BASSFIELD, Miss. — Like most Americans, Mamie Harper and her husband had tucked themselves away at home in an effort to keep the coronavirus at bay. On Easter Sunday, they listened to an audio feed of their church service while huddled indoors.
But a different kind of trouble soon found them. A tornado — one of dozens that tore across the Southeast this weekend — roared over their street on Sunday afternoon, snapping trees, blowing away keepsakes and launching cars from their parking spots. When it was over, debris temporarily kept emergency medical workers from driving onto Ms. Harper’s block. Her daughter pulled her from the wreckage of her small white house, and soon other neighbors, many of them relatives, also came out to try to help.
Ms. Harper, 68, felt an odd mix of gratitude and wariness. “You don’t know,” she said Monday, standing on the shoulder of her ruined street in a surgical mask because of the coronavirus. “Even though they’re coming out of the goodness of their heart, they may not know they’ve got it.”
The devastating weather system started Sunday and barreled across the region into Monday, leaving destruction, blackouts and heartbreak in its path. More than 30 people died — including at least 11 in Mississippi, nine in South Carolina and eight in Georgia — making it one of the most significant natural disasters in the country since government officials began ordering people to stay home and away from one another in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.
The response laid bare the new complications the pandemic may create for neighbors, victims and disaster response officials alike in coming months as a shuttered nation braces for the looming seasons of floods, fires and storms.
Emergency agencies are now being forced into new realms of improvisation and creativity as they attempt to provide shelter and succor, while simultaneously minding the presence of a quieter killer. Already, officials are doing what they can to avoid housing evacuees in large shelters, which could prove as dangerous for spreading the coronavirus as any cruise ship.
“This is a collision course of conflicting strategies to deal with the natural disasters and the pandemic simultaneously,” said Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
The “bull’s-eye” of the storm system encircled a swath of the South and brought twisters, high winds and intense rain into parts of southern Kentucky, eastern Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas, said Katie Martin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey suspended social distancing and other coronavirus-related orders, but only if they might get in the way of an effective response.
Though Alabama escaped without any reported fatalities, neighboring Mississippi appeared hardest hit, with at least 11 deaths as of Monday afternoon. The American Red Cross, which runs most of the temporary shelters in the nation, opened a couple of Mississippi sites that attracted dozens of evacuees.
But the organization moved all of those people into hotel rooms before Monday morning in an effort to comply with the spirit of social distancing rules, said Trevor Riggen, the Red Cross’s senior vice president of Disaster Cycle Services.
In Jones County, in southeast Mississippi, more than 50 people showed up to take shelter in the region’s fortified safe room, built to federal specifications to withstand big storms. Paul Sheffield, the executive director of the county emergency management office, said the evacuees were greeted by volunteers who offered hand sanitizer and insisted they wear masks. They rode out the storm in marked-off areas that kept families about seven and a half feet away from each other.
Experts say these efforts, though admirable, may not work in the event of a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, in which case there may be no choice but to house people in larger shelters.
“The shelter environment is the last thing we want,” Mr. Redlener said. “It’s virtually impossible to sustain social distancing and enforce appropriate public health measures in those circumstances.”
Plus, he said, there is the likelihood that many people in shelters would be there without the medications they would need for underlying health conditions.
Hurricane season begins June 1, and experts said it may be more active than usual because of warm water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, Atlantic and Caribbean. That has officials like Shannon Scaff, emergency management director for the coastal city of Charleston, S.C., particularly stressed.
On Monday, Mr. Scaff said coronavirus-related stay-at-home measures have meant his team has been unable to hold community meetings to advise people how to prepare for a hurricane evacuation.
And he was still not sure how social distancing might work if an evacuation was large-scale.
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “If an evacuation order is given because of a hurricane, Covid or not, I’m telling you to get out of here.”
Across the country, emergency officials said that, no matter the circumstance, they would encourage people to adhere to social distancing measures as best they could.
Officials in California said they were evaluating how to take into account the virus in responding to wildfires, earthquakes, floods and other disasters that might arise in the coming months.
“We’re disaster-prone, so you have to be prepared for multiple things at multiple times,” said Kim Zagaris, a former state fire and rescue chief for the California governor’s Office of Emergency Services, according to The Associated Press.
James Kendra, director of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, said he is worried that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been tasked with taking a lead on the pandemic response, could find itself stretched thin if natural disasters pile up.
FEMA has struggled with understaffing in recent years, according to a recent article in Insurance Journal, though the agency has contended that it is prepared for the challenges ahead.
In a statement Monday, a FEMA spokesperson said that more than 2,900 employees out of 20,500 were supporting the pandemic response, and that it could call in other federal employees to help as part of a “surge capacity force.”
Nongovernmental groups are also feeling challenged. Samaritan’s Purse, the North Carolina-based Christian relief group headed by the Rev. Franklin Graham, is planning a vigorous response to the Southeastern storms, sending in crews to help people repair and rebuild homes.
On Monday, Mr. Graham said his volunteers would wear masks and gloves and try to abide by social distancing rules as they worked. The problem, for now, was finding enough of them.
“There are going to be volunteers who normally would come but may be a little reluctant because of the coronavirus,” he said.
The scenes of double crises were commonplace on Monday. Around Chattanooga, Tenn., where two people died, residents of battered neighborhoods visited home improvement stores in masks and gloves, picking up tarps and plywood to cover up shattered windows and doors.
Also hard-hit was Walterboro, S.C., a historic, moss-draped community of 5,400 residents, about 45 minutes west of Charleston. A tornado tore through the heart of downtown early Monday, dropping trees on two dozen buildings and killing a woman who had been sheltering with her family. The storm also damaged or destroyed better than half of the 52 airplanes at the Lowcountry regional private airport, including a Douglas C-54 that delivered supplies during the Berlin airlift of 1948-49.
At the Colleton Courtyard assisted living facility downtown, Maxwell Lockwood, its manager, said he was thankful the tornado had not done much damage. And that none of the 34 residents of the home, he said, have tested positive for the virus.
Ellen Ann Fentress reported from Bassfield, Miss., and Richard Fausset from Atlanta. Reporting was contributed by Chris Dixon from Walterboro, S.C.; Cari Gervin from Chattanooga, Tenn.; Christine Hauser from Nantucket, Mass.; and Sandra E. Garcia, Aimee Ortiz, Mihir Zaveri and Jenny Gross from New York.
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