By Rick Rojas, Sarah Kramer Ozbun, Emily Cochrane and Richard Fausset

ROLLING FORK, Miss. — An ominous wedge appeared in the night sky over one of the poorest regions of the American South late Friday (24). When it touched down, it nearly obliterated the small Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork in one of numerous scenes of destruction and heartbreak across swaths of Mississippi and Alabama. At least 26 people were killed, dozens more were injured, and homes and businesses were smashed to pieces.

In Rolling Fork, a town of about 2,000 people near Mississippi’s western border, the extent of what was lost began to come into view at daybreak.

The tornado had shredded most everything, plucking trees that had stood for decades, roots and all, and dropping them onto homes and vehicles. A fire station was just open air. Houses had rooms shorn off.

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. 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.

Mike Barlow, who lives in Rolling Fork, was watching the local weather channel Friday evening when a meteorologist warned viewers to take shelter immediately. The National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado was moving toward the town at 8:05 p.m.

“I thought, ‘This is not good,’” Barlow said. 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.

“It roared, and the next thing you knew, the roof left,” he said Saturday (25) as he loaded what he could salvage into the back of his pickup truck. As he scanned his neighbourhood, now just as level as the Delta’s flat farmland, Barlow said, “It was the worst thing I have ever been through.”

As the violent weather system approached the small city of Amory, near the Alabama border, Matt Laubhan, a TV news meteorologist, broke momentarily from his live analysis of what the radar was showing. “Oh, man,” he said, lowering his right elbow onto a desk, his hand on his lips. “Dear Jesus, please help them.”

As residents assessed the losses, President Joe 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, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is expected to travel to Mississippi on Sunday (26).

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who toured neighbourhoods 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.”

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, said Janae Elkins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Patients from Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital, which serves Rolling Fork and other rural Delta communities, had been transferred to other hospitals in the area, as neighbouring counties sent ambulances and support staff to help.

Aaron 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”.

After the tornado hit Rolling Fork, 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. He added that it had taken ambulances at least 30 minutes to arrive in Rolling Fork because the area is so rural.

Annie Haynes recalled clutching the knob on her closet door as tightly as she could Friday night. Her ears were popping from the pressure. Her house was vibrating. She could feel the wind swirling around her after windows had been shattered and her roof had been punctured, she said.

But in a matter of seconds, the tornado was gone; it had wrecked her house, for which she did not have insurance, and had broken the windows of her car. Yet she knew others had suffered far worse. All she had to do was look across the street.

Her neighbour, a home health worker who lived alone in a mobile home, had been found dead early Saturday, she said, after the storm lifted the home off the ground and slammed it onto a neighbour’s house.

“I don’t even want to look over there,” said Haynes, 64, a preschool teacher. “I cried more for these other people than I cried for myself.”

Rolling Fork was the birthplace of blues singer Muddy Waters and sits between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Its residents, most of whom are Black, live with the risk of flooding from backwater levees along the Yazoo; one-fifth of the residents are under the federal poverty line.

A large part of the South could face another round of severe weather Sunday, including large hail, according to the weather service’s Storm Prediction Centre.

Nighttime tornadoes are twice as likely to be deadly as their daytime counterparts, experts have said. At night, people are typically asleep and are slower to respond to a warning, and the tornadoes are harder to see coming in the dark.

In Rolling Fork, many residents said what shocked them the most was just how quickly the storm appeared and then left their once-quaint farm town.

Damian Gadison said the only warning was the darkening sky and the howling winds, which forced him into the closet of his mobile home. His home badly damaged, he and his girlfriend were preparing to camp in their car Saturday.

“We need help — I’m talking about help,” Gadison said, sitting in the back seat of his car and straining to convey the gravity of his town’s situation. Tears streamed down his face.

“We didn’t have much,” he said, “but what we had, we held on to.”

-New York Times