Rolling sky 75/18/2023 ![]() This is where they come," she said with a trembling voice. ![]() "This is the place in the community to go to and not just to eat, but if you're hurting or if you're happy, and they want to share their news. ![]() Chuck’s Dairy Bar was a meeting place for the town of just under 2,000 residents. "She was holding her kids, and she was sucked out of the trailer."ĭRONE VIDEO SHOWS DEVASTATION MILE-WIDE TORNADO LEFT BEHIND IN MISSISSIPPI "We have a family, 5 or 6 kids and the mother’s gone. But the mother will never return to the store. She said she got to know the kids because they would come into her store to wait for the school bus and visit for after-school snacks. She showed Byrne where the nearby mobile home park used to be. She later learned that she lost neighbors and friends to the twister. "But then when we looked up, we just saw what used to be two motel buildings and 35 or more trailer houses are all gone, and they were all flattened." ‘I'm in a situation where I can't help them. And that's what we saw first," she said of her first glimpse of Rolling Fork. "We stepped out to the back of the building, which the building was gone, but we stepped out through what would have been the back door, and our vehicles were totaled. NWS STORM SURVEYOR: MISSISSIPPI TORNADO HAD ‘WORST TORNADO DAMAGE’ HE'S EVER SEEN With a broken arm, he cleared away bits and pieces of the dairy bar that blocked the cooler door and set them free. One of her customers from earlier in the day heard the group screaming when he got out of his shelter, Hardin recalls. Once the storm had passed, her husband tried to push open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. They heard the building moving, and all of a sudden, it stopped. "Just as he was closing the door, he looked up, and he said, ‘I see the sky.’ And that just let us know that the roof was gone, and this is more serious than we could have imagined," she said.Įveryone was squeezed in tight, praying, screaming and crying, she said. Hardin’s husband battled with winds to get the door closed. She and her husband gathered the employees and customers and "shoved" them into the walk-in freezer, nine people in total. "And at that moment, the lights flickered, and I just hollered, ‘Cooler!’" "Then one of my cashiers came to me running and said, ‘My mom is on the phone, and she said, there's a tornado,'" said Hardin. At 8:05 p.m., both her daughter and sister sent texts warning of a tornado in town. She said her customers and employees were talking about the incoming weather all day and thinking the worst would go north of Rolling Fork. So that's the hard part right now.HOW ARE TORNADOES RATED? "I just hollered, ‘Cooler!’" It's just so nice to be that place, to be that group of people where people feel like they can come to you and share. "And we're just the place to go whether you are hurting or you are happy, you need to talk, you want to let people know what is going on in your life - the good and the bad. And it allowed me to be able to give so much love back," she continued. "I came to this community as a stranger and they welcomed me in and gave me so much love. "The business is much older than I am and I've only been there 16 years," Harden said Monday, reflecting on the damage to Chuck's Dairy Bar. In the National Weather Service's preliminary report on Sunday, the agency said the tornado was an estimated three-quarters of a mile wide at some points. Some 2,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 25 people were confirmed killed in Mississippi with another 55 people injured. The tornado that hit Rolling Fork tore across Mississippi for about 59 miles over a period of over an hour, according to the National Weather Service, flipping cars and reducing homes to piles of rubble.
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