‘There’s nothing left’: Tornadoes kill 23
ROLLING FORK, Miss. — A powerful tornado cut a devastating path of at least 170 miles Friday night through parts of the Deep South, killing at least 23 people in Mississippi and obliterating dozens of buildings as it stayed on the ground for more than an hour.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said in a Twitter post that search and rescue teams from local and state agencies were deployed to help victims impacted by the tornadoes. The agency confirmed early Saturday 23 people had died, four were missing and dozens were injured.
A few minutes later, the agency warned the casualty toll could go higher, tweeting: “Unfortunately, these numbers are expected to change.”
Throughout Saturday morning, people walked around dazed and in shock as they broke through debris and fallen trees with chain saws, searching for survivors. Power lines were pinned under decades-old oaks, their roots torn from the ground.
Wonder Bolden was holding her granddaughter, Journey, while standing outside the remnants of her mother’s nowleveled mobile home in Rolling Fork on Saturday morning.
“There’s nothing left,” the 44-year-old hospice worker said, looking out at the car that had landed on top of a diner that used to be 60 feet away from her driveway. “There’s just the breeze that’s running, going through just nothing.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves tweeted Saturday that he was headed to the town, describing what happened as a tragedy.
Video shot as daylight broke in the town showed houses reduced to rubble, cars flipped on their sides and trees stripped of their branches. Occasionally, in the midst of the wreckage, a home would be spared, seemingly undamaged.
The National Weather Service sent crews to survey the tornado, but preliminary information based on estimates from storm reports and radar data indicate it was on the ground for more than an hour, said Lance Perrilloux, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Jackson, Miss., office.
“That’s rare — very, very rare,” he said, attributing the wide path to widespread atmospheric instability. “All the ingredients were there.”
Perrilloux said preliminary findings are that the tornado began its path of destruction just 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 National Weather Service issued an alert Friday night as the storm was hitting that didn’t mince words: “To protect your life, TAKE COVER NOW!”
Sheddrick Bell, his partner and two daughters crouched in a closet of their Rolling Fork home for 15 minutes as the tornado barreled through. The family listened as the tornado winds tore through, bursting windows and toppling trees. His daughters wouldn’t stop crying. He could hear his partner praying out loud beside him.
“I was just thinking, ‘If I can still open my eyes and move around, I’m good,’” he said.
Cornel Knight said that he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter were at a relative’s house in Rolling Fork when the tornado struck. He said the sky was dark but “you could see the direction from every transformer that blew.”
Knight said he watched from a doorway until the tornado was, he estimated, less than a mile away. Then he told everyone in the house to take cover in a hallway. He said the tornado struck another relative’s house across a wide corn field from where he was. A wall in that home collapsed and trapped several people inside.
Royce Steed, the emergency manager in Humphreys County, where Silver City is located, likened the damage to the deadly 2011 Tuscaloosa—Birmingham tornado and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“It is almost complete devastation,” he said after crews finished searching buildings and switched to damage assessments. “This little old town, I don’t know what the population is, it is more or less wiped off the map.”
In the town, the roof had torn off Noel Crook’s home, where he lives there with his wife.
“Yesterday was yesterday and that’s gone — there’s nothing I can do about it,” Crook said. “Tomorrow is not here yet. You don’t have any control over it, so here I am today.”