Devastating tornado leaves 25 dead

ROLLING FORK, Mississippi — Search and recovery crews resumed on Sunday the daunting task of digging through the debris of flattened and battered homes, commercial buildings and municipal offices after hundreds of people were displaced by a deadly tornado that ripped through the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest regions of the United States.

At least 25 people were killed and dozens of others were injured in Mississippi as the massive storm ripped through several towns on its hourlong path on Friday night. One man was killed after his trailer home flipped several times in Alabama.

About 26,000 customers remained without power as of Saturday evening in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee due to the storm, according to the website PowerOutage.us.

The twister flattened entire blocks, obliterated houses, ripped a steeple off a church and toppled a municipal water tower. Even with recovery just starting, the National Weather Service warned of a risk of more severe weather on Sunday — including high winds, large hail and possible tornadoes — in eastern Louisiana, south central Mississippi and south central Alabama.

US President Joe Biden ordered federal aid to Mississippi to support local recovery efforts, the White House said on Sunday.

The tornado devastated a swath of the 2,000-person town of Rolling Fork, reducing homes to piles of rubble, flipping cars on their sides and toppling the town's water tower. Other parts of the Deep South were digging out from damage caused by other suspected twisters.

"There's nothing left," said Wonder Bolden, holding her granddaughter, Journey, while standing outside the remnants of her mother's now-leveled mobile home in Rolling Fork. "There's just the breeze that's running, going through — just nothing."

Rodney Porter, who lives 30 kilometers south of Rolling Fork, said, "How anybody survived is unknown by me."

When the storm hit on Friday night, he immediately drove there to assist in any way he could. Porter arrived to find "total devastation" and said he smelled natural gas and heard people screaming for help in the dark.

"Houses are gone, houses stacked on top of houses with vehicles on top of that," he said.

Storm survivors walked around on Saturday, many dazed and in shock, as they broke through thickly clustered debris and fallen trees with chain saws, searching for survivors. Power lines were pinned under decades-old oaks, their roots torn from the ground.

Preliminary information based on estimates from storm reports and radar data indicate the tornado was on the ground for more than an hour and traversed at least 274 km, said Lance Perrilloux, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Jackson, Mississippi, office.

"That's rare — very, very rare," he said, attributing the long path to widespread atmospheric instability.

Agencies - Xinhua