In North Carolina, where the storm killed at least 23 people and put hundreds in the hospital, federal and local emergency workers were fanning out to the areas hardest hit and residents were scrambling to figure out how to help their neighbors or, for the dozens who lost their homes, how to start over.
In the Raleigh area, the police kept residents from a mobile home park with about 200 homes where three young siblings were killed. In sections of this city of about 400,000, several major buildings were damaged and several schools and government offices were closed for the day. Traffic into downtown Raleigh was snarled.
In rural areas, downed cellphone towers and severed utility lines were likely to hamper clean-up efforts.
The storm, which began Wednesday in Oklahoma and charged east for the rest of the week, brought winds as high as 165 miles per hour and spread challenging weather from New York to South Carolina.
Gov. Bev Perdue of North Carolina, who said she was nearly in tears touring damaged areas Sunday, said she had been in contact with President Obama and anticipated that a federal state of emergency would be declared by week’s end.
Ms. Perdue said she met with the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Sunday and would continue to tour the state Monday.
“The tornados have left and things are brighter today in North Carolina,” she told NBC’s “Today Show.” The state, she said, would survive. “We understand how to face adversity and suck it up.”
More than 90 tornadoes — what one meteorologist described as a “family” of them — hit the state on Saturday afternoon. At the Golden Corral in Sanford, N.C., a worker was washing kitchen equipment behind the restaurant when he spotted a giant black funnel-shaped cloud bearing down. He ran to his boss, Terri Rodriguez, who walked out the back door and, after dodging a piece of flying wood, saw a dark whirlwind thick with wood and metal only a couple of blocks away.
About 140 people were eating in her restaurant, many of them in front of the thick plate-glass windows that run the length of the place.
“All I could think is that I have to get them away from the glass because I knew it would just cut them in half,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “I thought, where can I put them? Then I yelled: ‘Tornado! Everyone to my kitchen!’ ”
People packed into the meat cooler and behind the stoves. Others jammed into the restrooms. Then they waited. After five minutes, Ms. Rodriguez said, the darkness lifted and she peeked out the back door.
The tornado, she said, had bounced up, skipped the Golden Corral and made a sharp turn, setting down on top of a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center a few hundred feet away.
“I could see the roof was just gone and all of the Lowe’s stuff flying up in the air,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
The Lowe’s store in Sanford, a town of about 29,000 in the center of the state, was essentially demolished. But an estimated 70 customers were saved when another fast-thinking manager herded customers and his staff into a windowless storeroom.
The storm killed at least two people in the Sanford area and injured several more, according to Sheriff Tracy Carter of Lee County.
Although April and May are the worst time for tornadoes in the South, this storm system, which had its roots in the Pacific Ocean, was unusual for its size and duration, officials said. The storm would calm itself a bit at night and then gain renewed strength with the day’s heat, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It brought flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms laced with giant balls of hail to Oklahoma on Thursday, killing two elderly sisters, before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia.
The effects from the storms could be felt as far as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area on Saturday night, when furious wind-driven rains covered roadways and produced isolated flooding.
Kim Severson reported from Atlanta. Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, Tarini Parti from Raleigh, N.C., and Joseph Berger from New York.
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