Mississippi Today

'Like you were unzipping a jacket': How survivors barely missed tornado damage, and their next steps for rebuilding

Published

1 year ago

March 31, 2023

‘Like you were unzipping a jacket': How survivors barely missed tornado damage, and their next steps for rebuilding

by Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today
March 31, 2023

ROLLING FORK – At first, Eddie Jones' two 5-year-old twin daughters didn't want to stay with his mother last Friday night.

But after she insisted, the girls complied, and at around 6:30 p.m. they made the short four-block trip to their grandmother's house.

Now by himself in his Rolling Fork home, Jones, a 50-year-old retiredArmy veteran, anchored his attention to the television, where he was tracking some NBA wagers he placed on a fantasy sports app. With his earpiece clipped in, Jones was talking with his buddies about the night's games when he heard a strange whistling sound from outside at around 8 p.m.

The whistling turned to a roar, and Jones bolted for the bathroom. He ran so fast he banged his leg on the bathtub before he laid down inside it.

He knew what it was, because a couple hours earlier he saw an alert on his phone about a possible tornado in the area. At the time, he didn't think much of it, figuring it was just another one of the small storms he was used to. There might be some lightning, some power outages, but things would be fine by the morning, Jones told himself.

“It's pretty regular around here,” he said later, recalling the warning on his phone. “But things were different this time.”

When asked if he heard a tornado siren or any other kind of alarm from outside his home, Jones said he didn't hear anything.

Eddie Jones' Rolling Fork home after a tornado hit on Mar. 24, 2023.

Sharkey County Supervisor Bill Newsom confirmed to Mississippi Today that a siren in Rolling Fork wasn't working when the storm arrived on Friday. On the county website, a notice about the siren's repairs says that, in the event of a tornado, a patrol car would drive through the city with its sirens on to warn citizens.

Jones said he didn't hear that either. Rolling Fork officials couldn't be reached before this story published. Newsom said a Georgia-based company called him after the storm and said it would install a new siren for free.

While stationed in his bathtub, Jones heard the windows around the house pop.

“The glass was shooting everywhere, and my walls started cracking,” Jones remembered. “It was just like you were unzipping a jacket.”

Laying down, he felt the house lift up into the air and settle back onto the ground.

When the commotion outside died down, Jones looked up to see that his bathroom door had flown off, and his clothes were scattered around the house. He climbed around his belongings and tried to get outside, but the wind was still holding his front door shut. Instead, he ducked outside the one window that wasn't shattered and made his way to his mother's house where his daughters were.

Fortunately, her house just four blocks away was untouched.

Jones went back in the morning to check on the damages: The roof was cracked open, tree limbs protruded out of the side of his living room and his car's windshield. The entire house had shifted a few feet off of its foundation.

But what struck Jones the most was looking to his daughters' room. He noticed that the wind, after breaking the window, blew debris inside and across the room, shattering a mirror on the opposite wall.

“Had my girls been (home), asleep in their bed, they wouldn't be here,” Jones said.

Jones and his daughters are still staying with his mother. He said the water pressure at her house finally returned to normal as of Wednesday, a relief after washing himself with baby wipes the last few days, and the power came back on Tuesday.

Now, Jones and hundreds of other Mississippians wait to see what relief will come from the government and charities to help them rebuild.

Eddie Jones' daughters' room in Rolling Fork after a tornado hit on Mar. 24, 2023.

‘It's going to be a mess‘

Rolling Fork is in Sharkey County, which, with about 4,000 residents, is the second least-populated county in the state. After last weekend's tornadoes, about a quarter of the county is now displaced from their homes, Mississippi Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney estimated.

Because President Joe Biden approved an emergency disaster declaration, victims are eligible for grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help pay for temporary housing as well as to rebuild their homes.

The program, FEMA's Individual Assistance, can kick in if a victim doesn't have insurance covering storm damage or if the insurance doesn't cover all of the damages. Victims can also apply for low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration. Receiving an SBA loan and its interest rates are subject to a victim's credit history, among other factors.

Chaney said it'll be a challenge to get all of the resources needed from the government to rebuild Sharkey County, where 27% of residents live in poverty and many homes are uninsured.

“For the individuals, the lower income population, they're not insured,” he said. “A lot of them live in trailers. It's going to be a mess, it's going to be hard. The government is going to have to really step in this time.”

Chaney estimated that, between people's homes and county infrastructure, Sharkey County could be dealing with over $200 million in uninsured losses.

A truck rests in what is left of Chuck's Dairy Bar in Rollingfork after a tornado devasted the area Friday night, Saturday, March 25, 2023.

“I've never been so stressed in all of my life. I'm usually a strong old woman, but I ain't that no more,” said Collie Barnes, an 81-year-old lifelong resident of Anguilla, which is just north of Rolling Fork. “I'm just glad to be alive.”

Barnes took refuge with her neighbors, who initially wanted to stay home, in a nearby church after hearing about the storm on the news. She went back to see her porch was missing and water was leaking through the roof, but she realized she was relatively fortunate.

“(Her neighbor) said, ‘I better see if I got a house,' and she didn't. It was gone,” Barnes said.

On Wednesday, Barnes and others came to the town hall in Anguilla – which itself is still recovering from a tornado last December – where a FEMA official sat outside, helping victims apply for assistance.

The state hasn't yet released an official count of total people displaced. While as of Tuesday less than 30 people were staying in shelters, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, a motel in Greenville is giving over 100 of its rooms for victims to stay in, the Clarion Ledger reported.FEMA is also placing victims in nearby hotel rooms, an agency spokesperson said, adding that anyone affected should either call800-621-3362or visitdisasterassistance.govfor help.

On Thursday, MEMA gave the latest information on damaged homes, deaths and injuries by county:

Bolivar County: 9 damaged homes
Carroll County: 24 damaged homes, 5 injuries, 3 deaths
Humphreys County: 55 damaged homes, 15 injuries, 3 deaths
Itawamba County: 1 damaged home
Lafayette County: 2 damaged homes
Lee County: 10 damaged homes
Monroe County: 1,476 damaged homes, 55 injuries, 2 deaths
Montgomery County: 49 damaged homes
Grenada County: 1 damaged home
Prentiss County: 1 damaged home
Panola County: 31 damaged homes
Sharkey County: 255 damaged homes, 15 injuries, 13 deaths

MEMA spokesperson Malary White said that, as of Tuesday, all missing persons had been accounted for.

So far, FEMA has approved Carroll, Humphreys, Monroe and Sharkey Counties to apply for Individual Assistance. MEMA spokesperson Malary White said more counties could be added as damage assessments continue.

Those counties, as well as Attala, Chickasaw, Clay, Grenada, Holmes, Issaquena, Itawamba, Lee, Leflore, Lowndes, Montgomery, Sunflower, Washington and Yazoo counties are also eligible to apply for SBA disaster loans.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1967

Published

17 hours ago

May 12, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-05-12 07:00:00

MAY 12, 1967

Benjamin Brown, a former civil rights organizer, was shot in the back on this day in Jackson, Mississippi.

Brown had walked with a friend into the Kon-Tiki Café to pick up a sandwich to take home to his wife. On his way back, he encountered a standoff between law enforcement officers and Jackson State University students, who had been hurling rocks and bottles at them. Brown was hit in the back by three shotgun blasts. No arrests were ever made, and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission gathered spy files on the students who protested.

Eyewitnesses pointed their fingers at then-Mississippi Highway Patrolman Lloyd Jones, who reportedly admitted his involvement in the killing. When some accused a Jackson police detective of killing Brown, Jones was quoted as replying that the detective “didn't shoot that n—–, I did.”

Jones was quoted as saying that he took the shotgun home, cleaned it, wrapped it in a blanket and placed it in an attic for a few months before returning it to service. Jones was never charged and in 1995 was killed while working as sheriff in Simpson County.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

If you didn’t like MAEP, you may not like the new public school funding formula

Published

18 hours ago

May 12, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Bobby Harrison – 2024-05-12 06:00:00

House and Senate members often adjourn a legislative day in memory of a constituent or other well known person who recently died.

On the day the Mississippi House took its final vote to adopt a new school funding formula, Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, asked “to adjourn in memory of the Mississippi Adequate Education plan…the failed plan.”

Oliver continued: “It has always failed and never met its expectations. Today we laid it to rest.”

House Speaker Jason White, R-West, gleefully responded that all House members might want to sign onto Oliver's adjourn in memory motion.

Of course, the Senate went on to pass the bill rewriting the Adequate Education Program and Gov. Tate Reeves, a long-time opponent of MAEP, signed the legislation into law this week, no doubt stirring much celebration for folks like Oliver and White.

But for those celebrating the demise of MAEP, be warned with a paraphrased song lyric: Meet the new school funding formula, same as the old school funding formula.

The core principle of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program lives in the new funding formula, named simply the Mississippi Student Funding Formula.

Like MAEP, the new formula uses an objective formula to determine the base student cost (amount of funding per student) and provides that amount of money multiplied by school enrollment or attendance to each local school district.

And here's the kicker: Like MAEP, the Mississippi Student Funding Formula mandates that the Legislature appropriate that amount of money annually to each local district.

The new law states plainly, “Base student cost shall not be lower than the previous year.” So that means the new law mandates lawmaker provide enough funds to pay for what will likely be an ever increasing base student cost or, if they don't want to fully fund education, they have to hope enrollment drops or they simply do like they did with MAEP and not follow the law. The new law does provide a small loophole, saying when a revenue shortfall is so severe that state budgets must be cut, education also can be reduced.

But the new law goes on to say, “If the total revenue increases the following year, the formula shall be recalculated or increased.” Just like MAEP, the amount of money called for by the formula is adjusted yearly for inflation. And it is recalculated every fourth year, meaning unless there are unusual circumstances the formula will generate more money for education each year.

For years, many politicians, including the governor, argued that the state could not afford MAEP's objective funding formula. So, while cutting taxes by more than a billion dollars annually, legislators chose to ignore the law saying MAEP “shall” be fully funded. At the same time those tax cuts were being enacted, many legislative leaders, led by then-Lt Gov. Reeves and former Speaker Philip Gunn, were trying to replace MAEP because they said it was too expensive.

During the 2024 session, new Speaker Jason White and House Education Chair Rob Roberson, R-Starkville, pulling significant help from Reps. Kent McCarty and Jansen Owen, said they wanted to rewrite MAEP not because it sent too much money to the public schools, but because it did not send enough money to poorer school districts. And, granted, the new plan has several features that help poor and at-risk students.

But the House plan, which was nearly identical to a funding formula developed by advocacy groups who support sending public funds to private schools, did not include an objective funding formula. Senate Education Chair Dennis DeBar, R-Leakesville, said it allowed the Legislature to determine “willy nilly” the amount of money to send to public schools.

DeBar and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann were not among the group of legislators who opposed the objective funding formula. A matter of fact, they said they would not agree to rewrite MAEP unless the new method of sending money to public schools also was arrived at objectively. DeBar and Senate staff essentially developed the new objective formula that was placed into the House's formula rewrite.

In the haste and zeal to replace MAEP, politicians who did not like the objective formula agreed to adopt, gulp, a new objective funding formula — one that provides a little less money than MAEP, but still a significant amount and still with a mandate for the Legislature to provide that amount of funds each year.

In a lawsuit challenging the Legislature for not fully funding MAEP, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that “shall” did not actually mean shall. In other words, the justices ruled that legislators did not have to fully fund MAEP even though the law said they “shall” do so.

When and if the new Mississippi Student Funding Formula is not fully funded, maybe the Supreme Court will get another chance to rule on whether legislators have to follow the laws they pass.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1968

Published

2 days ago

May 11, 2024

Staff Editor

mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2024-05-11 07:00:00

MAY 11, 1968

Five-year-old Veronica Pitt touches a tattered poster of Martin Luther King Jr. as she and her 3-year-old brother Raythorn leave Resurrection City with other evacuees on May 24, 1968. Credit: AP: Bob Daugherty.

The Poor People's Campaign arrived in Washington, D.C. A town called “Resurrection City” was erected as a tribute to the slain Martin Luther King Jr.

King had conceived the campaign, which was led by his successor at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph David Abernathy. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson reached out to young Black men wanting vengeance for King's assassination.

“Jackson sat them down and said, ‘This is just not the way, brothers. It's just not the way,”' recalled Lenneal Henderson, then a student at the University of California at Berkeley. “He went further and said, ‘Look, you've got to pledge to me and to yourself that when you go back to wherever you live, before the year is out, you're going to do two things to make a difference in your neighborhood.' It was an impressive moment of leadership.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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