'My City Is Gone': Mississippi Tornado Death Toll Rises To 25, Biden Calls Loss 'Heartbreaking'

While the death toll rose, four people who went missing in Mississippi have been found. Hundreds have become homeless after the powerful tornado ripped through the southern US state.

Ramona Brock sits outside the remains of a house and cars entangled in tree limbs in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, after a tornado touched down in the area March 25, 2023.

Rescue work continued on Saturday to look for survivors and help the hundreds who were left homeless after the powerful tornado that ripped through the southern US state of Mississippi late Friday. 

According to news agency AFP, the state's emergency management agency said the death toll had reached 25 and dozens more were injured. Four people reported missing "have been found," it added.

Other southern states were also conducting their rescue work from the damage caused by other suspected twisters. A 67-year-old man was also killed in Alabama after he became trapped beneath a trailer that flipped over.

The tornado devastated a swath of the Mississippi Delta town of Rolling Fork, reducing homes to piles of rubble, flipping cars on their sides and toppling the town’s water tower. The residents of the towns ducked in the bathtubs and hallways for several minutes to let the tornado pass later broke into a store that they converted into a triage centre for the wounded, reported the Associated Press.

“There’s nothing left,” Wonder Bolden told AP, holding her granddaughter, Journey, while standing outside the remnants of her mother’s now-levelled mobile home in Rolling Fork. “There’s just the breeze that’s running, going through – just nothing.”

"My city is gone," Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker told CNN. "Devastation – as I look from left to right, that's all I see. "A lot of families are hurting. This community is in a situation that we never expected”.

"Houses that are torn up can be replaced but we can't replace a life."

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves issued a State of Emergency and vowed to help rebuild as he headed to view the damage in an area speckled with wide expanses of cotton, corn and soybean fields and catfish farming ponds.

US President Joe Biden also promised federal help, describing the damage as “heartbreaking.”

“We will do everything we can to help. We will work together to deliver the support you need to recover, for as long as it takes,” he wrote on Twitter.

I also spoke to @FEMA_Deanne, who has already deployed emergency response personnel and resources to support search-and-rescue and assess the damage.

We will do everything we can to help. We will work together to deliver the support you need to recover, for as long as it takes.

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 25, 2023

Risk was seen a week before 

AP reported citing the preliminary information by reports and radar data as indicating that the tornado was on the ground for more than an hour and traversed at least 170 miles (274 kilometres),  said Lance Perrilloux, a meteorologist with the weather service’s Jackson, Mississippi office.

“That’s rare — very, very rare,” he said, attributing the long path to widespread atmospheric instability. “All the ingredients were there.”

Perrilloux said that the tornado began its path of destruction just southwest of Rolling Fork before continuing northeast toward the rural communities of Midnight and Silver City, then moving toward Tchula, Black Hawk and Winona.

The supercell that produced the deadly twister also appeared to produce tornadoes that caused damage in northwest and north-central Alabama, Brian Squitieri told AP, a severe storms forecaster with the weather service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

While tornadoes are a weather phenomenon that is notoriously difficult to predict, however, meteorologists saw a big tornado risk coming for the general region as much as a week in advance, Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Walker Ashley told AP.

Tornado experts like Ashley have been warning about increased risk exposure in the region because of people building more.

“You mix a particularly socioeconomically vulnerable landscape with a fast-moving, long-track nocturnal tornado, and disaster will happen,” Ashley said.