![]() ![]() He added that it had taken ambulances at least 30 minutes to arrive in Rolling Fork because the area is so rural.Īnnie Haynes recalled clutching the knob on her closet door as tightly as she could on Friday night. Rigsby said, he went door to door through the town, rescuing people who were trapped in their vehicles or in destroyed homes, including a woman who had been buried by rubble. Patients from Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital, the hospital serving Rolling Fork and other rural Delta communities, had been transferred to other hospitals in the area, as neighboring counties sent ambulances and support staff to help.Īaron Rigsby, a videographer and storm chaser who filmed the tornado, said in an interview that he had watched it develop from a “small cone” into a “massive wedge.”Īfter the tornado hit Rolling Fork, Mr. Meteorologists were still working to determine the size of the storms and whether “it was just one big long tornado that caused all of the damage, or if it lifted” and then dropped another one, Janae Elkins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who toured neighborhoods in Rolling Fork, Silver City and Winona on Saturday and requested an expedited disaster declaration for the region, said, “We’re going to fight like hell to make sure that we get as many resources to this area as possible.” “Dear Jesus, please help them.”Īs residents assessed the losses, President Biden said in a statement that he would ensure federal support for the region, pledging that “we will be there as long as it takes.” Deanne Criswell, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is expected to travel to Mississippi on Sunday. “Oh man,” he said, lowering his right elbow onto a desk, his hand on his lips. Barlow said, “It was the worst thing I have ever been through.”Īs the violent weather system approached the small city of Amory, near the Alabama border, Matt Laubhan, a television news meteorologist, broke momentarily from his live analysis of what the radar was showing. As he scanned his neighborhood, now just as level as the Delta’s flat farmland, Mr. ![]() “It roared, and the next thing you knew, the roof left,” he said on Saturday as he loaded what he could salvage into the back of his pickup truck. He had just enough time to put on pants and boots and to tell his wife, Kathy, to get off the phone and grab her purse before the tornado destroyed their home. The National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado was moving toward the town at 8:05 p.m. Mike Barlow, who lives in Rolling Fork, was watching the local weather channel on Friday evening when a meteorologist warned viewers to take shelter immediately. ![]() Roads were a maze of downed utility lines, tree limbs, strips of metal and lines of trucks and vehicles, as outsiders - law enforcement agencies, volunteers and others - crowded in. In other parts of town, the force of the storm was so powerful that it rendered homes and businesses into piles of debris, unrecognizable to residents who had lived there for decades. The tornado had shredded most everything, plucking trees that had stood for decades, roots and all, and dropping them onto homes and vehicles. ![]()
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