Two weeks before Tina Reed marked her first year as Pike County’s Civil Defense director, one of the worst tornado outbreaks in years hit the southeastern corner of Pike County.
But her experience in dealing with natural disasters stretches back years as a volunteer firefighter, deputy civil defense director and former employee of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, and she has been to scenes of devastation near and far.
“A really bad tornado hit Durant. I remember that. And I got sent up there. I was up there like a week doing that one,” she said of a mighty storm system that spun tornadoes there and in Yazoo City in 2010.
“That was horrible. That was probably one of the worst ones as far as tornadoes.”
Reed remembered encountering Bernice McGinnis, who was the civil defense director for Yazoo County at the time.
“All her friends, all her family, everybody that she knew had just been devastated by that tornado,” Reed said.
McGinnis became overwhelmed, right there in the county emergency operations center.
“She just lost it,” Reed said. “After they picked her up, she quit crying, and then she got down to business.
“I hope I never have to deal with that.”
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The perseverance that McGinnis displayed is a hallmark of what it takes to handle emergency management.
Reed has had her fill lately, responding to the March 15 tornado that tore through Progress and shredded houses and trees along Dykes-Walthall, Ginn, James George and Climmons roads and Silver Drive.
On a recent drive through the area, she recalled what she and other first responders went through responding to the disaster — clearing roads, rescuing a man from beneath a pile of rubble that only hours earlier was his house, and offering assistance to others who lost everything.
She recalled helping one man on Ginn Road who had just bought his house but hadn’t gotten it insured.
“Bless his heart,” she said.
Reed took his information on the day after the storm and returned with FEMA representatives to conduct damage assessments the following Wednesday.
“I walked up and I shook his hand and he said, ‘Do I know you?’ I was like, ‘Yes, sir, I met you Sunday when I came out here right after the storm,’ ” she said.
He didn’t remember her.
“I said, ‘You probably don’t. I think you were in shock,’ ” Reed said. “He was just sitting there looking at his house and I can’t imagine that feeling.”
A tornado-damaged home is seen on James George Road in southeastern Pike County. (Photo by Matt Williamson. Copyright 2025, Emmerich Newspapers, Inc.)
She continued down another road, where the devastation persisted.
“That house, it ripped the roof off, and that trailer over there. it picked it up, ripped the tiles out of the ground, moved it over and slammed it back down,” she said, pointing out the window of her county truck. “He had a big pole barn in between them. That’s gone. He had several old shop, sheds-type things, big ones with equipment in it that are gone.”
A neighbor’s house, miraculously, was untouched, she noted.
Just down the road was a property that lost 100 or more trees.
“Trees this big around that’s been there forever,” she said, extending her arms.
One family rode out the storm in a pantry, and while their house was devastated, wine glasses hanging in a rack were unscathed.
James George Road was one of the hardest hit roads in Pike County, Reed said.
“The guy that got hurt when his house was picked up and slammed into the gully behind his house, is right up here,” she said. “His house was a mobile home. There was a deck on the front of the house on the back — big decks — and it picked it up from between those decks and slammed it into the ravine behind the house. And he was under the rubble.
“They said they dug about five feet of rubble off of him to get him out. And they put him on a mattress and took him back up there to the church so ambulances could get him.”
Reed said firefighters from various departments cleared roads, and Sunnyhill Volunteer Fire Department Assistant Chief Rodney Naquin sent Reed a video that showed a mobile home sitting in the middle of the road.
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While responding to nature’s fury may be old hat for Reed, every incident has its own unique challenges, she said.
“They’re the same, but they’re different. You know, you can do 10 tornadoes in a row and it’s the same because it’s a tornado, but it’s different because the damage is always different,” she said. “It’s a different thing every time. It’s like a house fire, no two house fires are the same. Because it depends on what the house is made out of, how old it is, you know, it’s all different.”
An overturned trailer was no match for the March 15 tornadoes in Walthall County. (Photo by Matt Williamson. Copyright 2025, Emmerich Newspapers, Inc.)
House fires are how Reed got her start in emergency management.
She became a volunteer firefighter for Georgetown in her native Copiah County.
“My brother joined the fire department. And I was like, oh, that looks like fun. Let me do that too,” she said.
Then she took a job as Copiah County’s deputy emergency management director before going to work for MEMA in a job that had her managing the logistics of getting resources to their proper place.
“We would handle the requests and send them out to wherever they needed to go,” she said. “I did that for probably 10 years and then I moved up to area coordinator. I was in District 7, which is here, and I would go around and visit the counties and make sure they were in compliance, and if they had an event and they needed help, I would go help them.”
Reed, who still serves as a volunteer firefighter with Summit along with her husband Chad, went to work as deputy civil defense director in Pike County. She said that experience along with her work at MEMA made her a natural fit to take over Pike County’s emergency management operations following the retirement of Richard Coghlan last year.
“I know how everything works. If I need something, I know how to fill out the request,” she said. “I know what to write in the request to make it sufficient enough for them to give it to us.
“It’s really not been anything that I haven’t thought it was going to be. Yeah, it is obviously different being a deputy than being a director. Because it’s a lot more responsibility.”
Storm debris is piled on and around a car in southeastern Pike County, where a tornado hit on March 15. (Photo by Matt Williamson. Copyright 2025, Emmerich Newspapers, Inc.)
Tyler Touchstone works alongside her as deputy director, and together they help manage local fire departments, secure emergency management grants and deploy to natural disasters.
For Reed, the job is like a calling.
“Weather has always fascinated me,” she said. “I’ve always loved the weather. I’m not one of those people that get scared when it thunders. There are a lot of people that are terrified in the bad weather. I’m not one of those people. I respect its power, I do. And I watch the radar constantly, like during the storm, I watch it constantly.”
