Southern Tornadoes Leave At Least 26 Dead

A powerful storm leveled a town in the central part of Mississippi, where 25 were killed across the state, with another death reported in Alabama. Emergency officials said dozens more were injured.

Follow today's live coverage on the storms and tornadoes in the South.

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. 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 on 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,’" Mr. 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 on Saturday as he loaded what he could salvage into the back of his pickup truck. As he scanned his neighborhood, now just as level as the Delta's flat farmland, Mr. 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 television 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 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, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is expected to travel to Mississippi on Sunday.

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, who toured neighborhoods 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, Janae Elkins, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.

Patients from Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital, the hospital serving Rolling Fork and other rural Delta communities, had been transferred to other hospitals in the area, as neighboring 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, Mr. 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 on 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 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 neighbor, a home health worker who lived alone in a mobile home, was found dead early on Saturday morning, she said, after the storm lifted the home off the ground and slammed it onto a neighbor's house.

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

A storm chaser, Jonny B. Gabel, recalled pulling a family from the rubble of their flattened house, aided only by the light from a phone flashlight.

"They were all in absolute shock," said Mr. Gabel, tearing up as he added that "the little girl just wanted someone to pick her up. That was all she wanted. She just wanted to be held."

Soon after, Mr. Gabel, 35, said he went to a nearby Dollar General store and began digging through rubble with his bare hands. It was there he found two bodies in the darkness, lying six feet apart.

The tornado also caused damage in Silver City, Miss., about 30 miles east of Rolling Fork, the National Weather Service office in Jackson said on Twitter. Officials said the deaths in Mississippi were in Sharkey, Carroll, Humphreys and Monroe Counties.

"We are still doing search and recoveries," Mark Stiles, the local coroner, said. "We are trying to cut trees to get into where people are living."

Rolling Fork was the birthplace of the 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; a fifth of the residents are under the federal poverty line.

"The idea of cleaning up, building back, trying to get back in business could be a real problem," said Fred Miller, a former mayor of Rolling Fork, who has lived in the town for three decades. "And in a small community like ours, you know, somebody may just throw up their hands and say, ‘I can't do it.’ Those are things that we just have to wait on."

Set along the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, the Delta — a wide, pancake-flat and fertile stretch of bottomlands — is nearly synonymous with poverty, pain and the cruelest burdens of American history. It has also been an unusually fertile contributor to American popular culture, producing musicians like Waters, B.B. King and Charley Pride, and writers including Walker Percy and Donna Tartt.

But the legacy of slavery and racism in the heart of Mississippi's old cotton kingdom has persisted well into modern times. The region has experienced population loss beginning in the early 20th century, as Black residents moved north in large numbers to flee the oppression of the Jim Crow era. The mechanization of agriculture also contributed, and today, those who remain often face a lack of opportunities to earn a decent living.

The region, like the state of Mississippi more broadly, has also had trouble maintaining an adequate health care system. The hospital in Rolling Fork, like others in the region, has struggled to stay in business in recent years.

But Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the top executive at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, said that the state had also learned many lessons about how to respond to major disasters since it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Dr. Woodward said that crews from the medical center were able to send "scene triage" groups to the affected areas Friday night, which helped move injured people to hospitals around the state. As of early Saturday, she said, 18 patients had been sent to the medical center in Jackson.

Despite its struggles, the Delta region of Mississippi prides itself on neighborly spirit. On Saturday, hundreds of volunteers had come to Rolling Fork from surrounding counties to offer a hand. Nurses tended to the injured. Farmers used their tractors to move trees, cars and heavy debris. Others brought grills, setting up on the perimeter of the town and cooking hamburgers.

Everyone was asking the same questions: "What can we do? What do you need?"

In Alabama, emergency teams and law enforcement officials were searching through some of the destruction in Morgan County, south of Huntsville. The county sheriff's office shared photos on Twitter of rescuers helping to free a man trapped in mud after a trailer overturned, but later said that he did not survive his injuries.

Brandy Davis, the director of the Morgan County Emergency Management, said the man's death was the only one reported in Alabama so far.

Severe weather season in the South reaches its peak during March, April and May, meteorologists said. Earlier this month, powerful storms swept across the region, leaving at least 12 people dead and hundreds of thousands of customers without electricity, and damaging homes in at least eight states.

A large part of the South could face another round of severe weather on Sunday, including large hail, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center.

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 on Saturday.

"We need help — I’m talking about help," Mr. 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 onto."

Sarah Kramer Ozbun reported from Rolling Fork, Miss.; Emily Cochrane from Nashville; and Richard Fausset from Atlanta. Reporting was contributed by Mike Ives, Euan Ward, Victoria Kim, Jesus Jiménez and Judson Jones. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Eduardo Medina

Lequita Barfield heard reports that a tornado had just bulldozed the town where her mother lived in a mobile home, so she reached for her phone and made calls.

Her mother, Mary Barfield, did not pick up. She called again. Nothing.

"I just got a feeling that something was wrong," Lequita Barfield recalled in a brief interview on Saturday night. "I jumped in the car, and I got on the road."

She drove about 30 minutes to Rolling Fork, Miss., and saw what the tornado had done there: shredded buildings and trees and wires down. "Everything was just gone," she said. She had to walk the last mile to get to her mother's mobile home because of all the debris on the road.

The tornado had flipped her mother's home over, she saw, and it was now lodged against the side of another home.

A man who was also sifting through wreckage told her to follow him. He grabbed her arm and led her to an alleyway-like hole in the debris. There, under a mattress, she saw her mother's unmoving hand and arm.

"I called for her, but she didn't answer," Lequita Barfield said. "She didn't move her hand. She didn't do anything."

She looked around and saw flashlights aimed at the ground. She tried to find someone who could help her get her mother out. Maybe, she thought, if all the debris were removed from on top of her, she would have a chance.

Officials later did manage to remove the mattress, but because the foundation of the mobile home was unstable, they were not able to retrieve her body until later that night.

"My mom is gone," Lequita Barfield said, her voice breaking. "My mom is gone."

Locations of tornado sightings or damage reported by trained spotters.

Source: National Weather Service | Notes: Reports are considered preliminary. Data is for the 24 hours ending March 25 at 7 a.m. Eastern.

By Julie Walton Shaver

Anushka Patil

Among the youngest known victims of the tornadoes was 1-year-old Riley Herndon. Her family has lived near the small community of Wren, Miss., for generations — so long that their street is named for them. The close-knit family is now facing heartbreak, relatives said.

Riley and her father, Ethan Herndon, 33, were killed when the storm destroyed their mobile home on Friday. Ethan's father, who lived down the street, discovered their bodies in the wreckage of the home after the tornado had passed.

Riley's siblings, 4-year-old Aubrey and 7-year-old Brantley, were severely injured and will require long stays in a pediatric hospital, their aunt, Rachel Atkins, said. The children's mother, Elizabeth Herndon, 31, was sent to a different hospital with her own severe injuries.

Riley was just a month away from her second birthday. She had been born prematurely and had several health problems, some of which would have required surgery in the coming week. She also was "a really happy baby" who touched a lot of hearts, Ms. Atkins said. Riley's siblings, whom Ms. Atkins visited on Saturday, adored her.

"They’re asking about her now," Ms. Atkins said. "And they’re not going to be able to understand this for a while."

Ethan Herndon had worked at an RV dealership after serving in the Navy. He would "do anything for anybody," said Ms. Atkins, who is his sister. "He loved his family more than anything, and he loved God more than anything too."

Mr. Herndon loved to hunt and fish, Ms. Atkins said. As children, the Herndon siblings had grown up in a "wide open area, where we could do whatever we wanted to, and stay outside all the time."

There is little left of the family's home after the storm. "I have no words to explain what I just saw," said Ethan Herndon's uncle, Teryl Herndon, after he visited the debris-strewn area. He said he had seen a lot of tornadoes in his nearly 70 years, but nothing like the storm that hit on Friday.

Eduardo Medina

Lequita Barfield said in an interview that her mother, Mary Barfield, was among the victims in Rolling Fork, where she lived in a mobile home that had been flipped over by the tornado. Lequita said she drove to her mother's home on Friday night and had to walk the last mile there because roads were covered in debris. She eventually spotted her mother's arm and hand beneath a mattress. "I called for her, but she didn't answer," she said. "She didn't move her hand. She didn't do anything."

Emily Cochrane

In the hours after tornadoes ripped through the community of Rolling Fork, Fred Miller took stock of what needed to be rebuilt and repaired: the homes and businesses, the newly refurbished visitor's center and its trove of artifacts, and the beloved restaurant, Chuck's Dairy Bar.

But Mr. Miller, the former mayor of the town, was also thinking about the bears. Scattered across town were 12-foot-tall wooden bears, carved with chain saws, to commemorate one of Sharkey County's most famous legends: the day former President Theodore Roosevelt, nicknamed Teddy, refused to kill a captured bear on a hunting trip here, declaring it unsportsmanlike. That decision, memorialized in a political cartoon, led a New York toymaker to create a stuffed bear and name it "Teddy's Bear," which later became known as the teddy bear.

The legend is told throughout town, Mr. Miller, 73, said in an interview, describing the statue of a bear reading outside the library and one dressed like a policeman outside the police station. In a tradition that began in 2002, the 100th anniversary of the hunt, the town celebrates the Great Delta Bear Affair in October, in part to raise awareness about the Louisiana black bear, which was until recently considered endangered because of habitat loss and hunting.

A new bear is carved each year, with the 2022 bear recently installed outside the visitor's center, with a welcome sign. But as of Saturday, Mr. Miller said, "he's laying on the ground now, and I don't know if we’ll be able to put him back together or not."

Bears around town "were all blown down, some of them destroyed last night," he said of the sculptures, which he called "beautiful, unbelievable carvings." With so much widespread destruction and so much need, he added, "I’m afraid it's going be hard for us to get the momentum to build them back."

Meg Cooper, the director of the festival, said though some of the town's 18 bear statues had toppled over in the storm, someone had gone around and stood some of them up.

Before the tornado hit, festival organizers had been discussing where to put this year's statue and had considered placing it in front of Chuck's Dairy Bar — but that was demolished in the storm.

"It's really unimaginable and hard," she said about the choice now, amid all the damage around town. "I hope come October, everyone's asking ‘Where's the bear going?’"

Houston Cofield

With several communities in ruins, Mississippi officials set up three emergency shelters for people whose homes had been destroyed. Workers were setting up cots at the National Guard Armory in Rolling Forks, a devastated town where 13 died. The Mississippi attorney general, Lynn Fitch, said there would be beds for 250 to 300 people in the armory, which is also a hub for emergency supplies.

Anushka Patil

Recovery efforts are ongoing for the communities that were devastated by the tornadoes that swept across Mississippi and Alabama last week.

"My home is gone completely," said Ashley Nichols of Rolling Fork, Miss., one of the hardest hit towns. "My son's home is gone."

Melinda Newell Miller, a financial accountant originally from Rolling Fork, described the heartbreak of seeing her hometown in ruins. "There's no water, no light, no food places, no gas — everything is destroyed," she said.

Emergency response teams generally urge people not to show up in disaster zones to volunteer or deliver donations — these areas can still be unsafe and you could impede search-and-rescue efforts. (If you would like to donate, you should always do some research before giving to an unfamiliar organization. Sites like Charity Navigator and Guidestar can help.)

Here are a few ways to pitch in:

If you live elsewhere in Mississippi, check the websites and social media pages of your city government, as well as local police and fire departments, to see if they are coordinating donations from your area. Officials are doing so in several cities, including Greenville, Gluckstadt and Olive Branch.

The Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Service, better known as Volunteer Mississippi, is also sharing updates on local donation centers on their Facebook page.

United Way of West Central Mississippi is collecting donations of water at their office in Vicksburg, about an hour outside of Rolling Fork. Check their Facebook page for updates on the location and timing. They are also accepting monetary donations on their chapter website, and ask you specify "Rolling Fork" in the notes field to route your donations correctly.

The American Red Cross has trained disaster workers on the ground and is deploying additional workers and aid supplies. You can donate specifically to help people affected by the tornadoes here or by texting the word TORNADO to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

GoFundMe has created a dedicated page for various fund-raisers for people and communities affected by the storm.

Emily Cochrane

"This is about as bad as I’ve ever seen," said Fred Miller, a former mayor of Rolling Fork who has lived in the city for three decades with his wife. "The housing situation is terrible. I don't think there's a tree left in town that has not been skinned alive — most of them are down."

Jesus Jiménez

It was unclear on Saturday whether damage across Mississippi was caused by one tornado or several of them, but it was evident that the storm system left a long trail of destruction.

While Rolling Fork in west-central Mississippi appeared to have borne the brunt of Friday's storm, reports of damage extended across a large swath of the state into northeastern counties.

Janae Elkins, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Jackson, Mississippi, said crews on Saturday were working to review damage and assess the scope of the storm system that hit on Friday night, forming at least one powerful tornado, and moved through the state for over an hour.

"We’re not sure if it was just one big long tornado that caused all of the damage or if it lifted, and then dropped a new one," Ms. Elkins said.

Nicholas Price, a Weather Service meteorologist in Jackson, said that the crews were examining a track of roughly 170 miles.

"A tornado of this magnitude, being the strong tornado that it was, is very rare," Mr. Price said. He said once survey teams were done assessing damage, the Weather Service would have more information on the storm system's path and whether there were multiple tornadoes.

Thirteen people were killed by the storm in Sharkey County, where Rolling Forks is, the county coroner, Angelia Eason, said.

In Silver City, a town in Humphreys County about 30 miles northeast of Rolling Fork, the Mississippi Highway Patrol said on Twitter that emergency crews were working on Saturday to clean up storm damage. The scope of the damage in Silver City was unclear, but for part of Friday night the area was under a tornado emergency, a rare warning reserved for situations when "catastrophic damage is imminent or ongoing," according to the National Weather Service.

There were also reports of damage in Black Hawk, a community in Carroll County, Miss., about 50 miles northeast of Silver City. When storms moved through Black Hawk on Friday night, Exodus Oktavia Brownlow, 30, said she went to a part of her home away from windows and monitored the storm by watching a weather radar.

Just before 9 p.m. on Friday, the National Weather Service issued the tornado emergency. But because severe weather in the area is common, Ms. Brownlow said that she and many of her friends don't take weather watches and warnings too seriously. "I think we kind of took it for granted," she said.

Ms. Brownlow's home was spared, but as she drove around town on Saturday, she saw many houses just miles from her that were damaged. Parts of the Black Hawk area also sustained substantial tree damage, Ms. Brownlow said.

"The trees were literally snapped in half," Ms. Brownlow said. "I’m talking about trees that are very thick. Trees that have withstood several terrible thunderstorms that we’ve had, snapped in two as if they were toothpicks."

In northeast Mississippi near the Alabama state line, residents of Amory were told to boil drinking water on Saturday after the city's water department "suffered a direct hit from the tornado yesterday," the city's police department said on Facebook.

Images were circulating on social media of storm damage in New Wren, just west of Amory, where there were reports of fallen trees and even a truck that appeared to have been tossed into a tree.

"I feel incredibly blessed and lucky to not be affected in that way and just extremely grateful to be safe, to still have my home, to still have my loved ones and my friends around here today," Ms. Brownlow said.

Emily Cochrane

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, in a second update, said that the death toll had risen to 25 in the state and that the four people who had been missing overnight had been accounted for.

Jesus Jimenez

A large swath of the South could face another round of severe weather on Sunday, including large hail, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. Forecasters raised the risk for severe weather in portions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama from "slight" to "enhanced," which is the third category on a five-tier scale.

There is an Enhanced Risk of severe storms Sunday (3/26) across portions of eastern LA, South Central MS, and Southern Central AL. Large hail will be the main threat but damaging winds and a few tornadoes are also possible. #alwx #mswx #lawx pic.twitter.com/vXALoM5RN4

Sarah Kramer Ozbun

Mike Barlow of Rolling Fork, Miss., was watching the local news on Friday evening when the TV meteorologist warned viewers to take shelter immediately. Barlow said he had just enough time to put on his pants and boots and to tell his wife, Kathy, to grab her purse before the tornado hit. "It roared, and the next thing you knew, the roof left and sheetrock fell on us," he said, adding, "It was the worst thing I have ever been through."

Euan Ward

Trees snapped like toothpicks. A mangled car slammed onto the top of a store. A woman sat in her bed, with the back of her family's home shorn off and the roof completely gone.

Those were some of the scenes described by storm chasers who arrived in the minutes after a tornado roared through the small Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork, making them among the first outsiders to reach the scene.

Aaron Rigsby, a videographer and storm chaser who filmed the tornado, said that he had watched it develop from a "small cone" into a "massive wedge." After it hit, Mr. Rigsby said, he went door to door, helping people who were trapped in their vehicles or inside destroyed homes, including a woman who had been buried by rubble.

"The town took a direct hit," he said.

It took ambulances at least 30 minutes to arrive in Rolling Fork because the area is so rural, he said.

Jonny B Gabel, who has been an amateur storm chaser since 2017, said Saturday that he was a half-mile west when the tornado he had been tracking tore through Rolling Fork, and arrived minutes after it had passed.

"There was just something different about this storm, it's hard to describe," Mr. Gabel said. "The town was a minefield to get through because there were downed power lines and we could smell the gas leaking everywhere."

He and a friend heard a woman yelling from the ruins of a home, and they immediately ran over, he said. "The whole back part of their house was totally torn off, and then the roof was completely ripped, but the woman was just sitting there in her bed," he said. "It was a miracle."

Aided only by the flashlights on their phones, Mr. Gabel and his friend helped pull the woman and five members of her family from the rubble of the house, including the woman's small granddaughter. He posted a video of the episode on Facebook.

"They were all in absolute shock," he said. "The little girl just wanted someone to pick her up. That was all she wanted. She just wanted to be held," Mr. Gabel said.

Mr. Gabel said that he and his friend found a couch in the rubble and moved it to the front of the house so that one older survivor could sit down and wait for an ambulance.

Mike Ives contributed reporting.

Jesus Jimenez

The Mississippi Highway Patrol said on Twitter that emergency crews were working on Saturday to clean up storm damage in Silver City, a town in west-central Mississippi. While the scope of the damage there was unclear, the area was under a tornado emergency on Friday night. Such warnings are rare and typically saved for situations when "catastrophic damage is imminent or ongoing," according to the Weather Service.

Emergency and cleaning crews are in Silver City, MS, after last night's tornado. Please use caution and expect congestion on US Highway 49W in Humphreys County near Silver City. pic.twitter.com/BT8AGv3qr0

Jesus Jimenez

Residents of Amory, Miss., are being told to boil drinking water after the city's water department "suffered a direct hit from the tornado yesterday," the city's police department said on Facebook. The city of about 6,500 people in northeast Mississippi will be under a curfew from 8 p.m. until 6 a.m., the department said.

Emily Cochrane

President Biden, in a statement, called the images from across Mississippi "heartbreaking" and said that he had spoken to a number of state officials, including the congressional delegation and Gov. Tate Reeves. "We will be there as long as it takes," the president said. "We will work together to deliver the support you need to recover."

Jesus Jimenez

In an attempt to understand the size and scope of the storms that swept through the South on Friday night, the National Weather Service said will send several crews to survey "probable tornado damage" in Monroe and Chickasaw counties in northeast Mississippi. "This is expected to be a complex survey," the Weather Service said in a statement.

Judson Jones

Tornadoes like the ones that have ripped through the Midwest and South over the last week are common in the southern United States during this time of year.

Scientists often say there is no tornado season because tornadoes can occur anytime. Still, climatologically speaking, March and April are when tornadoes are most likely to happen in the South because of weather patterns.

Tornadoes are still more likely to happen in southern states during the winter than anywhere else in the United States.

But the probability of tornadoes forming in the South increases from March through mid-April — before shifting seasonal weather patterns create an environment more likely to create tornadoes across the Great Plains in late April, May and June, climatologists say.

Nighttime tornadoes are twice as likely to kill as their daytime counterparts, experts have said. At night, people are typically asleep and it takes longer for them to respond to a warning and to take shelter. Tornadoes are also harder to see coming in the dark.

Most of the deadliest storms in U.S. history have occurred between March and June. One of the worst disasters in recent decades came in May 2011, when a tornado devastated Joplin, Mo., leaving 158 people dead.

Earlier this month, at least a dozen people died when storms swept through the South, causing heavy rains, severe winds and tornadoes in Alabama, Arkansas, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia.

That is not to say devastating storms with tornadoes cannot occur in the winter. In January, a storm that spun out tornadoes and packed high winds killed at least nine people as it moved through Alabama and Georgia. And in December 2021, a massive storm spawned tornadoes that raked a trail of destruction over 260 miles from Arkansas to Kentucky, killing at least 88 people. That system destroyed much of Mayfield, Ky., including a candle factory where eight employees died.

Emily Cochrane

Patients and employees have had to evacuate Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital in central Rolling Fork, Miss., because of the lack of power and water. Jerry Keever, the hospital's chief executive, said he and his staff were also in the process of relocating patients from the Heritage Manor nursing home, which the hospital operates. "Devastating — that's the only word I can say," he said.

Sarah Kramer Ozbun

Tasmine Dee said she and her children were about to leave their house in Rolling Fork on Friday night and head to her mother's when the wind picked up. If they had walked out the door at that moment, she said, "We would’ve been dead." As the tornado roared through town, she recalled, "I thought my house was about to explode."

Sarah Kramer Ozbun

Dave Schaefer, a registered nurse who lives near Rolling Fork, was trying to make it to his house on Friday night during the storm, he said, but the darkness and downed trees made it impossible. So he went to Sharkey Issaquena Community Hospital and helped to treat the injured. "I have never seen as much devastation and traumatic injuries as I saw last night," he said, "from kids to senior adults. You just can't imagine. It was awful."

Sarah Kramer Ozbun

Ashley Nichols, a wife and mother of six, lost her house in Rolling Fork, Miss., to the storm. "My home is gone completely," she said. "My son's home is gone." As she walked through the debris, she said, "This couch can be replaced. It's the little things. All my grandmother's things are destroyed."

Jesus Jiménez

More than 24 hours before storms began to tear through the South on Friday, the National Weather Service was warning about the possibility of severe weather capable of producing tornadoes, damaging winds and hail.

Here's how the service's warnings played out as the storms grew in intensity and charted a course of destruction.

The Storm Prediction Center, which is a part of the Weather Service, said on Thursday that there was a moderate risk of severe weather in northeast Louisiana, southwest Arkansas and western Mississippi.

By Friday night, the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch, which indicates weather conditions were favorable for producing tornadoes, for nearly 5 million people in those regions. Within minutes, weather radars began signaling that tornadoes had already formed, prompting a string of tornado warnings for cities and towns across Arkansas and Mississippi.

The storms were prompted by a cold front that was moving west to east across the region, Janae Elkins, a meteorologist with the Weather Service, said. Separate from the main storms, Ms. Elkin said there were also several "rogue" supercell storms, typically strong thunderstorms with a rotating updraft that can last for hours in the right weather conditions.

"Those supercell storms, one in particular, was the very strong one that produced the tornadoes," Ms. Elkins said.

Just before 8 p.m. local time on Friday, the Weather Service issued a tornado warning for portions of western Mississippi, including the town of Rolling Fork.

"This is a life threatening situation," the Weather Service said on Twitter. "Seek shelter now!"

Less than five minutes later, the Weather Service issued a rare tornado emergency for the area, warning of a damaging tornado and golf-ball size hail.

Tornado emergencies are reserved for situations when "catastrophic damage is imminent or ongoing" and a "severe threat to human life is imminent or ongoing," according to the Weather Service.

Storms continued through the night, moving into central Mississippi and the eastern region of the state before tracking east into northern Alabama.

As the storms moved out of the area on Saturday morning, teams with the National Weather Service office in Jackson, Miss., were preparing to survey damage across the region to see what areas had been hit by tornadoes and how strong they were.

In Rolling Fork, the Weather Service was working to determine whether one long tornado hit the area or if it was a number of them, Ms. Elkins said, adding that her office had already seen several reports of "destructive damage."

Emily Cochrane

Governor Reeves said that he planned to ask for swift approval of a federal emergency declaration to bring aid to the region hit by Friday night's storms. "There's really no other way to describe it — it's absolutely heartbreaking," he said of the devastation.

Emily Cochrane

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, after arriving in Rolling Fork, described the town in the Mississippi Delta as "ground zero" for tornado damage, but said the storm's path had crossed much of the state. Officials are still assessing the damage, he said, adding that he had fielded calls from other governors and Biden administration officials pledging assistance.

Jesus Jimenez

In Morgan County, Ala., a man died of his injuries after he was pulled from the mud after a trailer overturned, the Morgan County Sheriff's Office said on Twitter. Brandy Davis, director of the Morgan County Emergency Management Agency, said that was the only death reported in Alabama so far, bringing the total to at least 24 across the South.

Sadly, the gentleman did not survive his injuries. https://t.co/IYbBsqsd3c

Rory Doyle

A couple of the main restaurants in Rolling Fork and a trailer home park nearby were devastated. I arrived in town just before sunrise, and it was hard to make sense of just how much destruction there was. As it got lighter out, you could see how many places had been wiped out.

Rory Doyle

I'm a photographer in Mississippi working for The Times today. Driving to Rolling Fork, where the storm hit last night, I didn't see debris on the road until I got to town. But once I arrived, I saw powerlines down and buildings destroyed. The main commercial strip, right on Highway 61, is completely leveled.

Jesus Jimenez

Mark Stiles, the coroner in Carroll County, Miss., said the three people who were killed there in Friday's storm were all found dead inside one home. "It took us a while to find them" because of the damage in the area, he said.

Emily Cochrane

The federal government is sending a team to help with recovery efforts, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said in an update. But the destruction — including downed powerlines — has made it difficult for rescue crews to get to the hardest-hit communities in the central part of the state.

Mike Ives

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. "The town took a direct hit," he said.

Violent tornado with horizontal vortex right before entering Rolling Fork, MS. Came across town and pulled multiple people from ruble. Unburied one woman and flagged down medic. Myself, Max and Jordan worked to free older woman buried under house and carried little girl to safety pic.twitter.com/uJu5BrMFFd

Mike Ives and Jesus Jiménez

The place hardest-hit by a powerful tornado that tore through rural Mississippi appeared to be Rolling Fork, a Delta town known as the birthplace of the blues singer Muddy Waters, where flooding and tornadoes have long been concerns.

Rolling Fork is a predominantly Black town of about 2,000 people in Sharkey County near the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. A fifth of the population live under the federal poverty line, and the town's residents face the risk of flooding should the backwater levees along the Yazoo fail. Many also live in mobile homes, a particular concern when severe weather strikes.

About 30 percent of the residences in Sharkey County are mobile homes or housing other than homes or apartments, according to a 2021 survey by the federal Census Bureau. The National Weather Service recommends that people in such homes flee for sturdier shelter because those in mobile homes are 15 to 20 times more likely to be killed compared to someone in a sturdier, traditional house. According to the Weather Service, 54 percent of fatalities related to tornadoes are in mobile homes on average.

"Anchor system failures are the primary cause of the majority of fatalities," the Weather Service said in its guidance on severe weather preparedness. "Even well-built manufactured homes can be destroyed if they become airborne."

A strong severe thunderstorm or an EF-1 tornado, with winds between 86 and 110 miles per hour, is powerful enough to completely destroy a mobile home, according to the Weather Service.

Flooding over the years in Rolling Fork has prompted calls for a huge federal hydraulic pumping project. But that plan has been opposed by a number of people who say it could harm the environment, affect birds that migrate through the region and worsen flooding further south.

In 2004, Senator John McCain, a Republican of Arizona who died in 2018, called the pumps "one of the worst projects ever conceived by Congress." And the plan was vetoed by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008 under President George W. Bush.

Jesus Jimenez

In a post on Facebook, the Langford Volunteer Fire Department described the damage to Rolling Fork, Miss., as "total devastation."

Cassandra Vinograd

Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said he was heading to Sharkey County, where the town of Rolling Fork was hit on Friday night.

Just completed command briefing with our disaster response team. Devastating damage—as everyone knows. This is a tragedy. I am on my way to Sharkey County to be with the people first hit. We are blessed with brave, capable responders and loving neighbors. Please continue to pray.

John Keefe

Skies are mostly clear today in the region hit by tornadoes last night, but severe weather could return on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center. Forecasters place the risk for severe storms as "slight," which is the second category on a five-tier scale. They warned of the possibility of hail and damaging winds in a band from Texas to South Carolina, with a risk of tornadoes across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Jesus Jimenez

The National Weather Service office in Jackson, Miss., is sending out teams this morning to assess damage and to determine where tornadoes may have touched down. "At this time, we’re not sure if it was just one big long tornado that caused all of the damage, or if it lifted and then dropped a new one," said Janae Elkins, a Weather Service meteorologist.

Winston Choi-Schagrin and Raymond Zhong

Scientists have been able to draw links between a warming planet and hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, attributing the likelihood that climate change played a role in individual isolated events. The same can't be said for tornadoes yet.

Even as scientists are discovering trends around tornadoes and their behavior, it remains unclear the role that climate change plays. "For a lot of our questions about climate change and tornadoes, the answer is we don't know," said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory. "We don't see evidence for changes in average annual occurrence or intensity over the last 40 to 60 years."

Tornadoes form inside large rotating thunderstorms and the ingredients have to be just right. Tornadoes occur when there is a perfect mix of temperature, moisture profile and wind profile.

When the air is unstable, cold air is pushed over warmer humid air, creating an updraft as the warm air rises. When a wind's speed or direction changes over a short distance, the air inside the clouds can start to spin. If the air column begins spinning vertically and rotates near the ground, it can intensify the friction on Earth's surface, accelerating the air inward, forming a tornado.

Like hurricanes and earthquakes, tornadoes are rated on a scale. The Enhanced Fujita, or EF, scale runs from 0 to 5.

Because it's challenging to measure the winds in a tornado directly, surveyors usually evaluate tornadoes by their level of damage to different structures.

For instance, they may look to see if the damage is limited to missing roof shingles or whether entire sections of roofs or walls are missing. Based on the level of damage, scientists then reverse-engineer the wind speeds and assign a tornado a rating on the scale.

Researchers say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater "clusters," and that the region known as tornado alley in the Great Plains, where most tornadoes occur, appears to be shifting eastward. The overall number of tornadoes annually is holding steady around 1,200.

In December 2021, a burst of deadly tornado activity across central and southern states came at a highly unusual time for the United States. March, with its warmer weather, is typically when tornado activity starts to increase.

The ingredients that give rise to tornadoes include warm, moist air at ground level; cool dry air higher up; and wind shear, which is the change in wind speed or direction. Each of these factors may be affected differently by climate change.

As the planet warms and the climate changes, "we don't think they are all going to go in the same direction," said Dr. Brooks of NOAA. For instance, overall temperature and humidity, which provide energy in the air, may rise with a warming climate, but wind shear may not.

"If there is not enough shear to make something rotate, it doesn't matter how strong the energy is." he said. "If there is all kind of wind shear, but you don't have a storm, you won't get a tornado, either."

Although we know that climate change may be playing a role in making some storms more powerful, the complexity of tornadoes means that it is hard to extend that connection with certainty, especially for an individual event.

A tornado's relatively small size also makes it harder to model, the primary tool that scientists use when attributing extreme weather events to climate change. "We are working at such small scales that the model you would use to do the attribution studies just can't capture the phenomenon," Dr. Brooks said.

Susanna Timmons

"Oftentimes reporters are the first people to arrive at a place after it has been hit. That is a difficult experience."

Patricia Mazzei, Miami bureau chief

During extreme weather, and related events such as wildfires and floods, we move quickly to bring vital information to those who need it, sending reporters and visual journalists to the scene.

"Once the storm hits, we try to get as close to the hardest-hit part as quickly and safely as possible," said Patricia Mazzei, the Miami bureau chief for The Times, who has covered natural disasters for more than 15 years, including several major hurricanes.

"At the beginning, it feels very like you’re the eyes and ears of the reader," Mazzei said. "They’re not there, your editors are not there. You know that you have to absorb the sights and sounds and smells and what people are saying and how they feel and what it looks like and feels like for them. And then you have to pull out, in order to transmit this information. It's a logistical dance that is very difficult and requires a lot of resources."

When Mazzei and her colleagues reach a disaster zone, they often find people out surveying the damage or helping their neighbors. "You encounter these moments of humanity that sort of just blow your mind," she said. "By telling their stories, we can let the world know what happened. And people really want the world to know what happened."

Traveling with police officers, firefighters and search-and-rescue teams can also be essential in helping readers understand the urgency and severity of a storm. Their insight can help reporters piece together the damage the storm caused, and understand what it will take for a hard-hit community to come back from it.

Our reporters and editors reach out to emergency service agencies and forecasters as a disaster is unfolding, checking in hourly at times to let readers know where the most damage is occurring, and if they need to evacuate. But being at the scene, interviewing the people experiencing the brunt of the disaster, is how we can bring readers stories of survival, resilience and tragedy.

"It's difficult to convey the panic and the immediacy of what people are feeling unless you get into the details," said Shawn Hubler, a National desk reporter who has covered California floods, wildfires and earthquakes for 40 years. "They’ll say it was terrifying. And by terrifying, you don't know what they mean until you drill down a little bit and you find out there were embers the size of baseballs slamming into their car as they tried to wind their way down some two-lane highway."

The on-the-ground reporting can also lead to some of the most important stories The Times can tell, seeking to hold decision makers accountable when warnings aren't issued or heeded, when poor choices put people or communities in harm's way, or when long-term planning or infrastructure has been insufficient or neglected, making the outcomes of extreme weather even worse.

For our journalists back at the office, the pace during an ongoing weather story can be frenetic. Editors on the National and Express desks field reports from several locations while also monitoring the course of a storm, the problems it is causing — including evacuations, power outages and flight cancellations — and how those affected can seek help.

For events such as blizzards, typhoons, hurricanes and severe weather that could produce tornadoes, our weather data and graphics teams step in early with forecasts and graphics that show the likely path and intensity of the storms.

Our Weather Data team is led by John Keefe and anchored by the meteorologist Judson Jones. For this team it is data, data, data. "Because we are looking at it all the time, it's easier for us to explain when there are weird quirks," Keefe said. This allows the team to alert editors to a coming weather system.

The team uses data primarily from the National Weather Service, augmented by other branches of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And Jones keeps in close touch with scientists at these agencies, and with academics who research weather. His expertise allows him to speak their language and interpret their jargon for readers. "My job is to translate that into terms that matter," he said, "and sometimes that's filtering out what doesn't matter."

Our Graphics desk, led by Archie Tse, takes this information and turns it into maps that track a storm's path; animated time loops that give readers the scale of the storm; and graphics that show rainfall, wind speed and storm surge. The goal is to create weather trackers that focus on the aspects that threaten to cause the most damage. Tse said that a combination of news judgment and design expertise goes into every graphic. "Our maps and visualizations are tailored for our readers to give them the information they need in a clear and concise way," he said.

Because the science establishing a direct link between extreme weather events and the rapid warming of the planet is increasingly clear, our Climate desk, which includes more than a dozen journalists, joins in our coverage to provide data, visual explanations and insights.

Here are some of the sources we use for extreme weather events.

The Storm Prediction Center, the Weather Prediction Center, the National Hurricane Center and other divisions within the National Weather Service.

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (E.C.M.W.F.).

The National Weather Service for the number of people under storm watches, warnings and advisories across the United States.

PowerOutage, a website that collects and aggregates data on the number of utility customers without power in the United States and other parts of the world.

FlightAware, which displays the cancellations and delays of commercial airline flights around the world.

These are all available to the public, but we sometimes subscribe for access to more data.

We also provide guidance for those in the paths of storms, offering ways they can prepare for and survive hurricanes, flash floods and tornadoes.

Weather is news. We cover it with the understanding that it has an impact on readers’ lives. And while extreme events may begin as breaking news, they often become stories of survival, tragedy, science and accountability.