BOGUE CHITTO, Miss. (AP) — Anunciata Schwebel could only watch in horror on FaceTime while her friend and tenant slunk into a bathtub to take cover from one of several tornadoes that slammed into Mississippi just after sunset Wednesday.
Her friend screamed that the windows were breaking. Schwebel could see on her screen the devastation to the cluster of cottages she owned in the town of Purvis — walls and roofs ripped away, her tenants huddled in their bathrooms.
“We could see a line of people sitting in their tubs,” Schwebel said Thursday. “We thought people were dead.”
Yet, for a second time in less than a month, a big burst of tornadoes caused no deaths. Authorities estimated that 500 homes were damaged across five counties Wednesday and said at least 17 people were injured. The powerful storms spawned at least three tornadoes across the bottom half of Mississippi that could be seen on weather radar, meteorologists said, possibly more.
Survivors told stories of crawling under furniture while winds tore off the roof and of hiding in a closet, holding on to a child. At Coaltown Baptist Church in Purvis, members hunkered down in a hallway, singing and praying until the storm passed.
A dozen people were hurt at a trailer park in the small community of Bogue Chitto, in rural Lincoln County, said Scott Simmons, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.
Most of the two dozen homes were flattened into heaps of splintered boards and twisted metal. People picked through the debris Thursday morning under cloudy skies as a chain saw buzzed in the background.
Krystal Miller and six others — including babies as young as 4 weeks old — grabbed a Bible and sheltered in their hallway when the tornado sent their home cartwheeling through the air.
“We just flipped, and it threw us all out,” she said. “It scattered everybody out. ... I can’t find the Bible.”
Her young son was in the hospital for monitoring and another child was injured in the face, she said.
Source: WPLG
