CNN —
A suspected tornado after dark Thursday killed two people in a small East Tennessee community, local emergency managers said, as part of a winter storm that left havoc across much of 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 on Facebook. 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 suspected tornado hit the small communities of Deer Lodge and Sunbright around 8:27 p.m. and caused “severe property damage,” according to the county. The National Weather Service will send a team Friday to Deer Lodge to confirm whether the destruction was caused by a tornado, the agency told CNN.
More than 100 emergency responders are deployed in the county, the emergency management office said. That includes 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.
As daylight arrived Friday morning, damage assessments 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.”
About 8 percent of Morgan County had no power at 9:45 a.m. Friday, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.
The damaging winds 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.
If it’s confirmed a tornado caused the deaths in Morgan County, it would be the first deadly tornado event of 2025. Twenty tornadoes have been reported this year in the United States.
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.
Tennessee averages three tornadoes in February, fewer than in the traditional prime months of April and May for such events nationwide. February saw 45 tornadoes last year across the country.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
CNN meteorologists Mary Gilbert and Robert Shackleford contributed to this report.
