USA.- Violent storms and a tornado ripped through Mississippi in the southern United States, killing at least 23 people and destroying dozens of buildings late Friday.
The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) reported that at least four people were missing and dozens were injured, while thousands of residents in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee were without power.
“At least 23 Mississippians were killed by violent tornadoes last night. We know there are many more injured. Search and rescue teams remain active,” the Governor of the southern state, Tate Reeves, posted on Twitter.
“The loss will be felt in these towns forever. Please pray that the hand of God is upon all those who lost family and friends.”
MEMA warned that the number of victims could rise: “Unfortunately these numbers are expected to change,” it tweeted.
Search and rescue operations are underway in Sharkey and Humphreys counties, about 110 kilometers north of Jackson, the Mississippi capital.
The rural towns of Silver City and Rolling Fork reported destruction as the tornado moved northeast without weakening, moving into Alabama through towns including Winona and Amory overnight.
“As for the official damage figures, we won’t have them until tomorrow,” said Malary White, a MEMA official.
The Jackson National Weather Service reported early Saturday that the tornado watch had passed.
“Additional showers and thunderstorms are expected throughout our area,” he tweeted, adding that they are not “expected to be severe.”
“My town is gone,” Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker in Sharkey County told WJTV.
“What we find is devastation all around us,” he lamented.
Scary
Woodrow Johnson, a Humphreys County official, told CNN his wife woke him up in a startle at the noise.
“It was a very scary thing,” he said. He added that his neighbor’s house, a trailer, had “completely disappeared.”
Cornel Knight told The Associated Press that he, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter were at a relative’s home in Rolling Fork when the tornado struck. He recounted that the sky was dark but that “you could see the direction of each transformer that exploded.”
The man was “eerily calm” as that happened, but watched from a doorway until the tornado was, he estimated, less than a mile away. He then told everyone in the house to take refuge in a hallway.
The tornado struck another family member’s home across a wide cornfield from where Knight was standing. A wall in that house collapsed, trapping several people inside.
The National Weather Service warned residents Saturday that “hazards will persist even after the storms have gone.”
Television images showed flattened houses and debris strewn on the roads.
The tornado appeared so powerful on radar as it approached the town of Amory, about 25 miles southeast of Tupelo, that a Mississippi meteorologist stopped to pray after new radar information came in, widespread that several storm chasers , who track severe weather and often broadcast live feeds showing dramatic funnel clouds, pleaded for search and rescue help.
Others abandoned the chase to take the wounded to hospitals themselves.
Rolling Fork and the surrounding area have wide tracts of cotton, corn and soybean fields and catfish farming ponds. Emergency officials have opened more than half a dozen shelters in the state.
The recorded phenomenon was a nasty storm generating the deadliest tornado and the most damaging hail in the United States, said Northern Illinois University Meteorology Professor Walker Ashley.
What’s more, this is humid overnight, which is “the worst kind,” he said. “You mix a particularly socioeconomically vulnerable landscape with a fast, long-tracked nighttime tornado, and disaster strikes,” she added.
Forecasters saw a high tornado risk for the region as a whole, not the specific area, up to a week in advance, said Ashley, who was discussing it with colleagues on March 17.
Tornado experts have been warning of increased risk exposure in the region as people are building more.
