NC officials: Fatal twister could have been worse

"We just got inside the door frame when I was pushed inside ... then everything went," said Parker, tears welling in her eyes as she described the chaotic scene during a brief discussion with reporters near her demolished home in central North Carolina.

Neighbors helped the 36-year-old Parker and her two children -a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old -out of the ruins that used to be their home, and the three survived with barely a scratch.

"We're blessed," she said.

The powerful storm system that swept through the Southeast and the mid-Atlantic states late Thursday and into early Friday produced two tornados. In North Carolina, the storm left one person dead, several injured and scores of homes and businesses damaged.

Authorities did not immediately release the name of the man who died when a small truck overturned in a parking lot just west of Greensboro. They said three others were injured, one when the storm knocked down a wall at a distributing business, and two others when their vehicles flipped off the road.

In Greensboro, some homes and businesses on the outskirts of town were damaged, and two FedEx airplanes were pitched off the tarmac and into an airport construction site. No one was injured at the airport.

And while officials scoured through wreckage when daylight arrived Friday, they found no new injuries or fatalities.

"I thought we were going to come back to something a lot worse than what we have out there," said David Douglas, assistant chief for the Greensboro Fire Department. "It could have been much worse than it was."

The National Weather Service reported preliminary indications that the Greensboro tornado clocked in as a category EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, meaning the funnel was packing winds between 111 and 135 mph.