how to move floors fallout shelter rooms

He had been watching the news and saw that a tornado had touched down in Rolling Fork.Ĭartlidge heard car windows shattering outside. Just seconds before Cartlidge found herself burrowed beneath her husband on the mobile home’s living room floor, her father had called her. “The only thing I could tell them to do was get on the floor,” said Charles Jones, Cartlidge’s husband. That’s 53% of all the people killed in their homes during a tornado, according to an Associated Press data analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tornado deaths.Ĭramped living arrangements forced mobile home inhabitants to shelter just as they lived: with little space between them. Since 1996, tornadoes have killed 815 people in mobile or manufactured homes. Tornadoes in the United States are disproportionately killing more people in mobile or manufactured homes, especially in the South. Such living arrangements have been a way to offset the financial strain endemic to the Mississippi Delta, where poverty is prevalent and stable jobs are scarce.

Most of the 14 people who died in Rolling Fork when the March 24 tornado hit the Mississippi Delta lived in the mobile home park, with large families crowding into one or two-bedroom units. Then the tornado tore through the park, making it a point of misery.

The family lived in a mobile home park behind Chuck’s Dairy Bar, a diner that had long been a nexus of local life for Rolling Fork residents.

They viewed Rolling Fork as a refuge from city life and an ideal place to raise kids. She worked in customer service for an appliance company and Jones for a local auto parts shop. “And I could feel the wind, it was so powerful you couldn’t even breathe while you were in the air.”Ĭartlidge and her husband, Charles Jones, 59, had forged a quiet life in Rolling Fork with their three sons. “It sounded like a real loud train coming through,” Cartlidge said. Mobile home residents in the path of a twister’s fury often don’t live to recount the experience. Streams of air whirled by Ida Cartlidge in every direction, but she couldn’t breathe.īetween the thin walls and above the shaky foundation of a mobile home, Cartlidge, 32, miraculously survived a March tornado that carved a path of destruction through Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

How to move floors fallout shelter rooms