Mississippi tornado victims wonder, ‘How can we rebuild?’

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, ROBERT BUMSTED and REBECCA SANTANA
Associated Press

ROLLING FORK, Miss. (AP) — Poverty is adding to the challenges of recovering from a massive tornado that pushed through Mississippi. Two of the counties hit by the Friday storm are Sharkey and Humphreys. They have only a few thousand residents in communities scattered across wide expanses of cotton, corn and soybean fields in the flatlands of the Delta. Many people live paycheck to paycheck working jobs in agriculture. Sharkey’s poverty rate is 35%, and Humphreys is 33%. That compares with about 19% for Mississippi and under 12% for the entire U.S. On Monday, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency revised the state’s death toll from the tornado to 21, down from 25.