Family legacies on the line following destructive tornadoes in southern Mississippi

On Saturday afternoon, as a front of severe weather moved across Mississippi and then into Alabama, two strong tornadoes cut essentially the same path just north of the small, rural town near the Louisiana border. 

State emergency management officials say three were killed near Tylertown alone, all of them from the same home. 

Another person was killed in rural Walthall County, dozens more were injured in nearby counties, and more than 200 were displaced statewide. 

Shortly after the weather cleared late-Saturday afternoon, Ronnie Magee, a lifelong Tylertown resident and pastor at the nearby Spring Hill Church of God in Christ, went to check on his daughter’s home in the Harveytown community, where he grew up.  

When he arrived, he and his sons found that the home, which was not occupied when the storm hit, had lost a portion of its roof, an airconditioning unit and every single tree on the property. 

“I've never seen a storm come through like this before. My dad's house is about two miles up the street, it demolished it, took it all away. And it has been there for about 70 years. So we hadn't seen anything like this in a mighty long time,” said Magee, who grew up in the home now lost to the storm. 

“We went out yesterday to try to even find a picture; mom kept a lot of pictures, and we weren't able to find a picture. So I'm going back up again.” 

On the morning after the storm, Magee and his sons had already begun the process of cleanup. Wood from a destroyed shed and the home’s roof were stacked in a growing pile of debris, combined with the branches of a few decades-old oak trees.

Throughout the property, shards of wood, corrugated metal and PVC pipes torn from nearby buildings jutted out of the ground. 

But Pastor Magee says he and his family were relatively lucky. Most of his concern immediately after the storm is with those who were displaced from their homes, or those who can’t yet access them because of downed power lines throughout the county’s rural, scenic drives. 

“We have a lot of roads closed, and a lot of power lines are down. Some people can't even get to their property. So just trying to get the roads opened back up, and then we can get down the roads and see what the damage is and see what's going on,” Magee told MPB News. 

“They're in very dire need here -- people are suffering right now. People are outside right now with nowhere to go.Walthall County doesn't have enough motels or hotels around here that we can put people in. So we're just trying to give people a place to go, wash up and eat.”

Across a small gravel road from the Magee property, a now-destroyed auto shop tells a much different story. 

Six Ratliff brothers inherited the business from their late father, Ben, a fixture in the community who passed away from cancer last December. 

On the morning after the storm, dozens of cars and hundreds of pieces of equipment, from engines to tire jacks, were strewn throughout the woods behind where the shop used to stand. 

Behind the flipped metal roof that used to house the shop, acres of pine trees stood bent, nearly touching the ground, and others were snapped either halfway or further up, yet still standing. 

Stephen McCraney, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said in a prepared address on Sunday that type of damage indicates a significant amount of debris blew through the woods at a high rate of speed. 

“You're talking 25 to 35 feet up, pine trees were snapped. We're not talking about twisted. We're not talking about rolled over. Snapped. Almost like a big giant brought in the hedgers and just cut it off and laid them down.”

The Ratliff brothers and several cousins started cleanup first thing the morning after, and by mid-day, had only just begun to clear a path to where the bulk of their supplies wound up.

At the front of the property were more than a dozen cars belonging to customers, all totaled. 

Toward the back, still on the concrete slab where the shop used to stand, were items that held sentimental value for their father, and now for the surviving family – classic motorcycles, old racing engines and a few candy-coated dirt track race cars their dad tinkered with for fun. 

“Heart-breaking, heart-breaking. That's about all I can say man, just heart-breaking,” is how Rick Ratliff described the scene to MPB News, in between using a chainsaw to clear snapped trees from their path deeper into the woods. 

“It'll be a long time before we get all this back together and get all these vehicles moved and get all this stuff cleaned up. It'll be a long time, man. The shop, totally lost. We’ve got a lot to try to make up for.” 

Only miles up the road, two other Ratliff brothers, whose families lived in houses next to each other, narrowly survived the tornados but lost both of their homes. After it passed, they had to cut through a patch of woods and pasture by foot to seek help because the road in was blocked by fallen trees and live power lines. 

After being cleared at the hospital, one of those brothers stopped by the auto shop property and could hardly recognize it. 

Older brother Eddie Ratliff, a teacher at Tylertown High School, says the damage was so severe he could hardly even describe what was there prior. 

“Honestly, I'm surprised that it tore it up the way it did. I can remember when we were building that shop, our dad was really particular about the material that he was using. He used a drill stem, or offshore drilling pipe, to frame it with. It twisted that stuff right up out of the ground and pulled it out of the cement.” 

Now, much of that offshore drilling pipe is wind-wrapped around the trunks of trees, or split into shards and thrown more than a quarter of a mile back into the woods. 

The family now has to navigate clearing the property, contacting customers who’d left their vehicles to be serviced, and focus on recovering themselves. 

“We're fortunate everybody is still okay. There were some fatalities in this situation; we survived it, so that's what's important to us. We can replace all these things if we decide to, but can't replace a life,” said Eddie Ratliff. “We're just trying to work slowly and get what we can before another rain or storm comes through and it gets too muddy in here.”