Please allow me to interject my feelings about Mother Nature

When the storm chasers are driving patients to the hospital … my Lord.

 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven through this town. They need more than prayers, then need serious boots-on-the-ground help.

 

Smithville, Miss., which got one of the EF5 tornados on April 27, 2011, is about to get hit by the same twister that wrecked the Delta.

 

This is SE of Tupelo. And I’ve never seen a met react like that either.

 

Storm chaser video from outside of Rolling Fork. And it appears there are some fatalities there.

 

Most recent count is 21 dead and likely to climb.
Dang.

 

The first-light footage coming out of Rolling Fork is incredible. Reminds me of the Palm Sunday tornadoes in 1994.

 

MEMA reporting 23 statewide, with about half of those in Rolling Fork — which has a population of about 1,800, so roughly 1 percent of the town's people were killed. The exact breakdown of how many and where is still fuzzy, though. Hopefully there is some clarification on that by the end of the day.
The county coroner told a TV station that six bodies were recovered from a mobile home park in Rolling Fork. One couple was found dead after an 18-wheeler got blown into their house.
We had a reporter go up there this morning. He said they were cutting apart the wreckage of a Family Dollar store that was just twisted metal, to the point he had to ask what the building was. Like others, he compared the damage to Katrina.

Some drone footage of the damage:

 

I think one of the things that made the Rolling Fork situation so bad was that there was little warning. The tornado formed and then touched down not far from town, so people only had a few minutes. And, even though there was plenty of notice about the potential for tornadoes, this was really the first big storm to pop off in a system that produced scattered supercells. It had been relatively quiet in that area all day.
So you wound up with people possibly zoning out, it's right after sunset when you can't necessarily see the sky turning ugly, and then from out of nowhere there's an EF-4 tornado literally on their doorstep.

It's crazy, too, how big a difference a few miles can make. If this thing had been even 10 miles further north it would have been almost a best-case scenario. Rolling Fork is in one of the least-populated counties in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. Its neighboring county IS the least populous in that category. There are about 5,000 people total, and half of them live in Rolling Fork. If you have to have an EF-4 tornado plow across your state, the track this one took is right where you'd want it to go to minimize the catastrophe — except it happened to clip the one population center in the entire area.

 

What TV stations cover that part of Mississippi? TV mets probably save more lives now than sirens.

 

Hey guys -

A lot of our members live thereabouts.

Let's do a check to make sure everyone is OK.

And if we need to use the board as a clearinghouse for resources or information, let's do so.

I'll get a charity drive started up top as soon as it makes sense.

DM me if you have specific needs or need help off the board.

I send our love.