She made an instant decision—somehow, moving seemed safer. Her headlights seemed absolutely useless, and she wanted to stop, but where? Where would it be safe? On the side of the highway? People were swerving all over the road, as blind as she was. Like an ocean wave, rain poured across her windshield, obscuring nearly everything. There were long stretches during which she felt as if she were driving on instinct alone, because nothing was visible at all. Pulling the shoulder strap of the seat belt over her head, she leaned over the steering wheel, looking for the dotted lines in the road, catching a glimpse here and there. They wouldn’t be able to see her car with time enough to stop.
At times it was impossible to see the road through the windshield, but stopping meant certain disaster because of the people on the highway behind her. Rain fell so hard in places that traffic slowed to five miles an hour and Denise held the wheel with white knuckles, her face a mask of concentration. Now that she was firmly in its midst, there was little she could do. People who could took cover inside, but people on the highway, like Denise Holton, had no place to go. All at once, radio stations crackled with emergency warnings, documenting the storm’s ferocity. The system had blown in from the northwest and was crossing the state at nearly forty miles an hour. One minute it was cloudy and dark, but not unusually so in the next, lightning, gale-force winds, and blinding rain exploded from the early summer sky. Thousands of trees were felled, flash floods swept over banks of three major rivers, and lives changed forever with one fell swoop of Mother Nature. Telephone lines lay strewn across roads, transformers blazed without anyone to stop them. In all, nine documented tornadoes would touch down that evening in the eastern part of the state, destroying nearly thirty homes in the process. Others simply shook their heads and said that they knew something like that would happen sooner or later. Because it occurred in 1999, some of the most superstitious citizens considered it an omen, the first step toward the end of time.
It would later be called one of the most violent storms in North Carolina history.