Wild Videos Of Tornados Crashing Through South Carolina High Schools

Serious damage at a South Carolina high school after a tornado
struck it this month. Nobody was inside when this twister
hit on a Saturday night. 

Two South Carolina high schools were hit by tornadoes this month, but luckily in one case, nobody was in the school. In the second case, the twister hit the parking lot, but missed the actual high school building.

Dramatic vidoes of both tornadoes are at the bottom of this post.

Let's start with the high school parking lot tornado.  

It was an unexpected one, but it did yield some dramatic video, and a case lesson on how small, relatively weak tornadoes can be potentially deadly.

In this case, nobody was hurt when the tornado went through a high school parking lot, damaging dozens of cars. The twister tossed a few on top of each other.

You might have to watch the video at the bottom of this post  a couple times to catch the narrow funnel cloud going across the parking lot and tossing the vehicles. But it is something to behold.

As is often the case with tornadoes, this one is pretty narrow, so many of the vehicles in the parking lot do just fine.

The tornado goes to prove that it doesn't take a particularly large or strong tornado to put people in danger.

The tornado was an EF-1, with winds of 90 mph.  It hit the campus of Loris High School in Horry County South Carolina on Monday, according to numerous news reports, including television station WPDE  in Florence, South Carolina.

About 75 cars were damaged, and some of them were damaged, WPDE reported. 

Still, since classes were in session, we're glad the tornado didn't go through the high school instead. It would have only damaged part of the high school, but the part were students would have been in could have been really in trouble.

There was no tornado warning in effect at the time.  Meteorologists at the nearest National Weather Service office were tracking the parent thunderstorm and detected some weak rotation within it. But that rotation didn't seem strong enough to set off a tornado.

But it did. The rotation was just enough to set off a relatively weak tornado in a place where it could have hurt people.

This is another reason why you should take severe thunderstorms seriously.  You'll often hear a mention of weak rotation within the oncoming storm. Much more often than not, when the rotation is weak, you won't get a tornado. But in the case of Loris County, South Carolina, and I am sure many other instance it did. And it could happen any time.

This was the second time within a week that a tornado struck a South Carolina high school. On January 11, a  EF-2 tornado with winds up to 130 mph hit North Central High School in Kershaw County, South Carolina. Security cameras there yielded even more dramatic videos than the parking lot tornado.

Because it was a weekend, nobody was in the school, so nobody was hurt.

Which is a good thing Since so many people are in schools, they can be dangerous places to be in tornadoes.

Back on March 1, 20017 an EF-4 tornado with top winds of 170 mph hit Enterprise High School in Alabama, killing eight students and injuring 50.

Here's the video:



Here's surveillance video of another high school hit at night a few days before the video of the one above in South Carolina. Glad nobody was in there. Hallways turned into dangerous wind tunnels: