By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, MICHAEL GOLDBERG and ROGELIO SOLIS
ROLLING FORK, Mississippi (AP) — A powerful tornado sliced a devastating path through Mississippi Friday night, killing more than two dozen people and destroying dozens of buildings while remaining grounded for more than an hour.
The tornado leveled blocks in the small Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork, reduced houses to rubble, threw cars on their sides and brought down the water tower. Local residents hunkered down in bathtubs and broke into a John Deere store, which they converted into a triage center for the wounded.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency tweeted late Saturday afternoon that the death toll had risen from 23 to 25. Four people were found missing, but dozens were also injured.
Meanwhile, other parts of the Deep South were digging in for damage caused by other suspected twisters. A man also died in Morgan County, Alabama, the local sheriff’s department said in a tweet.
“There’s nothing left,” said Wonder Bolden, who held her granddaughter Journey as she stood in front of the remains of her mother’s now-leveled trailer in Rolling Fork. “There’s just the breeze blowing, going through – just nothing.”
All Saturday, she and others walked around in a daze and shock as they smashed through rubble and fallen trees with chainsaws, searching for survivors. Power lines have been fixed under decades-old oak trees whose roots have been uprooted.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency and pledged to help rebuild as he set out to view the damage in an area dotted with vast expanses of cotton, corn and soybean fields and catfish farming ponds was. President Joe Biden also pledged federal aid, describing the damage as “heartbreaking.”
Damage in Rolling Fork was so widespread that several storm chasers — who track severe weather and often livestream dramatic funnel clouds — asked for search and rescue assistance. Others called off the chase to take the injured to hospital.
But it didn’t help that the community hospital west of the city was damaged and patients had to be relocated.
Sheddrick Bell, his partner and two daughters huddled in a closet of their Rolling Fork home for 15 minutes as the tornado ripped through. His daughters would not stop crying. He could hear his partner praying aloud next to him.
“I just thought, ‘If I can still open my eyes and move, I’ll be fine,’” he said.
Rodney Porter, who lives about 20 miles south of Rolling Fork and is a member of a local fire department, said he doesn’t know how anyone survived while providing water and fuel to families there.
“It’s like a bomb went off,” he said, describing houses stacked on top of houses. Crews even cut gas lines into the city to ensure the safety of local residents and first responders.
The National Weather Service’s warning when the storm hit was no secret: “To protect your life, HIDE COVER NOW!”
Preliminary information, based on estimates from storm reports and radar data, shows it has been on the ground for more than an hour and has traveled at least 170 miles, said Lance Perrilloux, a meteorologist at the Weather Service’s office in Jackson, Mississippi.
“That’s rare — very, very rare,” he said, attributing the long path to widespread atmospheric instability. “All the ingredients were there.”
Perrilloux said preliminary findings are that the tornado began its path of destruction southwest of Rolling Fork before continuing northeast toward the rural communities of Midnight and Silver City before moving toward Tchula, Black Hawk and Winona.
The supercell that produced the deadly twister also appeared to be producing tornadoes, causing damage in northwest and north-central Alabama, said Brian Squitieri, a severe storm forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
In Morgan County, north Alabama, a 67-year-old man who became trapped under a trailer that overturned during severe overnight storms was rescued by first responders but later died at a hospital, AL.com reported.
As survey teams work to estimate the number of tornadoes hit and their severity, the Storm Prediction Center is warning of the potential for hail, wind and possibly some tornadoes Sunday in parts of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Cornel Knight told The Associated Press that he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter were staying with a relative in Rolling Fork when the tornado struck. He said the sky was dark but “you could see the direction of every transformer that blew.”
He said the tornado hit another relative’s home across a wide cornfield from where he was. A wall in this house collapsed, trapping several people.
Royce Steed, the emergency manager in Humphreys County, where Silver City is located, compared the damage to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“It’s almost complete devastation,” he said after crews finished searching for buildings and moved on to damage assessment. “This little old town, I don’t know how many inhabitants it has, it’s more or less erased from the map.”
In town, the roof had come off at Noel Crook’s house, where he lives with his wife.
“Yesterday was yesterday and that’s over – there’s nothing I can do about it,” Crook said. “Tomorrow isn’t here yet. You have no control over it, so today I am here.”
The tornado looked so strong on radar as it approached the town of Amory, about 25 miles southeast of Tupelo, that a Mississippi weather forecaster paused to say a prayer after new radar information arrived.
“Oh man,” said WTVA’s Matt Laubhan on the live broadcast. “Dear Jesus, please help them. Amen.”
Now this town is boiling its water, a curfew in place.
More than half a dozen shelters have opened across the state to house the displaced.
“It’s a priceless feeling to see the gratitude on people’s faces because they know they’re getting a hot meal,” said William Trueblood, director of disaster relief for the Salvation Army’s Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi Division, as he addressed the Picking on the way made stocking up on the way.
He said they heard at least 19,000 homes were affected by the storm.
Still, there were signs of improvement. Power outages, which at times affected more than 75,000 customers in Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, have been reduced by a third as of noon Saturday, according to poweroutage.us.
Forecasters predicted a major tornado risk for the entire region a week in advance, said Walker Ashley, a professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University.
Tornado experts like Ashley have warned of increased risk exposure in the area as people build more.
“You mix a particularly socioeconomically vulnerable landscape with a fast-moving, long-track nighttime tornado, and disaster is going to happen,” Ashley said in an email.
___
Associated Press writer Emily Wagster Pettus in Rolling Fork, Mississippi; Michael Goldberg of Silver City, Mississippi; Jim Salter in O’Fallon, Missouri; Rick Callahan in Indianapolis; Heather Hollingsworth in Mission, Kansas; Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington; Robert Jablon in Los Angeles; Seth Borenstein of Kensington, Maryland; and Jackie Quinn in Washington, DC contributed to this report.
Source