The tornado blew out windows, damaged homes and trapped people in the town of Rolling Fork, witnesses said. Emergency workers were assessing the destruction.
Emergency workers were surveying the damage from a large tornado that whipped through rural Mississippi on Friday night, flattening homes and trapping some residents.
The tornado caused damage in Silver City and Rolling Fork, Miss., the National Weather Service office in Jackson said on Twitter. The agency issued rare tornado emergencies for parts of the state Friday night, indicating a life-threatening situation, along with tornado warnings in parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.
The center of the destruction appeared to be in Rolling Fork, where Fred Miller, a former mayor, said that a storm had blown out windows and damaged homes and trees.
“A great deal of the town has been destroyed,” including all the businesses on a commercial and retail stretch of a local road, Mr. Miller said in an interview on Fox Weather. “People are trapped in a couple of the eateries, and people are trying to get them out now.”
Aaron Rigsby, a videographer and storm chaser who filmed the tornado, said in an interview that he had watched it develop from a “small cone” into a “massive wedge.”
After the tornado hit Rolling Fork, Mr. Rigsby said, he went door to door through the town, rescuing people who were trapped in their vehicles or homes, including a woman who had been buried by rubble.
“The town took a direct hit,” he said, adding that it had taken ambulances at least 30 minutes to arrive in Rolling Fork because the area is so rural.
Rolling Fork is a town of about 2,000 in the Mississippi Delta nestled between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers that was home to the blues singer Muddy Waters. Its residents live with the risk of flooding should the backwater levees along the Yazoo fail.
Rain and high winds were still whipping through the area early Saturday. More than a million people in Alabama and Tennessee were under a tornado watch, and some areas were under a tornado warning, indicating a higher likelihood of danger. More than 80,000 electricity customers in those two states and in Mississippi had lost power.
In Mississippi, many of the outages were in Sharkey and Montgomery counties. An officer who answered the phone at the Sharkey County Sheriff’s Office in Rolling Fork early Saturday said that the power in the building was off.
There were no official damage assessments or reports of injuries yet, Malary White, the chief communications officer for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, said on Friday night.
Ms. White said state search-and-rescue resources were being sent to Sharkey County, and that the agency was assessing the needs of people affected by the tornado and would begin to assess the damage in the daylight. She added that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been alerted.
Tornadoes in Mississippi
Locations of tornado sightings or damage reported by trained spotters.
“Many in the MS Delta need your prayer and God’s protection tonight,” Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi said on Twitter, adding that search and rescue teams, and medical support were working in the area. “Watch weather reports and stay cautious through the night, Mississippi!”
In Rolling Fork, Mayor Eldridge Walker told a local television station on Friday that he could not leave his house because of downed power lines. He said its garage and west side had been seriously damaged by the tornado.
He told the station, WLBT-TV, that people had been injured, though he did not specify a number and asked that people continue to shelter in place while emergency responders arrived.
Jerry Briggs, an emergency coordinator in nearby Warren County, said that he had no information about damage or casualties in Rolling Fork.
After the tornado hit Rolling Fork, the National Weather Service office in Memphis, said on Friday night that it was monitoring a tornado as it approached the town of Smithville, Miss. Todd Beal, a meteorologist at that office, said he was not sure whether it was the same tornado.
Earlier on Friday, officials in Mississippi urged residents to find a safe place in the event of tornadoes, while officials in Tennessee reminded people that spring weather could be unpredictable.
Severe weather season in the South reaches its peak during March, April and May, meteorologists said.
Earlier this month, powerful storms swept across the South, leaving at least 12 people dead and hundreds of thousands of customers without electricity. Heavy rain, severe winds and tornadoes damaged homes in at least eight states.
At the end of February, tornadoes injured at least a dozen people in Oklahoma.
Johnny Diaz, Victoria Kim, Chris Mele and Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting.
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