A tornado nobody initially counted has been confirmed near Raleigh-Durham International Airport, pushing North Carolina's total from last month's Isaias-remnant outbreak to 14 touchdowns statewide. The newly identified twister was rated EF-0, with estimated winds of 80 mph, and it struck a heavily wooded area near Interstate 40 and I-540, between Pleasant Grove Church Road and Aviation Parkway.
The National Weather Service confirmed the count, according to CBS17, with 10 of the 14 tornadoes landing in the Raleigh-Durham region. The outbreak was tied to the remnants of Isaias as they swept across the state last month. The newly detected tornado near RDU was brief even by tornado standards — on the ground for less than a minute, traveling just 0.16 mile and reaching a maximum width of 30 yards, per the same CBS17 report.
Investigators didn't spot the tornado through storm reports or eyewitness accounts. Instead, downed trees were identified through high-resolution satellite imagery, which was used to produce the new post-analysis report confirming the additional touchdown, the outlet noted. That kind of after-the-fact detection work is why the Raleigh-area total has crept upward since the storm first passed through.
Other Touchdowns Scattered Across the East
Beyond the Triangle, four other tornadoes touched down that day in Craven, Duplin and Columbus counties, according to the CBS17 report. Those additional twisters rounded out what the station described as the most tornadoes spawned in a single day for the area tied to remnants of a tropical system.
Not every outlet has landed on the same numbers. An earlier report from WRAL put the total at 13 tornadoes statewide, which the station said broke the record for most tornadoes to hit North Carolina in a single day from a tropical system. Meanwhile, WLOS reported that eight of the 14 tornadoes occurred around the Triangle area, including Raleigh and Durham — a different split than the 10-of-14 figure CBS17 attributed to the National Weather Service. The available reporting doesn't explain the discrepancies between the counts.
How This Outbreak Stacks Up Against 2020
CBS17's report framed the new total against the last time Isaias hit North Carolina. The station said the newly confirmed 14-tornado outbreak was two more than the 2020 version of Isaias produced for eastern North Carolina that year. A 2020 CBS17 report on that earlier storm said North Carolina saw 12 tornadoes spawned from Isaias, including an EF-3 in Bertie County that killed two people.
Broader counts for the 2020 storm vary depending on the source. A separate CBS17 report on the 2020 storm put the overall Isaias tornado total at 35, while a tropical cyclone report from the National Hurricane Center says the storm spawned 39 tornadoes, some causing extensive to catastrophic damage. The available evidence doesn't reconcile those differing counts or explain how each tally was compiled.
For comparison, WLOS also pointed to a much smaller, unrelated event: a cold front on October 14, 2015, that produced three brief EF-0 tornadoes across the western Carolinas, with two touching down in Upstate South Carolina and one in western North Carolina. That outbreak was far more contained than last month's storm, underscoring just how unusual it was for a tropical system's remnants to spin up more than a dozen tornadoes across the eastern part of the state in a single day.
