‘I was terrified.’ NC woman captures time-lapse video of funnel cloud near her home
Birds circled confusedly in the sky.
Mokie, an Australian shepherd-poodle, jumped up and down on a couch, more hyper than ever, though she never whimpered or barked.
“Animals know before we do,” Cramerton resident Patricia “Ollie” Frye told The Charlotte Observer on Friday about the instincts of animals for bad weather.
Then her daughter, 11th-grader Lilian Givens, called from South Point High School in nearby Belmont.
“’They won’t let us leave,’” Lilian said.
The school was on lockdown after a tornado warning Wednesday afternoon.
Frye also saw the warning, which included parts of Gaston County.
Instead of immediately running for cover — she did that with Mokie moments later — Frye placed smartphones on windowsills in her living room and dining room and pointed their cameras outside.
She figured she’d send the clips to the National Weather Service as evidence of a tornado. Plus, she enjoys filming such outdoor scenes.
“Certainly seemed like one to me,” she said. “I was terrified.”
Winds felt ‘hurricane-ish’
Frye stood on her screened back porch, “and that’s when I saw it,” she said. “It was coming at me.”
“It was a funneling cloud, with rotation,” she said. “You could see the sky rotating.”
She opened her basement door, beside the living room.“Mokie, let’s go.”
And down they went.
She felt the house shake, but she and Mokie made it only a few down when “suddenly it was gone,” she said.
“The cell came right over the house,” Frye said. “When it came past me, I could not see anything outside.”
Sheets of rain continued to fall after the cloud passed, she said, and “the winds felt ‘hurricane-ish.’”
“They felt like Hurricane Hugo’s, a little bit.”
Frye grew up in neighboring Belmont and lived there when the deadly 1989 category 5 hurricane caused destruction across the Charlotte area and the Carolinas.
Frye also sent copies of her video to the Observer.
Weather service to review the video
National Weather Service meteorologist Jake Wimberley said Friday that his office, in Greer, South Carolina, received Frye’s email with the video clips attached. The NWS will review the film, he said.
The NWS on Thursday confirmed two EF-1 tornadoes in Gaston County during Wednesday’s storms that killed two people in the Charlotte region.
Neither tornado path entered Cramerton, Wimberley said. The nearest one dissipated near McAdenville, 2.3 miles north of Cramerton, he said.
Was the rotation captured by Frye a separate funnel cloud? That will be part of the NWS investigation, Wimberley said.
He complimented Frye for the safe way she captured the images, keeping herself from the windows. Always avoid windows during storms, Wimberley said.
“That’s following the best protocol,” Wimberley said about Frye’s actions.
During severe thunderstorms just before 4 p.m. Wednesday, a tree fell on a car, killing a person inside, at the intersection of Dixon and South New Hope roads, according to an NWS report. That’s a mile southeast of downtown Gastonia.
And a 24-year-old woman died early Thursday when she was driving too fast for weather conditions and crashed in Caldwell County, the State Highway Patrol reported.
On Friday, the weather service confirmed a third tornado. That one formed just after midnight Thursday in rugged terrain between Cullowhee and Glenville in Jackson County in the N.C. mountains, according to an NWS report.
Related to a king of England
Frye’s family came from Scotland as part of the Stewart clan and has lived in Belmont since before the Revolutionary War, she said. King Edward III of England is her 18th (generation) great-grandfather, she said her search on Ancestry.com revealed.
‘Head in the clouds’
“I love nature,” Frye said. “But I’d never seen anything like this before.”
She works as a moving-light technician with local chapter 322 of the IATSE union — International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.
She tours nationally three times a year with Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli.
The rest of the time, she’s a local stage hand with the union, helping on such productions as Charlotte Ballet’s current “Swan Lake.” Performances continue through Sunday, May 12, at Knight Theater in uptown Charlotte.
She likes spending her off-work hours “with my head in the clouds,” she quipped.
