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April 26, 2010

When a powerful tornado struck suddenly this weekend, a Mississippi man prayed to the Lord and took cover under a little communion table as his church crumbled around him. "The whole building caved in, but me and that table were still there," Dale Thrasher told the Associated Press. The next day, Thrasher and other members of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Yazoo City sorted through the wreckage of the church. One searcher found a hymnal opened to the song, "Till the Storm Passes By."

The tornado killed at least 10 people and damaged hundreds of homes in Mississippi. Sandra Grayson was sitting on her front porch when the tornado ripped across a nearby hill.  According to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, she grabbed her two miniature schnauzers, Bubba and Julie Belle, and hid in the bathroom.

"I could hear all around me the trees twisting and swaying," she said. "I asked God to hug us because it was like you could just tell you were looking in the eyes of death."

When Grayson came out of the bathroom, the Clarion-Ledger reported, she saw that 100-year-old oaks had fallen like dominoes across her property — many twisted and snapped at their trunks or completely uprooted. But none had landed on her house.

Yazoo County Coroner Ricky Shivers -- a Baptist deacon -- says he was in his truck when the twister picked it up and flipped it four times. Shivers says he told God that if it was his time to die, he was ready. Later he went out in his hospital gown to help identify bodies.

"This tornado was enormous," said Gov. Haley Barbour, who grew up in Yazoo County, a county of about 28,000 people known for blues, catfishand cotton. The twister wreaked "utter obliteration" among the picturesque hills rising from the flat Mississippi Delta, the governor said.

Tornadoes also were reported in Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama. The storm system tracked northeastward, downing trees in northwest Georgia and damaging an elementary school roof in Darlington, S.C., late Sunday.

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