There were warnings about possible tornadoes Saturday afternoon, Jan. 11, and strong wind gusts up to 67 mph did hit the area with the only damage being downed limbs.
But at 2:11 p.m. a micro-burst, a down draft or a small funnel cloud struck on North Main Street and nearby West Juniper Avenue, toppling huge oaks and pines and pulling down power lines.
Amazingly, particularly to those who remember the carnage Hurricane Fran and its winds wreaked on North Main homes back in 1996, the trees all toppled away from homes and no one in town was injured.
One Wake Forest family was touched, however. Cheryl Harrison was fatally injured when a tree fell on her and her husband and son as they walked along a Raleigh greenway near Dunn Road. Harrison is the sister of attorney Kathryn Drake and sister-in-law to former town commissioner Frank Drake. See the obituary in this week’s edition. Harrison’s husband and son were slightly injured.
“At the start of the outage we had about 1,600 customers out!” Public Works Director Mike Barton said in an email.
“All but a handful were back on by 4 p.m. the remaining [customers] getting on by 2 a.m. Sunday.
“The hardest hit area was West Juniper Avenue where tall pine tree fell from across the street and across a three-phase line, causing the cross arms to break on about five poles. We also had about five trees fall on North Main, two of which caused both lanes to be blocked until we cleared them up.”
