Two days after a tornado tore through Eupora, Mississippi, Cherraye Oats set out with her daughter Courtney to get tarps for their neighbors’ battered homes. Oats’ house was spared, but the mobile home 20-year-old Courtney rented was destroyed. “If my daughter had not spent the night with us, we probably would have been burying her.”
On a beautiful late afternoon in early May, Dedrick Benison and Michael Calvin are quietly surveying the house that came crashing down around them just a week before. On April 27th they were watching a movie here, a neighbor’s house on the catfish farm where the men live and work, near Forkland, Alabama. Moments later a tornado collapsed the roof and ripped off the kitchen wall, sending furniture and splintered wood flying.
“I hate disasters,” Derrick Evans has said grumpily and repeatedly over the past several days. As a resident of coastal Mississippi and a Gulf Coast advocate, Evans has been through situations like this before – Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, BP, to name a few.
Like Holt-Peterson Road near John Wathen's place outside Tuscaloosa, I have seen total destruction in nearby Alberta City and Crescent Ridge Road, in Birmingham's African-American community of Pratt City (approximately 7,000 homes), and elsewhere.
The question that folks who want to volunteer or send relief must begin to ask is not "how hard was xx hit?", but "where is there NOT a steady flow (or even an over-abundance) of relief?"
Two days after a tornado tore through Eupora, Mississippi, Cherraye Oats set out with her daughter Courtney to get tarps for their neighbors’ battered homes. Oats’ house was spared, but the mobile home 20-year-old Courtney rented was destroyed. “If my daughter had not spent the night with us, we probably would have been burying her.”
On a beautiful late afternoon in early May, Dedrick Benison and Michael Calvin are quietly surveying the house that came crashing down around them just a week before. On April 27th they were watching a movie here, a neighbor’s house on the catfish farm where the men live and work, near Forkland, Alabama. Moments later a tornado collapsed the roof and ripped off the kitchen wall, sending furniture and splintered wood flying.
“I hate disasters,” Derrick Evans has said grumpily and repeatedly over the past several days. As a resident of coastal Mississippi and a Gulf Coast advocate, Evans has been through situations like this before – Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, BP, to name a few. 
Like Holt-Peterson Road near John Wathen's place outside Tuscaloosa, I have seen total destruction in nearby Alberta City and Crescent Ridge Road, in Birmingham's African-American community of Pratt City (approximately 7,000 homes), and elsewhere.
