Natchez Tornado Summary

It’s May 6, 1840 at 9:00 PM. The Bair’s are going to bed. Trenton and Max go to their room and lay down, but just can’t seem to fall asleep because of the loud rain hitting the roof. They go and see if their mom, Heather, and their dad, Hunter, are asleep. They walk into their parents’ room and see them sitting on their bed. They are concerned about the weather so they decide to go outside and check it out. It is raining really hard and lightning fills the sky. The family goes back inside and Hunter turns on the T.V. He sees that both sides of the river have been drenched with three inches of rain. This prevents the farmers from planting their crops. With so much rain, the family decides to play it safe and go down to the basement for the evening. Everyone grabs supplies to
They stay together and go to help others. Some are responsive and some are not. As they walk to where there used to be a houses, they see people trapped under the ruins. A lot of people are dead or injured. It is a terrible sight! Down by the Mississippi River, boats are overturned and people are struggling to survive.
On May 8th the news channels are flooded with information of the tornado. The tornado is named the “Natchez Tornado.” It is the second deadliest tornado in history. The news report says that it killed three hundred seventeen people, the death tolls may not have included the slaves, and injured one hundred and nine more. It is recorded as an E F-5 tornado with winds over two hundred miles per hour.
Looking back to this event, we know it took a lot of people working in unison and a lot of time to rebuild Natchez. There was so much damage to the town, and people responded to help in many different ways. Tornadoes have the potential to do a lot of damage. It cost more than 1.26 million dollars in 1840 to fix the devastation left behind. Today it would cost approximately 29.8 million dollars to recover from those