Two Killed, Two Injured in South Carolina Thunderstorm

The rubble of a house under construction where two workers were killed in a thunderstorm Thursday in Pickens County, South Carolina.
(Pickens County Emergency Management. )

Two people were killed when a home under construction collapsed Thursday during a thunderstorm in South Carolina.

Two others were injured, Pickens County Emergency Management Director Denise Kwiatek told weather.com. She said witnesses described a sudden storm that moved in.

"Everyone is saying that all of a sudden they got a hard wind, then all of a sudden it started raining, there was thunder," Kwiatek said.

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The house was only partially framed and one of the walls collapsed, she added.

The incident happened at about 2 p.m. in the town of Sunset, about 30 miles northwest of Greenville.

Kwiatek said rescue workers had to pick their way through downed power lines and trees to get to the construction site.

"They had to literally cut their way in," she said.

When they arrived, other workers had already pulled the victims out of the rubble. Two were pronounced dead at the scene, and the two others were transported to a local hospital.

The Pickens County coroner identified the dead as 22-year-old Domingo Diego Nicolas and 42-year-old Sabino Juarez Lopez, both from Greenville, according to Fox Carolina.

Jonathan Erdman, weather.com senior meteorologist, said there did not appear to be any severe weather watches or warnings in the area at the time, although there were some in other parts of the state.

"It looks to be a day of simply typical PM thunderstorms in the Southeast in mid-summer," Erdman said.

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