The storm came, and just as Monica Coleman predicted, it hit places least equipped to handle it.
On Monday morning, she was one of roughly 1 million Americans without power because of Winter Storm Fern. Officials in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where she lives, are warning residents that they could be without power for multiple days.
“We are stuck here,” Coleman wrote to Capital B in a text Monday. Her county was one of the hardest hit by the storm that turned highways into ice rinks, snapped trees onto power lines and homes, and cut electricity from Texas to Kentucky.
For her, the impact of the storm is about the country’s inability to care for the most vulnerable long before disaster ever strikes.
“We know that climate change is real, and people in the South, especially communities of color and rural communities, are first and worst impacted,” she said Friday before the storm hit. “Every time something happens, it feels like we’re never prepared, and it just doesn’t make sense to me.”
She pointed to the devastating impact of an ice storm that hit Mississippi in 1994 that led to nine deaths.
“We are now still doing the same things that we did when I was 9 years old, to just try to make sure we can make it,” she said. “Everybody’s left fending for themselves instead of the community and state actually having a plan.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said the state’s situation “is probably going to get worse before it gets better.”
As temperatures plunged into the teens and single digits across half the country, at least a dozen people have died in storm-related crashes and cold exposure. As of Monday morning, 56% of the contiguous U.S. was covered in snow and ice, the second-highest rate in two decades.
The worst power outages were concentrated in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana, where ice-coated lines and fallen trees severed service for more than 300,000 customers in Tennessee and over 140,000 each in Mississippi and Louisiana at the height of the storm. In Mississippi alone, as much as 12% of all customers lost power Sunday, with the hardest-hit pockets in the northern part of the state.
One of the worst hit places in Mississippi was Rolling Fork, a small, 80% Black town. On Monday, the entire town was out of power and running water.
Just three years ago, Rolling Fork saw 90% of its buildings and structures decimated by tornadoes. At the time, Rolling Fork Mayor Eldridge Walker said his city was completely “gone” after 17 people were killed and the town’s water tower was destroyed.
More than a year after the tornadoes, residents were still waiting on trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and living in hotels or doubling up with relatives in the meantime.
After the tornadoes, officials estimated it would take five to 10 years for Rolling Fork to fully rebuild. One of the first focuses for the community during rebuilding was the construction of storm shelters, which the area lacked in 2023. This time around, the county did have a local storm shelter, but it, too, lacked electricity and water, according to a Facebook post from the county’s emergency management agency.
This winter storm, coupled with a much weaker FEMA than even three years ago, shows the precarity that many rural Black communities are facing as climate threats intensify.
For much of the past year, the Trump administration has systematically terminated FEMA staff. So far, the administration has laid off 20% of the agency. But last week the Department of Homeland Security paused terminations of FEMA employees working on disaster response in anticipation of needing some of them, if only temporarily, for the life-threatening winter storm.
“Disaster recovery has been treated as a political afterthought — held hostage inside an agency whose priorities are increasingly focused elsewhere,” wrote Disaster Survivors United to Rebuild, a coalition of disaster survivors, in a statement to Capital B.
The worst impacts from natural disasters like hurricanes and winter storms tend to be after the disaster strikes as communities lose electricity, heating and cooling, and clean water.
Research shows these impacts are rarely evenly shared. Studies following Hurricane Harvey and Winter Storm Uri in Texas found that in areas where electricity and water systems failed, the Blacker a community, the longer and more damaging the outages were. At the same time, minority households faced significantly greater hardship and lower ability to cope.
But even for those with access to water and electricity, storms pose new challenges. Shemekia Stringer, who lives in Southaven, Mississippi, just outside of Memphis, Tennessee, never lost power, but her home turned into a shelter for her extended family.
“I wasn’t as prepared with eight people here in the house,” she wrote in a text.
In places like Rolling Fork, where 1 in 3 people live below the poverty line, another “once-in-a-generation” storm means more spoiled food, frozen pipes, and life-threatening cold for people still trying to claw their way back from the last catastrophe.
Forecasters said temperatures are expected to rise Jan. 28, but they’ll still be below freezing.