1984 Carolinas Tornado Outbreak - Aftermath

Aftermath

Ultimately this outbreak was responsible for 57 deaths, 1248 injuries, and confirmed tornado damage in 2 counties in Georgia, 8 counties in South Carolina, and 17 counties in North Carolina, according to data from the National Weather Service and the National Climatic Data Center records and statistical data.

This was an unusual East Coast outbreak both in its sustained intensity, and in some of its meteorological specifics. It has been noted by Grazulis and other researchers that this outbreak developed near the center of a large-scale low, in a fashion resembling the 1925 Tri-State tornado. In this outbreak, the damage path was attributed to separate tornadoes, though one storm produced (along a rough, 250+ mile track) a family of 13 large tornadoes - 10 of which produced F3 or F4 damage, which were occasionally linked by swaths of downburst damage.

This outbreak was also part of a larger storm system that was responsible for producing severe weather across a much wider area of the eastern U.S. On the previous day, weaker tornadoes had been reported in scattered locations from Louisiana to Alabama, and a thunderstorm-caused flash flood was suspected to be the cause of a train derailment in north Florida. The northern part of the same system first spawned additional severe (non-tornadic) thunderstorms, which caused 4 additional deaths in Maryland and Pennsylvania, before then dropping snow, sleet and ice across a wide area of the northeast. The thunderstorms which produced the tornado outbreak were also responsible (according to the same data) for numerous reports of large hail and wind damage in Appalachian southwest North Carolina, and numerous larger cities (Atlanta, GA, Greenville, SC, Columbia, SC, Charlotte, North Carolina, Fayetteville, NC, Raleigh, North Carolina, Suffolk, VA, Norfolk, VA) at the periphery of the outbreak, with wind damage from thunderstorms reported as far north as Delaware.