YAZOO CITY — Three months after a monster tornado plowed nearly 150 miles through Mississippi, survivors are rebuilding homes and businesses, and officials say most of the debris has been cleared.
In one of the hardest hit areas of Yazoo City, many businesses damaged in the April 24 storm were repaired and reopened.
Contractors installed new power lines this past week, and volunteers from an Iowa church group helped repair houses.
Angie Cotten Rhoads was once again cutting hair and offering indoor tanning at Just My Style, a salon just off U.S. Highway 49 in Yazoo City — the place she huddled with eight other adults and nine children as the midday tornado ripped off the roof and exploded the windows.
Rhoads, a single mother with three teenage girls, said she’s living in a camper in the driveway of her log cabin and is plenty miffed about dealing with government bureaucracy.
“This late in the game, a lot of people are tired. They’re just tired,” Rhoads said during a cigarette break before cutting a man’s hair.
She said has more than $60,000 of damage to her home and is appealing a $2,400 repair payment she received from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The spring tornado bumped down in Louisiana before skipping across the Mississippi River.
Once it was in Mississippi, it bulldozed homes near Eagle Lake in Warren County, slammed into Yazoo City and cut a swath of destruction through churches, homes and businesses in several counties as it moved through the central and northern parts of the state. The system pushed into Alabama, spawning more tornadoes.
The National Weather Service said the tornado was 1.75 miles wide in some places in Mississippi — a record for the state.
It killed four people in Yazoo County, one in Holmes County and five in Choctaw County. Two people were killed in Alabama.
Brent McKnight, emergency management director in northern Mississippi’s Choctaw County, said some locals have become understandably skittish about bad weather since the storm.
“There’s a few of them, when it rains they flinch. Others are just like, ‘It’s going to get me one way or the other,”’ McKnight said. He said about 15 families are living in FEMA trailers.
