A man walks his dog past a tree that fell and blocked a side street in Raleigh, North Carolina April 17, 2011. Tornadoes tore through the Carolinas on Saturday afternoon as the death toll rose to 20 people from the storms across the southern United States over the last three days. [Photo/Agencies]

One of the volunteers who scoured the rubble was an Iraq war veteran who told Lamb he was stunned by what he saw.

"He did two tours of duty in Iraq and the scene was worse than he ever saw in Iraq, that's pretty devastating," Lamb said.

The county was devastated by flooding last October with the water submerging the county seat of Windsor, damaging 200 homes and businesses. No one lost their lives in the flooding.

Scenes of destruction across the South looked eerily similar in many areas.

At one point, more than 250,000 people went without power in North Carolina before emergency utility crews began repairing downed lines. But scattered outages were expected to linger at least until Monday.

Among areas hit by power outages was Raleigh, a bustling city of more than 400,000 people where some of the bigger downtown thoroughfares were blocked by fallen trees early Sunday.

At the Cedar Creek Mobile Home Park in Dunn, one woman died while another man was critically hurt when a car was blown atop him outside his home, said Police Chief BP Jones. More than half the 40 homes in the park were unrecognizable piles of debris Sunday morning.

In Bladen County, the dead included a 92-year-old father and his 50-year-old son. They were killed when they were thrown from their adjacent mobile homes in the town of Ammon. A 52-year-old woman also died in Ammon, and a 50-year-old man died in Bladenboro - both also thrown from their homes, County Medical Examiner Kenneth Clark said.

Bladen County emergency management chief Bradley Kinlaw said 82 homes were damaged and 25 destroyed in Saturday's storms. The path of destruction was narrow - but at least six miles (10 kilometers) long, he said.

In Sanford, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Raleigh, a busy shopping district was pummeled by the storms, with some businesses losing rooftops in what observers described as a ferocious tornado. The Lowe's Home Improvement Center in Sanford looked flattened, with jagged beams and wobbly siding sticking up from the pancaked entrance.

Remarkably, no one was seriously injured at the Lowe's, thanks to a quick-thinking manager who herded more than 100 people into a back area with no windows to shatter.

"It was really just a bad scene," said Jeff Blocker, Lowe's regional vice president for eastern North Carolina. "You're just amazed that no one was injured."