Outside, houses destroyed, trees lying with their roots exposed. Inside, stretchers line up in front of tables overflowing with food. In Rolling Fork, in the state of Mississippi, where a tornado sowed chaos and death, help is being organized for the victims and volunteers are arriving from nearby towns.
Less than 24 hours after the tornado hit that town in the United States, on Friday night, the local Red Cross set up shop in a National Guard building.
One room is used as an infirmary, an ambulance is parked at the entrance and boxes full of cereal bars or baby diapers continue to arrive through the rear access to the premises.
“We’re trying to provide people with a place to stay for the night with food and medical support, so they can have a place to rest because they’ve lost everything,” says John Brown, Red Cross manager for Alabama and Mississippi.
Rolling Fork, with just 2,000 inhabitants, “looks like a war zone”as if “a bomb had exploded”, continues the official.
At least 25 people have died in Mississippi as a result of the passage of the tornado.
Whether or not they choose to remain in the assistance center, the inhabitants will have been able to find out about the situation, feed themselves and recover a minimum of strength to face the moment, adds Brown.
This is the case of Anna Krisuta, 43, with her son Álvaro Llecha, 16, sitting one on a stretcher, the other on a chair, with electric blue energy drinks placed in front of them.
Their house is “in pieces”, says Anna Krisuta with a brave smile. Both pull out their mobile phones to show the extent of the damage, caught on video.
Will they spend the night in this center? They are not sure. Maybe they prefer to “sleep in the car”, says Álvaro, looking at his mother with some doubts.
The teenager assures that he owes his salvation solely to the fact that he hid in the bathroom, the room he considered the safest in the house.
“I thought I was going to die,” he says anguished.remembering more than anything the violent wind “that rushed through the bottom of the door” of his home.
Arriving from Vicksburg, about 70 km from Rolling Fork, volunteer Lauren Hoda cannot hide the mixture of “sadness”, “pain” and “anger” she feels for the “injustice” inflicted on the inhabitants.
“When I woke up this morning I felt like crying for the people of this town because I don’t think they had much time before (the tornado) happened. There were people eating in the restaurant, families in their beds, ”says this 28-year-old girl who claims to have already experienced another major natural disaster: Hurricane Katrina, in 2005.
Hoda spent Saturday night in Rolling Fork carrying the collected donations: water, food, canned goods, diapers, wipes, medicine, deodorant, toothpaste, as she lists.
Jon Gebhardt, an assistant professor of military science at the University of Mississippi in Oxford — about a three-hour drive from Rolling Fork — says he arrived in the middle of the night after the tornado hit to help set up the center.
Due to the “pain and anguish” expressed by the inhabitants, “today I cried a lot,” he admits. “But this morning when I woke up and saw the generosity and the ability of this community to come together in such a difficult time” he felt “lucky to be in Mississippi.”
Will the physical and moral reconstruction of the town be able to be done in a few weeks? “No,” she answers. “Will this population be able to become a better version of itself in the years to come? Yes, I do believe that ”, he maintains, confident in the “resilience ”of the Mississippi Delta.
