Within days of the tornado, state emergency management officials were already predicting the recovery process would look much like the one following Katrina – long and somewhat complicated.
Nearly 14 months later, that prediction largely seems to have come to fruition.
Michael McEwen
Rolling Fork
Numerous houses on the edge of town along the historic Highway 61 that were blown away have already been rebuilt. One of the area’s longest-lasting and most popular eateries, Chuck’s Dairy Bar, is set to reopen soon.
But once past those and into Rolling Fork’s downtown, the story is much different.
The town’s white water tower remains cut into a few large pieces and laying on the ground where it fell during the storm. Blocks of what used to be a variety of local businesses housed in historic buildings and reduced to rubble have been cleared, but not rebuilt.
The trees, which were once numerous and provided shade to those same downtown blocks, are now but a few, and those that remain have virtually no branches or canopy.
Part of a larger storm system moving across the southeast that day, the EF4 tornado also struck the small settlement of Silver City 30 miles east of Rolling Fork, as well as the town of Amory, nearly 200 miles away.
But Rolling Fork, an agricultural hub and the seat of rural Sharkey County, saw by far the most severe impact.
The town of less than 2,000 saw nearly 200 families displaced as a result of the storm. A majority of residents in Sharkey County, estimated at close to half, were renters at the time – many in groups of trailers or mobile homes scattered across Rolling Fork.
Many of those displaced wound up spending months in hotels spread across the Mississippi Delta in towns like Greenville, Vicksburg or as far as Cleveland.
Now more than a year later, almost all who wished to return have done so, mostly to the sites of their former homes that are now occupied by FEMA trailers. But some of those returning to the town say they can hardly recognize it, and wonder why recovery seems to have stalled.
“The process going on here is like it’s not going,” said LaTonya Clark, a lifelong Rolling Fork resident. “The same tornado that happened in Amory is the one that happened in Rolling Fork, and they built their town back up nice. So I think it could have been done quicker here than it is now.”
Clark, who lives on the west end of town near sprawling fields of row crops, was working the night of the tornado and was injured by flying debris. After a seven day hospital stay, she returned home to find her apartment had been destroyed, forcing her into a motel room for the next three months.
Now living in a FEMA home on the site of her old apartment complex, Clark says a technical dispute between the landowner and the federal disaster agency over who owns the trailer has threatened her with homelessness yet again.
According to Clark, the landowner wants her and seven other households to relocate the homes by the end of the month at their own cost.
Clark says her situation is similar to those many returning residents have faced over the past year, and wonders why more can’t be done to help them.
“We just came from being homeless, so to go to being homeless again is devastating. It’s not good,” Clark said. “With what’s going on now, there should be something happening more than what is, but the town still looks terrible, and I’m just at a loss for words, really.”
Town Mayor Eldridge Walker says he can sympathize with resident frustrations, but also that they don’t tell the full story. According to Walker on a May 14 phone call with MPB News, MEMA officials have characterized the process so far as resoundingly positive.
“Our last meeting with FEMA and MEMA was open to the general public, and their commentary to the public was that Rolling Fork was in a good position right now and moving forward in timely recovery,” Walker said.
“They also said most cities they've worked with before in similar situations haven’t moved forward as quickly as Rolling Fork has at this point. I think we've done a good job being in a small community with the resources we have available.”
A flawed process?
Within two months of the storm, more than $20 million in federal relief funds were made available to aid recovery in Rolling Fork. That figure has only grown as more specific needs have developed, such as increased debris removal programs or funds to replace lost street signs and damaged roadways.
Typically, those funds are made available through either federal or state-administered grant programs or low-interest loans, and are regulated by procurement processes meant to avoid any possible fraud.
In the wake of large natural disasters, those same procedures are often held responsible for slowing down recovery on their own.
But Anthony White, a 40-year resident of Rolling Fork and a member of the town-led recovery commission since the storm, says town leadership has been largely to blame for the delays.
“We’re at a standstill with a lot of the projects because we move forward and then we find out we didn’t use the right procurement process or slipped up on some technicality,” said White.
“Currently the city does not have a grant manager because they filed wrong and had to redo the process. It’s those types of things that are discouraging and make you wonder if we’re really concerned about this city and its wellbeing.”
White was among several residents who showed up to a scheduled meeting for the recovery task force on Saturday, May 11 only to discover it had been postponed.
He said even as a member of the commission, he wasn’t notified of that, and was especially disappointed because they were set to discuss certain crucial recovery initiatives, such as housing programs, economic development initiatives or workforce training.
But what’s worst of all to White is that over the past year, he’s seen community participation in the task force dwindle to only a handful, while the number of those attending Rolling Fork Board of Aldermen meetings to accost them for an apparent lack of effort has only increased.
He worries canceling task force meetings haphazardly will only reduce the community’s interest even more.
“I'm afraid that we are in that area now where most of the people have recovered to a great extent. A lot of them have gone back to their homes, new homes are being built, so the recovery process for the residents is working real good. But what the government bodies can do, we’re still coming up short,” said White, who regularly attends both county and city board meetings.
“There's not a lot of transparency and there's not a lot of debate about what can be done to make this community better. There's the talk about money from FEMA and projects from FEMA -- those things are being discussed at the very least. But beyond that, when all that is over and done with, we're still a community that needs to come together and figure out a way to better this situation for ourselves. I've yet to see it.”
But Walker says there is progress happening, even if it may seem slow. A contract to remove the now-destroyed water tower and replace it with a new one has already been approved, and the Mayor said he plans to finalize the hire of a new grant manager by the end of May.
“You said you spoke to some members of the recovery task force who said nothing was happening,” Walker told MPB News, “I think it's misleading to say that because I think we're in a good place right now.”