Devastation in the Delta

Early last week a spate of more than 50 tornadoes churned furiously through portions of Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee, uprooting and smashing everything in their path, leaving behind more than 100 dead, thousands homeless and property damage in the tens of millions of dollars. One of the hardest hit was the Mississippi Delta town of Inverness (pop. 1,119), which suffered 90% destruction in its business area, the loss of nearly three-fourths of its residential dwellings and 18 deaths. TIME Correspondent Rich Rein toured stricken Inverness. Here is his report:

SKIPPER CAMPBELL, 27, of Rayville, La., was driving toward Inverness on State Highway 49-W when the storm hit. "I think I'm a miracle," says Campbell. "It started raining real bad, and the wind was really blowing. I got into town and had to pull off the road. I pulled down the window and heard a drone like a million bumblebees come at me."

Campbell looked back and saw "a big black funnel, about 75 yds. wide at the ground, and maybe 500 ft. high." The twister passed over his car, bouncing it up and down a few times; then everything went calm. "Everything seemed to be in slow motion," he says. "I could detect all sorts of things swirling around me. At one point I thought I saw a human body fly past. I could see right through the storm. I suddenly realized I was in the eye of the storm."

Campbell was in the center of the main tornado that tore a half-mile-wide swath through Inverness. For perhaps a minute, he sat in suspended motion as much of the world about him caved in or exploded outward. "One house suddenly came apart like a dollhouse," he recalls. "The roof flew up, the walls spread out, and I could see two elderly persons, colored folks, crouched inside. Then everything sprang right back on top of them and they disappeared."

Torn to Bits. What Campbell witnessed was characteristic of a tornado. The houses on either side of a tornado's twisting funnel are in a low-pressure area. But the air inside the houses momentarily retains its original pressure. In that instant, a house can simply explode. Thus Civil Defense authorities urge people to keep their windows and doors open during a tornado so that the pressures can equalize. In Inverness, few heeded weather-service warnings that preceded the twisters.

Earl Brown, a grocer, and his wife and twelve-year-old son had heard the tornado alerts early in the morning and knew that the watch expired at 5 p.m. At 4:30 they figured the twister had missed them. Minutes later it hit, demolishing the entire front of the house and turning the family car around.

Miss Adie Thorton lived alone in her house. "It tore the place to bits," she says. "I was in a corner, and all of a sudden a great big piece of concrete flew in and then flew out. I screamed and that's all I remember." Miss Thorton hurt her neck, though not seriously.

The people of Inverness were fortunate that Skipper Campbell survived the storm. As soon as it passed, he left his car, rushed to the nearby house, dug through the rubble and discovered the elderly black couple huddled under a table, unhurt.

All Working Together. A Red Cross first-aid instructor, Campbell then ran one block west to the main street. "There must have been about 75 people out there," he says. "Some were just crying, others were walking around dazed, in a state of shock." Campbell began organizing search parties, telling them how to start looking for survivors. Then he met Mrs. Charles ("Daisy") Caffey of nearby Leland, Miss., a registered nurse who also happened to be passing through Inverness at the time of the storm.

Together they broke into the local community center and set up a first-aid station. The pair ministered to the sick and wounded for almost an hour until the first doctor arrived. "Black or white, rich or poor, it didn't make any difference; everybody was working together," says Mrs. Caffey. "People can't say America is torn up and we feel hostile against each other."

Many blacks, however, fail to share Mrs. Caffey's optimism. Through a caprice of fate, the black neighborhood bore the brunt of the storm and sustained the majority of injuries. Now black leaders fear that the rebuilding process will be dominated by whites, and that the new Inverness will mirror the racial inequities of the old. Nor are their fears unreasonable. At the first high-level meeting of local civic leaders, who will determine what property will be rebuilt first, there were no blacks present.

Inverness is determined to survive. A school has been converted into an emergency shelter. State and federal agencies have sent representatives to inform the townspeople how to obtain food stamps, low-interest loans, unemployment benefits and mobile homes. Chain saws were soon buzzing everywhere as the land was cleared of fallen trees and debris was bulldozed into piles and burned. Said one longtime resident, Mrs. Dot Williams: "We began rebuilding this town an hour after the twister hit. If anyone thinks we'll just give Inverness up, then they don't know Mississippians."

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