it covers a really broad area, the area of wind damage that we're seeing, it's mostly light damage, it's about 300 to 500 yards wide. It's not like a tight path, so that tells us we don't have a tornado on the ground, but we do have some pretty impressive wind damage," said Orrock.
Orrock also told News 3 that the weather event happening near an open field without anything to obstruct it played a role as well.
"The field is where you get the acceleration. So those power poles were downwind from a very large open field, so you will get the wind accelerating, because there's no friction, you don't have any trees, so the wind will actually accelerate across fields like that. I think that's what happened when it hit the power lines, it just accelerated across the field, probably went from 50 mile an hour wind close to 70, and just snapped all those power poles," said Orrock.
Richardson is already in the process of replacing his fence and is just happy that the damage from the storm wasn't worse, especially from the downed power lines.
"To see it not fall on cars or anything like that, everyone's fortunate. So it's good that no one was hurt from the storm," said Richardson.
All neighbors who were impacted by the power outage from the downed lines have had their power restored, according to a Dominion spokesperson.
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