At least 23 people were killed when a tornado passed through Mississippi, the governor of this southern state said on Saturday, leaving behind a ravaged landscape. “It’s a tragedy,” Governor Tate Reeves said on Twitter, referring to “devastating damage” after the tornado passed through the Mississippi on Friday evening for more than 150 km from west to east. And the toll could well get worse.
“Unfortunately, these numbers are expected to change” upwards, the Mississippi State Emergency Services (MSEMA) said on Twitter. Search and rescue teams are on the job to find victims. US President Joe Biden spoke in a press release of the “heartbreaking” images, and stressed that the federal state would do “everything it can to help”, “as long as it takes”.
In Rolling Fork, a town of some 2,000 people in western Mississippi, footage Saturday morning showed entire rows of homes torn from their meager foundations, streets littered with debris and cars flipped onto their roofs. Two semi-trailers were also piled up on top of each other. Trees were uprooted and pieces of metal wrapped around the trunks while for one house, still standing but wobbly, the floor collapsed.
“My town no longer exists”
“Almost everything has been swept away” in the city, said Patricia Perkins, a 61-year-old resident, by telephone. “Most of the shops were razed” by the tornado, says this employee of a tool store. Aaron Rigsby, a tornado hunter, describes arriving at the scene on Friday evening and hearing “screams of people trapped in the rubble, calling for help”. “There was a lady who did not manage to take shelter in time and who was mowed down, the roof of her house falling on her,” he says, also reached by telephone. “I managed to free her from the rubble” and seek help when she was injured in the leg, he adds. Another lady found herself… trapped between her sofa, pieces of roofing, and a fridge,” he said again.
On CNN, the mayor of Rolling Fork, Eldridge Walker, asserted: “my town no longer exists”. According to the city councilor, several victims were located and removed from the debris of their homes, to be taken to hospitals and treated. “Houses that have been torn away can be replaced, but you cannot replace a life,” said Eldridge Walker. “The losses will be felt in these cities forever,” Governor Tate Reeves tweeted, asking to pray for the victims and their families.
A death in Alabama
According to ABC, at least 13 people died in Sharkey County, along with three in neighboring Carroll County and two others in Monroe County. Separately, a Silver City, Humphreys County police officer reported one person dead to ABC. In Alabama, a neighboring state of Mississippi, the thunderstorms were also particularly intense and a man died after the overturning of his trailer, announced the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office.
The “priority at this stage” is to ensure “the safety of living people and to locate people to verify that they are safe,” said Malory White of MSEMA.
Tornado warnings had been issued Friday in several counties in Mississippi. Saturday at 2:48 a.m. (07:48 GMT), the branch of the National Weather Service (NWS) of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, indicated that “the watch for tornadoes was lifted throughout the area concerned”.
This meteorological phenomenon, as impressive as it is difficult to predict, is relatively common in the United States, especially in the center and south of the country. As of December 2021, around 80 people had lost their lives after tornadoes hit Kentucky.
