Tornado strikes southern IW
Published 12:48 pm Friday, March 19, 2021
The tornado tore the shingles from the roof of Collosse Baptist Church in multiple places, leaving the underlying wood exposed to the elements.
The damage to the church roof and portico is visible from the church cemetery
Only one of the four columns supporting the church’s portico is still standing after the tornado.
One of the destroyed columns in the church’s parking lot
Another column from the church portico and the church van beneath a collapsed car port
Thomas Brown tries to patch the damage to his home’s roof with a tarp.
Loretta Holmes Brown readies an extension cord in front of her detached garage, which lost its siding as a result of the tornado.
The Browns’ next-door neighbor lost an 85-year-old pecan tree planted by his mother to a tornado that touched down on Collosse Road March 18.
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A tornado touched down in southern Isle of Wight County around 9:30 p.m. March 18.
Area resident Loretta Holmes Brown describes the event as lasting all of five minutes, but by that time, the damage was done.
She and her husband, Thomas, were outside their home on Collosse Road the next morning trying to patch the roof with a tarp and locate any salvageable items. Loretta hopes to find her husband’s glasses among the debris.
“I think he had his on his head when he came out here; we can’t find them in the house nowhere,” she said.
She and Thomas had been in the kitchen eating a steak dinner when the wind started picking up. Thomas, she said, had gone outside briefly to see if he could find a chair that had blown away.
“Soon as he did, the house started shaking and I come out and try to open the door to get him to come back in; by that time this had all blown off,” Loretta said, standing in front of where the wind had torn the siding from her detached garage.
A nearby church, Colosse Baptist, also took heavy damage. Of the four columns that had supported the church’s portico, only one remains standing. The rest lie strewn across the grass and parking lot. In several places, the sanctuary’s shingle roof has been torn away, exposing the underlying wood to the elements.
“The neighbor down the street called, Kathy, and was telling me she looked out her window … and seen the front of the church grass on fire,” Loretta said. “I guess the power line snapped off.”
While the Browns are expecting a lifeline from their homeowner’s insurance, it won’t bring back a downed 85-year-old pecan tree belonging to their next-door neighbor.
“He grew up in these houses,” she said, as cows mooed in the background. “I think he said his mother planted the trees,” Loretta said.
“The cows are probably having a fit because they’re usually out there in the pasture or the one across the street,” she added. “I don’t think they can get into either one of them right now.”
The National Weather Service had issued a tornado watch for Isle of Wight County and surrounding areas, but a warning — which indicates a tornado has been sighted either visually or by weather radar — was not issued for Isle of Wight. The Browns also signed up to receive Isle of Wight County’s IW Alert text messages, but never received warning of an imminent tornado.
According to NWS Meteorologist Eswar Iyer, the reason one was never issued for Isle of Wight was because “it happened very quickly, and then it went away very quickly.”
NWS surveyors were on-site the morning of March 19. They ruled it an EF-0, with a maximum wind speed of 85 miles per hour — the strongest EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale by press deadline.
