Clarke County residents are mourning the loss of four of their neighbors to Wednesday's storms. The Snell community is located near Middleton, southeast of Meridian, and the destruction was not only enormous, but deadly.
It looked like a dumping ground. But it wasn't. It is what was left of a six unit trailer park in the Snell Community of Clarke County. Jerry Irby was just getting off work around 6 Wednesday evening when he spotted the monster storm. He called ahead to warn everyone to take cover.
Irby said, "My wife and I crawled into the culvert..."
But 19 of his neighbors took cover in a double-wide trailer under a hill.
Sheriff Todd Kemp said, "They took refuge inside this mobile home because the rest of them pretty much lived in single wide mobile homes in this area and they thought that was the safest place to be."
When the storm had passed, Irby was stunned by what he saw.
Irby said, "They was kids and women coming up out of the debris, hollering, they knew me, they were hollering for me to help them. So, we got the kids out of the way and I could hear some under the debris hollering, you know, they knew my name, help them. And I crawled down through there; seen a few deceased and a few of them wrapped around trees but they were still alive and I found some more deceased."
Three men and one women died in the twister. The survivors are hospitalized with a variety of injuries.
Sheriff Kemp said, "Numerous homes totally destroyed. Mobile homes totally destroyed. We have major power outages throughout the north part of the county."
Jerry Irby says the only storm he's seen that even comes close to this was Camille. Sheriff Kemp says Clarke County took a direct hit.
Sheriff Kemp said, "This is something we're unaccustomed to here in Clarke County. We hadn't had anything like this in a long time."
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