Mississippi storm survivors share their stories: ‘We are safe here’

A searcher walks past the remains of a SUV in Louisville, Miss., early Tuesday morning, April 29, 2014 after a tornado hit the east Mississippi community Monday. Tornadoes flattened homes and businesses, flipped trucks over on highways and bent telephone poles into 45-degree angles as they barreled through Alabama and Mississippi on Monday, part of a storm system that killed at least nine people in the South and brought the overall death toll from two days of severe weather in the country to at least 26. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

The Associated Press

A searcher walks past the remains of a SUV in Louisville, Miss., early Tuesday morning, April 29, 2014 after a tornado hit the east Mississippi community Monday. Tornadoes flattened homes and businesses, flipped trucks over on highways and bent telephone poles into 45-degree angles as they barreled through Alabama and Mississippi on Monday, part of a storm system that killed at least nine people in the South and brought the overall death toll from two days of severe weather in the country to at least 26. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
A searcher walks past the remains of a SUV in Louisville, Miss., early Tuesday morning, April 29, 2014 after a tornado hit the east Mississippi community Monday. Tornadoes flattened homes and businesses, flipped trucks over on highways and bent telephone poles into 45-degree angles as they barreled through Alabama and Mississippi on Monday, part of a storm system that killed at least nine people in the South and brought the overall death toll from two days of severe weather in the country to at least 26. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

A powerful storm system was menacing a large swath of the South early Tuesday, killing more than two dozen people from Arkansas to Alabama over more than two days of destruction. Here are the some stories from people in Mississippi that made it through the frightening chaos.

___

After the tornado pounced on Tupelo, Miss., one gas station looked as if it had been stepped on by a giant. Francis Gonzalez owns a convenience store and Mexican restaurant attached to that station. Gonzalez, her three children and two employees ducked for cover in the store’s cooler shortly after a cellphone blared a tornado warning.

In the nick of time. Within seconds, the wind picked up and glass shattered. The roof over the gas pumps was reduced to aluminum shards. A nearby SUV had its windows blown out. The storefront window had a large hole in it. Debris lay everywhere.

“It took us by surprise,” Gonzalez said in Spanish. Stunned by the destruction all around, she added: “My Lord, how can all this happen in just one second?”

____

NBC affiliate WTVA-TV chief meteorologist Matt Laubhan in Tupelo, Miss., was reporting live on severe weather about 3 p.m. when he realized the twister was coming close enough that maybe he and his staff should abandon the TV studio.

“This is a tornado ripping through the city of Tupelo as we speak. And this could be deadly,” he said in a video widely tweeted and broadcast on YouTube.

Moments later he adds, “A damaging tornado. On the ground. Right now.” The video then showed Laubhan peeking in from the side to see if he was still live on the air before yelling to staff off-camera to get down in the basement.

“Basement, now!” he yelled, before disappearing off camera himself.

Later, the station tweeted, “We are safe here.”

____

At the Winston County Medical Center in Louisville, Miss., Dr. Michael Henry, head of the emergency room, didn’t expect a tornado at such close quarters.

“We thought we were going to be OK. Then a guy came in and said, ‘It’s here right now.’ Then boom … it blew through,” Henry recalled.

The fierce winds knocked down two walls. The emergency room and an outpatient clinic, at the back of the hospital, bore the brunt of the wind damage. The 27-bed hospital also was pocked with holes in its roof and water damage, dimly lit when it kicked over to generator power.

Fifteen patients were in hospital rooms at the time. Eight or nine were in the emergency room, but staff said no one died. Doctors relocated to a former operating room and sent some patients to other hospitals.

____

Sennaphie Yates of Louisville, Miss., said her grandfather had been taken to the Winston County Medical Center after a fainting spell. She said she and family members arrived at the hospital to check on him just before the tornado hit.

Yates said hospital workers herded people into a hallway. “They had all of us against the wall and gave us pillows. They said ‘get down and … don’t get up,'” she said.

Yates said the worst of it lasted three, maybe five minutes. Then the storm passed. Afterward, she and family members stayed with her grandfather for hours until hospital officials cleared him to go home.

____

Republican state Sen. Giles Ward of Mississippi huddled in a bathroom with his wife, four other family members and their 19-year-old dog Monday as a tornado destroyed his two-story brick house. The winds also flipped his son-in-law’s SUV upside down onto the patio in Louisville, Miss., home to about 6,600 people.

“For about 30 seconds, it was unbelievable,” Ward said. “It’s about as awful as anything we’ve gone through.”

He estimated that 30 houses in his neighborhood, Jordan Circle, were either destroyed or heavily damaged. After the storm passed, Ward and his family went to a neighbor’s home where 19 people had managed to find safety in a basement.