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Severe thunderstorms which may have included a tornado caused damage to a house Thursday in Cottonville.

According to Michael Roark, director of Stanly County Emergency Services, units were dispatched to a house on Hardy Road after storms had blown a roof off a house.

When units arrived, Roark said, between one-quarter to one-third of the tin roof had been blown off the house, along with damage to an outbuilding.

Jonathan Blaes, the meteorologist in charge in the Raleigh office of the National Weather Service, said teams will be onsite at the Cottonville residence and others in nearby Anson County to examine the sites to see what type of storm it was.

Blaes said the storms “were definitely rotating, so it was a little bit of a special day in that tornadoes were certainly more likely then any kind of typical summertime day.”

He said just because the thunderstorm was rotating “does not always mean that the damage on the ground was caused by a tornado.”

Ryan McIntyre, whose mother lived in the house, said she heard the loud wind and saw the front porch lift up into the air, forcing her into a closet.

McIntyre said his mother was supposed to pick up her grandson from day care when she called him to say she was in the closet because of the storm.

“After things settled down, she came out and found all that,” McIntyre said, including trees being blown into a neighbor’s pasture.

He said his mother was upset by the storm, but was not injured.

The storm also did some interior damage to the house, McIntyre said. Units which responded helped put up a tarp to protect the rest of the house from additional rain water coming in.