23 dead, ‘houses on top of houses’ after tornado hits Mississippi

ROLLING FORK, Mississippi — A powerful tornado cut a devastating path through Mississippi Friday night, killing around two dozen people and obliterating dozens of buildings, as it stayed on the ground for more than an hour.

The tornado flattened entire blocks of the small Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork, reducing homes to piles of rubble, flipping cars on their sides and toppling the water tower. Residents hunkered down in bath tubs and broke into a John Deere store that they converted into a triage centre for the wounded.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency warned in a tweet Saturday that the casualty toll could go higher than the 23 dead and four missing it had identified, saying: “Unfortunately, these numbers are expected to change.”

Other parts of the Deep South were digging out from damage from other suspected twisters. One man died in Morgan County, Alabama, the sheriff’s department there said in a tweet.

“There’s nothing left,” said Wonder Bolden, holding her granddaughter, Journey, while standing outside the remnants of her mother’s levelled mobile home in Rolling Fork. “There’s just the breeze that’s running, going through — just nothing.”

Throughout Saturday, she and others walked around dazed and in shock as they broke through debris and fallen trees with chainsaws, searching for survivors. Power lines were pinned under decades-old oaks, their roots torn from the ground.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves issued a state of emergency and vowed to help rebuild as he headed to view the damage in an area speckled with wide expanses of cotton, corn and soybean fields and catfish farming ponds. U.S. President Joe

Biden also promised federal help, describing the damage as “heartbreaking.”

The damage in Rolling Fork was so widespread that several storm chasers — who follow severe weather and often put up livestreams showing dramatic funnel clouds — pleaded for search-and-rescue help. Others abandoned the chase to drive injured people to the hospital.

But it didn’t help that the community hospital on the west side of town was damaged, forcing patients to be transferred.

Sheddrick Bell, his partner and two daughters crouched in a closet of their Rolling Fork home for 15 minutes as the tornado tore through. 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.

Rodney Porter, who lives about 32 kilometres south of Rolling Fork and belongs to a local fire department, said he didn’t know how anyone survived as he delivered water and fuel to families there. “It’s like a bomb went off,” he said, describing houses stacked on top of houses.

Estimates from storm reports and radar data indicate that the tornado was on the ground for more than an hour and traversed at least 274 kilometres, said Lance Perrilloux, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Jackson, Mississippi, office.