(intriguing music playing) >> Hello, everybody.

I'm Willy Bearden.

You know, it used to be that you could see Rolling Fork’s water tower for miles before you got to town.

That all ended on March 24th, 2023, when a tornado devastated Rolling Fork.

This is part three of the story we've been telling about the tornado and its aftermath.

And it's the story of neighbors and strangers pulling together to bring Rolling Fork back.

It was a somber day, a Sunday as Rolling Fork recalled the tornado.

>> May the Lord bless thee and keep thee.

May the Lord make His face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee.

>> In the crowd were friends and loved ones of the victims.

One of them was Charles Stubbs, whose brother, Darryl Purvis, lived in the mobile home park just off Highway 61, along with most of those who were killed.

>> You know, you can rebuild, but you can't get that life back.

And my brother’s gone, so.

Standing here right now, if my brother were living, he’d be standing right here with me.

You know?

Like I say, that's my baby brother.

My baby brother.

>> Bearden: Among the speakers was Ty Pinkins.

He was born in Rolling Fork.

Now he's running for the United States Senate.

He paid tribute to the dead, while looking to the future.

>> If we get the right investments in our community, then the Delta and Mississippi in general, but specifically in the Delta, we can move our state from the back of the line, to the middle of the pack, to winning the race for our children's future.

And that starts with making sure that we have direct investment in this part of the state.

>> Bearden: The town is much different than a year ago.

Businesses have built back, including the Double Quick by Deer Creek.

Amanda Rutherford and her co-owner had to make-do to keep business going at The Green Apple, their flower shop on Highway 61.

>> I immediately wanted to build back.

It was never an option for me.

I'm thinking it's going to be a while.

I think it's going to be a couple of years before we get back to normal.

But I think the community and the people want this little town to thrive.

I mean, they want it to be here.

They need it to be here.

>> Bearden: At Service Lumber Company across the highway, Brett Bailess is the general manager.

When the tornado hit, everyone from customers to suppliers jumped in to help.

>> About, you know, the destruction was unbelievable.

But what was more unbelievable was the selflessness of random people showing up to help everybody.

It's like, you know, a guy from North Dakota, like, “Who asked you to come here?” He's like, “Nobody”, you know?

“Well why are you here?” “Just to help people.” >> Bearden: B.J.

Anderson's day job is at Service Lumber Company.

He and his wife, Von, also run a restaurant where they serve what they say is the best fish in town.

And Brandon is also a member of the Sharkey County Board of Supervisors.

>> It is very important, again, to be getting it back off the ground and knows that’s where the people, they will want to come back.

They'll find a way to come back.

But, you know, if they’re not seeing, you know, any kind of progress, they're going to be like, no, I'm just gonna go on, and try somewhere else.

And they could be 30 miles down the road, but still that’s less residency that we have here in Sharkey County.

>> Bearden: Last fall, Karebya Christmas told us she might have to leave Rolling Fork because there were not enough homes available.

Now she's buying a house through the nonprofit Rolling Fork Rising, and built by members of a small college football team.

When we talked to Shirley Stamps last December, she was living in Greenville, displaced by the tornado.

Her dream was to finally own a home.

This is Shirley's new house, also being built through the Rolling Fork Rising project.

Ironically, Shirley and Karebya will be next-door neighbors.

>> When you arrive in this community, you see new homes that have been built within ten months.

You see businesses that were torn down on Highway 61 that's been, and being, rebuilt in this community.

So that shows me and tells me that this is a resilient community.

>> Bearden: Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker also operates a funeral home, and he's the deputy coroner.

>> The people of the community was first.

All other hats that I wore was not my primary focus at that time.

I was more concerned about families who had gotten injured, and what we could do to get them to safety, make an assessment of what's happened.

>> Bearden: What he saw was massive devastation.

Most of the housing was damaged or destroyed, along with many businesses and city government buildings.

Three members of the Board of Aldermen lost their homes.

>> Interviewer: Was the city of Rolling Fork prepared for this in any way?

>> Walker: Well, we weren't.

Nobody knew.

I mean, this storm just, just...

It came upon us so quickly.

So quickly.

>> Bearden: A task force from FEMA as well as from Mississippi Emergency Management moved in quickly to help.

But the slow pace of recovery soon caused frustration and finger-pointing.

>> Shelton: We need some help rebuilding Rolling Fork, and we looking for the city to help us.

>> Walker: It was aggravating at first, until I started asking questions to those who were working with us to get the help that we needed for our community.

Then I found out that a rebuild in this type of situation, trying to help folk who's been affected by the storm, it just took time to put in place.

There were some situations that arose during this process that simply slowed us down.

There were decisions made that we had to go back and change and do all over again to make sure that we were legal, and following the proper legal protocol.

Let's go back to what I just stated: working with FEMA, working with MEMA, we're falling in line with their timeline, not ours, because that's where we were going to get the help for these families.

>> Bearden: Looking ahead, the mayor thinks Rolling Fork after recovery might be better than before.

>> Walker: With the rebuild, it’s giving us the opportunity to somewhat start all over again in some areas: infrastructure, rebuild the City Hall, Fire Department, Police Department, our local Post Office, our school systems.

>> Bearden: Mayor Walker understands that the new housing that's going up all over Rolling Fork will bring back some of those who were displaced by the storm, but not all.

>> Walker: But I'm more focused on people who want to stay in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, because it's their home, and because they want to see this community rebuilt.

They want to be a part of it.

I want them to be a part of it.

>> Bearden: On the weekend of the anniversary, community leaders gathered in the high school gym to say thanks to the many first responders who came to Rolling Fork’s aid.

>> There were people that had never heard of Rolling Fork, Mississippi before that got in their vehicles and drove here.

Those are the real people that have helped us get where we are a year later.

>> Bearden: Lately, Natalie Perkins has taken to driving around her hometown every week, keeping track of the recovery.

>> Perkins: Just driving through and seeing the houses that are going up.

It can't do anything but inspire you that, you know, we're coming back.

We're going to come back.

>> Bearden: Natalie sees the recovery in two ways.

She's second-in-command of the town's emergency management team, and she's the editor of the town's 147-year-old newspaper, The Deer Creek Pilot.

>> Perkins: I think as much as the businesses rebuilding and the homes rebuilding are so inspiring and such good news, the infrastructure feels like it's at a standstill.

And that is the one thing everybody says.

Why is that water tower still lying on the ground?

>> Bearden: We were told that the wrecked water tower will be hauled away when a new water tower is built.

That could be November.

There's a lot to do.

>> Perkins: We're hoping that the city and the county are going to work together to try to get the rest of this these debris piles up.

>> Bearden: The county has a plan to repair the courthouse, but no timetable as yet.

This is how the police department looked right after the tornado.

City buildings around the courthouse were so badly damaged they had to be demolished.

South Delta High School is also still closed.

>> Perkins: It was damaged.

It had some pretty extensive roof damage that you can see.

The air conditioners got tossed around on the roof there.

>> Beardon: The question is whether to repair it or build a new school.

>> Perkins: They're trying to get FEMA to say that it's 50% damaged so we can get new schools.

And and in the meantime, the children are all crammed into a school in Anguilla that was damaged in another tornado in December.

>> Beardon: When we first met Natalie, she had just published the first issue of the paper after the tornado.

The USA Today named Natalie Mississippi's Woman of the Year for serving her community through both jobs.

But she says it has required some hard choices.

>> Perkins: I know what I'm doing is important for the recovery of Rolling Fork, but for the people in my community, I feel like I haven't done what they needed me to do, as far as being their voice as the newspaper.

That's what my job has been, is to be the voice of the community and keep them informed of everything.

And I feel like I, I just can't I can't do it all.

Yeah.

And that that bothers me.

It really does.

That's what keeps me awake at night.

>> Bearden: This is the Sharkey-Issaquena Community Hospital.

Doing this series, we've been told over and over again that without the hospital, the future of Rolling Fork is in question.

From the outside, there's not a lot of visible damage, but the hospital is closed, and its future is uncertain.

>> Jerry Keever: Probably around 120 people just showed up at the hospital, walked to the hospital however they could get there.

What if they had nowhere to go?

>> Bearden: Jerry Keever is the CEO of the hospital.

He also has made ambulance runs as an EMT.

Peggy Johnson runs the nursing home.

That night, Peggy had to walk from her home across town to get to her patients.

>> Peggy Johnson: Most of them were terrified that night and you could see it on their face.

Some of them, when I got there, some of them were telling me, you know, they were crying.

I was so scared.

You know, I thought the building was going to come down.

>> Bearden: There were 12 patients and six staff on duty in the hospital that Friday night.

Soon, others came to help, including volunteer doctors and nurses and others, including off duty hospital staff.

>> Keever: If they were able to get here, they came that night.

And that's, that’s dedication.

That's loyalty to a facility.

That's loyalty to the community and this loyalty to the people that we serve.

Because they knew that their neighbors needed help.

Night of the tornado, we could not even... we had patients just lined up in the hallway.

>> Bearden: Jerry and Peggy led us through the now empty hallways and treatment rooms to show us the damage.

>> Keever: So, this would be our primary trauma room.

But the night of the tornado, we could not use this room because of the water intrusion.

>> Bearden: Twenty-four patients were evacuated to other hospitals in the area, but no one died.

Within 48 hours, hospital operations moved into what had been the Civic Center, and before that, the National Guard Armory.

Jerry Keever says it reminds him of what we saw in the old TV series M*A*S*H. The tornado cost lives and property.

Since the tornado, the hospital has lost 68% of its revenue.

What happens next to Sharkey-Issaquena Community Hospital is a complex equation.

It depends largely on whether it would cost more to rebuild the hospital or replace it.

The hospital's board is pushing for a new facility on Highway 61.

>> Keever: Would we be better served on Highway 61?

I think everybody would say yes on that, we would be.

Just because of the visibility and the ease of access.

And we think it would open up markets that we currently don't have.

There's, you know, we have patients and they come to us from Hollandale and those types of areas and the ease of access and plus having a brand new facility makes a big difference.

>> Bearden: Recently, the hospital was designated a rural emergency hospital.

That change will assure a predictable amount of revenue every month.

Under the new designation, it's not just an emergency room.

Patients will receive treatment, but they would have to go to a different hospital for long term care.

Work is going on to get the residents back in the nursing home by summer.

The tornado lifted the roof and the entire facility had to be rewired.

A report last year showed that almost half of Mississippi's rural hospitals are at risk of closing.

Patients Choice Medical Center in Belzoni shut its doors in 2013, and thousands of patient records were left behind in an empty treatment room.

One of the major problems for Mississippi's rural hospitals is uncompensated cost for uninsured patients.

Many of those patients are poor with no insurance.

This group is referred to as self-pay patients.

>> Keever: So if you're self-pay and you don't have any insurance coverage, you had no Medicaid, you had no Medicare, you had nothing.

When they present to the emergency room, there's a federal law called EMTALA that we have to follow.

So if you present to my emergency room, I have to assess you.

I have to treat you.

That's what the federal law says that I have to do, regardless of your ability to pay.

>> Bearden: For years, the Mississippi legislature has vetoed an expansion of Medicaid coverage.

It has cost the state millions.

>> Keever: I see both sides of it.

But as far as the medical side of it, the hospital side, of it, the clinic side of it, you know, the expansion of Medicaid would certainly be beneficial benefit us financially as the model is today.

You know, as the federal model and the state model is today.

>> Interviewer: Because you are going to have people who need medical care, who can't pay.

>> Keever: Oh, absolutely.

And and we're treating them anyway.

Money should not be a deterrent for you going to the doctor or your ability to pay should not be a deterrent for you getting the health care that you need.

>> Bearden: The west side of Rolling Fork is where the tornado hit first.

About 60 miles away in Jackson, Mississippi, weather experts, including a guy named Logan Poole, were watching a killer tornado develop and they worried about the people in its path.

>> Logan Poole: It's actually important to recognize that these can happen, these will continue to happen.

And when they do, they're more dangerous here than essentially anywhere else in the country.

>> Bearden: Logan Poole is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service team in Jackson.

He showed us what he was tracking on his computer that Friday night.

>> Poole: And we were watching the cluster of storms coming out of northeast Louisiana crossing the Mississippi River.

We started to see it.

And up until that point, our area had largely avoided what could have been a more widespread event.

And we were concerned that maybe there was a bit of a softening of the wording and the rhetoric, and people were thinking maybe this isn't going to happen.

And then suddenly, almost within a number of minutes, we had one of the most destructive tornadoes on the ground that the state has ever experienced.

>> Bearden: Logan was familiar with Rolling Fork.

He had passed through town earlier in March on his way to inspect damage from an earlier tornado that had struck the nearby town of Anguilla.

As he watched the tornado bear down, Logan thought about the people in its path.

>> Poole: I was there a few weeks before and I think to myself, what do I tell these people?

What do I tell them, they’ve got a storm, it's gonna be on top of them in a handful of minutes, that may not be survivable in a mobile home.

And where do they go?

I know they don't have shelters.

Do I tell them to leave, do you just watch it happen?

>> Bearden: A tornado warning was issued by the Weather Service and had been broadcast on local television.

Although, as with many tornadoes, some say they didn't know the threat was imminent.

>> Poole: Because I know that we gave them advance warning.

We gave them over 10, 15 minutes advance warning in Rolling Fork.

And prior to that, we were letting people know through Facebook Live and through messaging to our partners and all day, we've been talking about this possibility for a long time.

>> Bill Parker: Good evening, everyone, this is Bill Parker, meteorologist in charge, back with Logan, who’s meteorologist here at the National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi.

We have a strong rotational coupling with us with a tornadic, tornadic thunderstorm moving into Sharkey County.

If you live in the Rolling Fork area, you should be taking cover now.

Move into an interior room, put as many walls between you and the outside element as possible.

>> Poole: We talked about warnings.

We gave them lead time.

Lead time for what?

To worry?

To just know the inevitable?

No, I refuse to accept that.

We have to figure out a way to get these people a real, actionable thing to do, when we issue these warnings.

>> Bearden: Storm chasers Dayton Griffin and his mother, Tonya, were on Highway 61, south of town, almost parallel to the tornado.

It was moving at 60 miles an hour with winds of 195 miles an hour.

It hit the town hard.

Of the 17 people who died in the tornado, most of them lived in the trailer park.

Logan Poole knows mobile homes.

He lived in one growing up in Alabama.

>> Poole: In mobile homes or just not where you want to be in a tornado.

They're one of the last places you want to be, as a matter of fact.

The frame becomes separated.

Oftentimes all you find is a metal wrought iron steel frame, very bottom, twisted into almost indescribable knots.

And the rest of the home, or the rest on top of the mobile home frame, is completely gone.

>> Bearden: But the reality is many people in the Mississippi Delta live in mobile homes.

It's affordable housing, in one of the poorest regions of the country.

But against a tornado, a mobile home is not safe shelter.

>> Poole: Delta is a difficult topic because shelter requires resources and resources are not uniformly spread.

Our area is the most vulnerable to these violent tornadoes.

And there's a reason that that area and the surrounding region, it has seen the most tornado deaths.

If we could save just even just most of the folks who are in this mobile home situations, then we would cut the number of deaths at least in half.

Bearden: I grew up here in Rolling Fork and it occurred to me that it's the only hometown I'll ever have.

I think that led directly to me becoming a writer and a filmmaker.

There were so many stories, so many voices, so many people here.

And I listened to all of them.

I'm sure Iowa is a wonderful place, but they don’t write books about Iowa.

They really don't.

They write books about this place, where we all are from.

Back in March, I was invited by the Lower Delta Partnership to speak in Anguilla, five miles up the road from Rolling Fork.

It was a fine evening in a lovely old church.

It gave me a chance to be among friends, most of whom I had known since childhood.

It was sweet, recalling the place where we all grew up.

Rolling Fork, in my memory, is family and playmates, times and places that were so familiar and comforting.

So much of that was lost, like the sanctuary of the Episcopal Church that has stood in its place by the creek since 1924.

It is being rebuilt.

The marker that honored Blues legend Muddy Waters, our most favorite native son, was knocked down by the tornado.

Now it's back, but so much cannot be replaced.

Robert Stein, who photographs the Delta, sent me this video of the town as it was before March 24th, 2023.

The trees alongside the creeks were glorious.

Now most of them are gone.

My friend Charles Weissinger lost three pecan trees in his yard.

He believed they were 600 years old.

The Native People sat in their shade.

The footbridges that cross the creeks probably won't be built back, but they're remembered in a painting by Charles’ wife, Ann.

That Sunday evening, after the memorial service, a group of Mennonites filed into the First Baptist Church.

They were among the many volunteers who came to Rolling Fork to help.

Inside the church, the men of their choir sang.

♪ I will cling to the Old Rugged (large bell tolling) Just after 8:00, the bell rang out from the church tower that had been blown off the roof that night.

(large bell tolling) One deep note sounded for each of those who died in the tornado.

For me, there's one image that stands out most from the past year.

It's this old tree with a piece of tin wrapped around a branch.

In the right light, the tin looks almost like a flag.

On the way out of town that Sunday, we stopped for one more picture.

Barbara Windham joined us.

She had been looking at the tree, too.

She sees a message in it.

>> Barbara Windom: I told my son, so we come through here, and I said, look, son, that's been a year now.

At that time, really, it was almost a year, coming up, you know.

A few months later and I said look at that and it's still up there.

I say God put that up there.

And I said in winds, high winds, that came through since then, and I say it's still there.

And when God puts something in place is stays there.

That’s where it be, right there, it’s been there ever since He put it there.

And He sure did it, that’s my belief.

That's my belief right there.

>> Bearden: The story of what happens with Rolling Fork is not finished.

It's really only just begun.

We hope someone will take what we've done with this series and continue to tell the story.

It's that important.

This wouldn't have been possible without the generous support of Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

And we thank them.

But mainly we thank the people of Rolling Fork for telling their stories and for letting us in.

And we thank you for watching.

(Soft piano music)