The worker had been washing kitchen equipment behind Golden Corral, a popular restaurant in Sanford, N.C., when he spotted a giant black funnel cloud bearing down. It was one of more than 90 tornadoes — what one meteorologist described as a “family” of them — that hit the state on Saturday.
He ran to Ms. Rodriguez, who walked out the back door. She dodged a piece of flying wood, and then she saw it: a dark funnel cloud thick with wood and metal only a couple of blocks away.
About 140 people were eating in her restaurant, many of them in front of the thick plate-glass windows that run the length of the place.
“All I could think is that I have to get them away from the glass because I knew it would just cut them in half,” she said in an interview on Sunday. “I thought, where can I put them? Then I yelled: ‘Tornado! Everyone to my kitchen!’?”
People packed into the meat cooler and behind the stoves. Others jammed into the restrooms. Then they waited. After five minutes, Ms. Rodriguez said, the darkness lifted and she peeked out the back door.
The tornado, she said, had bounced up, skipped the Golden Corral and made a sharp turn, setting down on top of a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center a few hundred feet away.
“I could see the roof was just gone and all of the Lowe’s stuff flying up in the air,” Ms. Rodriguez said.
The Lowe’s store in Sanford, a town of about 29,000 in the center of the state, was essentially demolished. But an estimated 70 customers were saved when another fast-thinking manager herded customers and his staff into a windowless storeroom.
The storm killed at least two people in the Sanford area and injured several more, according to Sheriff Tracy Carter of Lee County.
A string of tornadoes that began Thursday night in Oklahoma left of a trail of death and millions of dollars in damage from the middle of America to the Eastern Seaboard. But they reached their zenith on Saturday night in North Carolina.
Officials said the storms killed at least 43 people and injured hundreds more. No damage estimates were immediately available, but they will most certainly run into the tens of millions of dollars.
Although April and May are the worst time for tornadoes in the South, this storm system, which had its roots in the Pacific Ocean, was unusual for its size and duration, officials said. The storm would calm itself a bit at night and then gain renewed strength with the day’s heat, said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It brought flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms laced with giant balls of hail to Oklahoma on Thursday, killing two elderly sisters, before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Virginia.
The effects from the storms could be felt as far as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area on Saturday night, when furious wind-driven rains covered roadways and produced isolated flooding.
When the system hit North Carolina on Saturday night, it spawned a record 92 tornadoes in the state, killing at least 22 people and injuring more than 80 others. At least 14 deaths were in Bertie and Hertford Counties, in a rural northeast corner of the state where cotton, tobacco, peanuts, corn and soybeans anchor the economy.
“Normally the storms that hit here are pretty severe but smaller in size,” said Cal Bryant, the editor of The Roanoke-Chowan News Herald, which serves a part of North Carolina that was most severely hit. “Now they are thinking it may have been one big tornado. They’re trying to find where it stopped, and they haven’t got there yet.”
Mr. Bryant, who spent Sunday with survivors in Bertie County, said rescue crews were going house to house looking for dead or injured residents and assessing damage. At least 60 houses, some of them mobile homes, were destroyed, and he expected the count to go higher.
Kim Severson reported from Atlanta. Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, Tarini Parti from Raleigh, N.C., and Joseph Berger from New York.
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