CNN —
The year’s first deadly US tornado struck after dark Thursday, killing two people in a small East Tennessee community as the first of five back-to-back, jet stream-driven winter storms pummeled the eastern United States.
Severe weather blasted through Morgan County, killing a mother and daughter in the same home, the county Emergency Management & Homeland Security office said Friday. No ages or other identifying information were given.
Three injuries also were reported, the agency said, in a county that’s no stranger to deadly and damaging tornadoes.
The Morgan County tornado – with a preliminary intensity of EF2, according to the National Weather Service – slammed the small communities of Deer Lodge and Sunbright around 8:27 p.m. and caused “severe property damage,” according to the county. The twister in Deer Lodge had a maximum wind speed of 135 mph, a weather service survey team found – just 1 mph shy of EF3 strength, to which it still could be upgraded.
More than 100 emergency responders were deployed in the county, the emergency management office said. That included dozens from a Tennessee Highway Patrol strike team that will “look for any people that are missing, and we assist in any way we can,” said state Highway Patrol Capt. Stacey Heatherly.
An EF1 tornado, meanwhile, also hit Thursday night in the community of Thorn Hill in Grainger County, Tennessee – northeast of Knoxville and about 100 miles east by road of Deer Lodge – the weather service said. Several buildings and vehicles had moderate damage, and no one was injured, county Emergency Management Director Jeff Atkins told CNN.
As daylight arrived Friday, damage assessments in Morgan County began.
“We’ll get a better picture of what the scene looks like, how much damage there is,” emergency management spokesperson Aaron Evans told CNN affiliate WVLT. “Teams will be able to get a better grip and grasp on the area to see how many homes were damaged.”
Nearly 8 percent of Morgan County had no power at noon Friday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.
The damaging winds had arrived more than two hours after sunset, making it hard for residents to see the danger. Nighttime tornadoes are twice as likely to be deadly as those that occur during the day, a 2022 study found.
February tornadoes are not rare, but they are less common than in spring. While Tennessee averages three tornadoes in February, Thursday’s was the first in that month in Morgan County, the National Weather Service office in Morristown said. February saw 45 tornadoes last year across the country.
Several tornadoes have touched down in Morgan County since 1965, including an F3 in 2002 that killed seven people some 20 miles southeast of Deer Lodge and an EF1 tornado last year in Sunbright.
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN meteorologists Mary Gilbert and Robert Shackleford contributed to this report.
