EF1 tornado in Alexander County, North Carolina

Tornado August 17, 2021 · Alexander County, North Carolina

EF1

Rating

5.1 mi

Whole path

200 yd

Path width

$15K

Damage as recorded

NOAA records this tornado county by county. Its path ran through Iredell County → Alexander County; the totals above are for the whole tornado.

EF0EF1EF2EF3EF4EF5Unrated

The path drawn at its surveyed width of 200 yards (0.11 mi) — zoom in and the swath grows to true scale. Other tornadoes recorded nearby that day are shown faint.

What EF1 means. On the Enhanced Fujita scale, EF1 is moderate damage: roofs badly stripped, mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned, windows broken, consistent with estimated gusts of 86–110 mph. The rating comes from a survey of the worst damage after the storm, not from a wind measurement, so it says as much about what the tornado hit as about how strong it was.

What the National Weather Service wrote

NWS storm survey determined a tornado that began in western Iredell County crossed into Alexander County near Smith Farm Rd south of Stony Point. Damage was almost entirely limited to uprooted hardwoods and snapped softwoods. A couple of homes did receive very minor structural damage. The tornado appeared to lift near Lentz Rd just west of Highway 64.

The wider storm

Tropical Storm Fred made landfall in the Florida Panhandle on the 16th and lifted steadily north through Georgia and into the southern Appalachians during the 16th and throughout the 17th. Tropical moisture and strong southeast upslope flow into the Blue Ridge mountains resulted in widespread showers and some thunderstorms producing extremely heavy rainfall rates. By the time the rain tapered off by the end of the 17th, 24-hour rainfall amounts of 5-12 inches were reported across portions of the mountains and foothills. This was in addition to a small area of 5-10 inch amounts that fell across portions of the southern North Carolina mountains during the morning of the 16th. The result of this rainfall was significant to catastrophic flash flooding across portions of the French Broad and Pigeon River basins, including some of the worst flooding to impact these areas in almost 20 years. The most severe flooding occurred in portions of southern and central Haywood County, where a number of fatalities and hundreds of millions of dollars and damage occurred. In addition, a brief tornado touched down in Iredell County and tracked into Alexander County.

Began near Stony Pt (35.8460, -81.0520).

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event 982263. Narratives are written by the National Weather Service forecast office that issued the report.

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