Tornadoes kill 10 people in Mississippi

April 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

YAZOO CITY, Miss.

Tornadoes ripped through the Southeast on Saturday, killing 10 people in Mississippi and injuring more than a dozen others. Roofs were torn off businesses, homes were splintered, vehicles were overturned, and roads were blocked by toppled trees.

Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesman Greg Flynn said five people were killed in Choctaw County, including two children. Four victims were in Yazoo County, and one was in Holmes County.

Gov. Haley Barbour told The Associated Press there was “utter obliteration” in parts of Yazoo County, an area known for cotton, cat- fish, blues music and picturesque hills rising abruptly from the flat Mississippi Delta.

More than 15 other counties also were damaged. The swath of debris forced rescuers to pick up some of the injured with all-terrain vehicles in the west-central part of the state.

Tornadoes also were reported in Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama, and the severe weather continued to track eastward.

In Yazoo City about 40 miles north of Jackson, Malcolm Gordon, 63, stood with members of his family peering through a broken win- dow. Above them, the roof was gone, a tree lay across part of the house, and power lines stretched across the yard in a neighborhood made up of modest houses and mobile homes on a street that winds around hills and ravines. The smell of shredded pine trees hung on the warm breeze.

Gordon looked around at the devastation. “It sounded like a train coming down that road,” he said. Gordon and his wife, Diane, hid in a closet while much of the neighborhood was blown away.