When the weather forecasters announced that Thursday afternoon’s storms were making a beeline for Forest and Morton, I told my co-workers to pack up and head home, in hopes that they could get off the roads before bad weather hit. Just before they left the office, our Business Development Specialist, Emily Jackson, who had been following the storms on her computer, exclaimed “there are tornados everywhere!” Boy was she right.
At this posting the reports are that there were 32 tornadoes in Mississippi Thursday afternoon. Two even went through Philadelphia at the same time, I think.
I had the weather live from WLBT television in Jackson, playing on my computer and when the weatherman said there was a tornado on the ground in Morton and headed to Harperville and Sebastopol, I sent my wife a message at home warning to keep an eye to the sky.
Then as the newspaper stand in front of the office began to wabble into the street, I pulled it out of the storm and into our little entranceway as the power went out, so I too packed up and started making my way home via the usual route out Hillsboro Road and up Highway 21.
When I pulled out of our back parking lot and made the block around to East Second Street I could see the flag at Forest City Hall blowing hard to the north and then in a flash it was blowing hard to the south. “This can’t be good,” I mumbled out loud and made the turn onto West Main St. and headed home.
All along Highway 21 the wind was howling and debris was swirling across the road popping off the windows of my Expedition, and several times large limbs were hurled from trees and I dodged them as they came toward me. All the time I kept an eye to the west and north just waiting for a funnel cloud to appear. Fortunately for me and the other drivers on that road one never did, but for the folks in Morton the damage had already been done.
At Sebastopol Attendance Center part of the awning over the walkway between buildings was blown down and at our house the power had gone out as well. Reports were coming in on the phone that Highway 487 at Standing Pine was blocked and during the same time period additional reports were coming in that another tornado was on Spillway Road at the Ross Barnett Reservoir which is where our lake house is located. We were going to need to find a way to get there to check on things, I thought, and Highway 487 is our regular route to and fro.
Standing on the front porch facing north and contemplating what to do next, I watched as the winds intensified and the sweet gum trees looked as if they were about to take off into the field across the street. There was a constant roar in the distance that sounded like thunder that never stopped, and I am pretty sure it was the tornado that was making its way though Standing Pine that ended about six miles north of us. Soon enough things calmed down and we threw the dogs into the car and began a slow trek through downed trees and debris toward Rankin County.
There were power lines dangling in the road and at Carthage power outages had knocked out the traffic signals just like in Forest when I had left there an hour earlier. At Coal Bluff on Highway 25 in northwest Scott County, the roof had been blown off the store there and it appeared that the widespread damage would stretch all the way from Forest to the Capitol City.
We were lucky at the Reservoir to find only limbs and pinecones and leaves, and pretty much anything else that could move, moved around, but no real damage except that the power was out there too.
Good Friday morning the power had been restored and at some point I saw Morton Mayor Gerald Keeton on the television news along with other city, county and state officials. One of them, I think it was Keeton, said something along the line of “we’ve had tornados come over us and go around us but never hit us...until now.”
Thankfully there was no loss of life in Keeton’s city, but once again we are starkly reminded of the wrath of Mother Nature. And, once again we are reminded that we should take warnings serious and take cover when these violent storms approach because as the mayor said, they can go over us, or around us, but one day they will hit us.
In Mississippi that could be any time of the year. Take care my friends.
