Storm spawned tornado

With the trees bending, limbs flying and rain blowing sideways, she jumped from the pickup truck where she sat waiting out the storm. She opened the front door to the house, called out, "Don, my new car is going to get all scratched up," and turned back to look.

Just like that, the truck's cab had been smashed. A huge live oak in the yard had cracked in two and fallen across it.

"I mean, I'm not trying to be melodramatic," she said. "But look where the limb is over the steering wheel. What was that? Ten seconds?"

A freak tornado spun up from a thunderstorm Saturday that strengthened out of nowhere and tore along Turkey Creek in Hanahan, shattering trees and kicking over power lines and poles for a mile in the neighborhoods on either bank.

On Monday, crews were pulling huge limbs off roofs and piling walls of debris along the road. But the damage was confined to neighborhoods right around the creek, so dramatically that people a block or two away had no more than a few fallen branches.

On Monday, the city didn't have any damage estimates yet. Its crews were all out on the streets cleaning up.

"This is the worst we've had since Hugo," Mayor Minnie Blackwell said as she picked up debris and tree limbs with her daughter, Madison, in the park across from Hanahan High School. "These are some of our older neighborhoods where a lot of elderly people live. People say, 'Oh, well, Hanahan has had a little storm.' But when something like this hits us, it's major."

The tornado, spun from a burst in a storm with hurricane-force winds of more than 80 mph, left a swirling pattern of twists in the marsh grasses along Turkey Creek for less than a mile. The twister vanished as quickly as it formed, leaving a swath 40 yards wide in the marsh.

Most of the damage came from winds in the storm rather than the tornado, said meteorologist Jon Jelsema with the National Weather Service, Charleston.

"It went from being hardly a thunderstorm at all to being a severe thunderstorm and then a tornadic thunderstorm within 10 minutes," Jelsema said. "It's not that uncommon, but those tornados are very difficult to detect."

Nearly 30 electric power poles fell or were stripped by falling trees along the storm's route, and 3,000 customers lost power, said Scott Grigg, South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. public affairs supervisor. More than a dozen crews worked to restore power, but it took until Sunday morning to get power back along Murray Drive and most of Sunday to get power back to all the homes.

Hanahan took the worst shot from the storms that pelted rain and blasted lightning strikes across the Lowcountry. A funnel cloud crossed Dorchester Road outside Summerville but apparently didn't touch down. The Charleston peninsula flooded in spots. Trees and power lines were reported down from Jamestown to Jedburg and hail was reported as close to the coast as James Island.

HANAHAN—Hail began pelting the new Honda in the driveway in front of her. So, Janice Metts decided to dash for her house. That may have saved her life.

The swarm of storms and tornados was spawned by the collision of a weather front and the sea breeze.

Metts stood Monday with her hands on her hips surveying her husband's crushed truck in her yard. She went out for five minutes to bring a neighbor's dog back home after dog-sitting. She would have walked but a shower had started. By the time she got home, it was a deluge. The oak was one of eight trees that broke and dropped around her house.

"The power line fell across the road and (electricity) was arcing. Trees fell all around our fence all over the place," she said. "But you know, all this can be fixed. Nothing fell on our house. I can only say I was blessed."