Teary-eyed Moss Point picks up the pieces after tornado. ‘It’s like a bomb went off.’

Samantha Woodward could not find the words.

It is difficult, she said, to explain how it feels to rush behind a staircase and pray that a tornado does not kill you.

But that is what she and seven others did on Monday. The M&M Bank where they hid was the epicenter of a twister that tore through Moss Point Monday afternoon, and it trapped them all inside.

“It was chaos,” she said Tuesday morning from outside the bank, where she and others were trying to salvage what they could. “You could feel the destruction.”

Devastation has struck Moss Point, and its residents – who said over and over again how grateful they are that the storm was not worse – spent the morning picking through debris, fixing their roofs and praying that the thunder overhead would not unleash yet another storm.

“It’s like a bomb went off,” said Jeremy Cothern, who works at Risky Limbs Tree Service and was picking up branches near the tattered Sonic restaurant.

And in a place that is accustomed to storms, people awoke Tuesday morning to wreckage that some said was worse than Hurricane Katrina. Their cars were crushed. Their roofs were gone. And at the bank, where an alarm would not stop going off, Woodward was stepping over glass to rescue wet computers and save paperwork so she can still pay pensioners.

Mississippi tornado’s path through Moss Point

The tornado struck Moss Point about 3 p.m. Monday, and it appeared to first touch down near Moss Point High School before it cut a path of destruction across homes, ripping apart a church and the bank as it tore down Main Street.

The school’s basketball gym, where professional athlete Devin Booker once played, was not spared by the twister.

Residents in its path had little warning it was coming. On Tuesday morning, Kecia Dailey walked out of her house on Bowen Street and tried not to cry.

“I’m just making it this morning,” she said. “It was terrible.”

Others sat on chairs on their destroyed porches, just looking over the misery.

“This is unreal,” said Ernest Watson III, whose father’s home on East Bayou Avenue was destroyed. He is not sure if it will be saved. It is one of several houses on the block marked with an orange X. Power lines are down and roofs are long gone. Myra Howard, a neighbor, was cleaning up her aunt’s house nearby. It does not have a roof or walls, and a construction dumpster blown from First Baptist Church sat near the rubble that had once been her bathroom.

“So many photos, so many memories,” she said. “We just have to pick up where we left off.”

They are lucky, she said, it was not worse. When the tornado’s winds blasted the dumpster into the house, Howard said it hit a relative inside. He survived, she said, and is in the hospital.

“I’m just praying he doesn’t have any internal bleeding,” she said from her crumbling front steps.

Tornadoes ravage Mississippi

Moss Point was yet another moment of agony this week in Mississippi, which has been battered by tornadoes this year. Multiple twisters tore through Jasper County overnight Sunday, and Gov. Tate Reeves said those storms killed one and injured 25 others. In Rolling Fork in March, a deadly tornado flattened entire blocks and killed 25 people.

No one has died in Moss Point – and its residents called that a miracle. But it is also hot, and people who have homes to return to may still lack power, which means in the immediate aftermath of Monday’s destruction a new fear is that residents, especially the elderly, may overheat.

Pelican Landing, which last week was a convention center where people celebrated reunions, weddings and school dances, is now a place where people have fled for help. The Red Cross is there, and also in neighborhoods handing out water and help.

A few signs of healing have already emerged.

As Howard pieced together everything that was gone, she was shocked at what survived. Her aunt was a “prayer warrior” at First Baptist Church, Howard said, and the tornado spared one thing: her china cabinet.

Jerry Georgia Jacobson teared up Tuesday remembering how friends from the Freedom Christian Fellowship church came right away to help him and his wife repair their Main Street home.

“People are kind,” he said.

Others rolled down windows to say “God bless you,” when they drove past ruined homes.

“I don’t know,” Watson III said, how Moss Point will recover. “I just hope it doesn’t start raining again.”