After Tornado, Town Starts a Long Path to Recovery

ROLLING FORK, Miss. — There’s no funeral home that’s capable yet of burying the dead.

None of the few restaurants or food stores in town have reopened, so for many people, their only meals come from volunteers on the side of the road. If houses are still standing, in many cases their residents are waiting for power or for water that’s more than a trickle. If the car still drives, at least one of its windows was probably blown out. Residents are lucky if they can get a prescription filled. Schools are still closed.

Officials have vowed in recent days that Rolling Fork — which was struck last week by tornadoes that killed 13 people in the town and in surrounding Sharkey County — will come back better than ever. But in a poor, rural area where life was already lived on the margins, just navigating the basics of food, water and shelter can seem almost insurmountable with no immediate fix in sight.

“It’s taken a toll on every single individual that lives here,” said Natalie Perkins, the Sharkey County emergency management coordinator and the editor and publisher of The Deer Creek Pilot, the weekly newspaper in Rolling Fork.

In some cases, families are essentially starting over, their homes and businesses ripped apart by the tornadoes. For some, the first hurdle is the most agonizing: waiting for the two funeral homes to get up and running so they can make arrangements for relatives who were killed.

“I am going to have to see a therapist after going through what I went through,” said Evelyn Macon, who was staying in a donated hotel room in Greenville, Miss., about 40 miles from Rolling Fork. Her home had been destroyed, and she said she was overwhelmed by the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

“We don’t have nothing,” Dianne Shelton, her sister-in-law, said.