‘MY CITY IS GONE’
Mississippi’s emergency management agency said on Saturday afternoon that the death toll had risen to 25, with dozens more injured. Four people who had been reported missing earlier have been located, the agency said.
At least 12 of those deaths occurred in Rolling Fork, its mayor, Eldridge Walker, told CNN earlier in the day.
“My city is gone, but we are resilient,” Walker said on CNN. “We are going to come back strong.”
Jarrett Brown, a volunteer with the disaster response organisation Team Rubicon who traveled in Rolling Fork, told Reuters the damage showed that the storm was inescapable for some residents.
“In some of these areas, there was no safe spot to go to,” he said via a video call.
Jeremy McCoy, a constable in neighboring Yazoo County who had gone to Rolling Fork to assist with rescue efforts, told CNN of the grim situation on the ground and stepping on nails in the rubble.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said McCoy. “You hope to hear somebody call, a baby crying, a dog barking or something, but hear nothing.”
Tim and Tracy Harden, owners of Chuck’s Dairy Barn in Rolling Fork, said in a Facebook post that they hid inside a small walk-in cooler one minute before the tornado demolished their building.
“Forever grateful to the customer with the broken arm that kept going and freed us all from the cooler,” they wrote.
The National Weather Service has deployed teams to assess the damage and determine how many tornados touched down, according to Price, the meteorologist.
At least 24 reports of tornadoes, stretching from western Mississippi into Alabama, were issued to the National Weather Service on Friday night and into Saturday morning by storm chasers and observers.
