An apparent tornado ripped through Vicksburg and Warren County Wednesday, toppling trees, tearing shingles from roofs and overturning mobile homes and work trailers.

St. Alban Hunting Camp at the end of Hankinson Road took the brunt of the damage outside the city. There, two mobile homes were overturned and blown up to 100 feet from their foundations. The private club rents property but each member owns a house on the land, Sheriff Martin Pace said.

“These are second homes to people for more than the hunting season,” Pace said.

About 2,600 Entergy customers lost power Wednesday, and 205 remained without power this morning, Entergy spokesman Don Arnold said. Many of Wednesday’s outages were clustered near Porters Chapel Road, where the wind broke a main circuit pole, and Oak Ridge Road, where four poles were broken.

Rainfall totaled 1.65 inches at the Vicksburg Water Treatment Plant on Haining Road. The National Weather Service in Jackson recorded 1.3 inches at its gauge, at Vicksburg Tallulah Regional Airport.

A survey team from the weather service was in Vicksburg this morning to determine if the storm was a tornado, said meteorologist Brad Bryant. The weather service said Wednesday evening that the damage in Vicksburg was consistent with a tornado.

At the hunting camp, Ruth and Robert Derryberry of Flowers sifted through the rubble of their mobile home but found little salvageable other than a small ladder. “There’s not too much to say,” Robert Derryberry said as he surveyed the damage.

On Campbell Swamp Road, a couple was trapped after a tree fell on their vehicle, but they were not injured, Pace said.

“Miraculously so far we have received no reports of injuries,” he said.

Warning sirens in Warren County didn’t sound before the worst of the storm hit around 11 a.m.

Clustered mostly south of Interstate 20, the sirens were erected in the 1980s to act as sentinels for incidents at Grand Gulf Nuclear Station. County supervisors have been reluctant to pay for new sirens or participate in a phone alert system similar to the CodeRed service for Vicksburg subscribers, in each case citing cost.

Emergency planner Anna Booth said the system made more than 1,000 calls Wednesday to each Vicksburg resident whose home or cell number is in the local database. In December, the city added a weather-alert component to the system for two years, to cost $10,500 the first year and $10,700 the second year.

Deputies and Warren County work crews worked to clear Campbell Swamp until about 11 Wednesday night, Pace said.

“It looks like a war zone down there,” he said of the horseshoe-shaped road in south Warren County. “If you went down one side of the road, it was a war zone, then you get out of it, and then the war zone starts again.”

Deputies were forced to walk into the road on both ends, checking for people in homes and cars, then wait for power lines to be cleared before two county road crews could begin clearing the debris.

“All the way through there,” Pace said, “you could see where the storm hit.”

“I don’t think it stayed on the ground all the way through because it took out just the tops of trees in some places, and in other places, it looked like a giant Weed-Eater had cut all the way down to the ground,” he said.

In the city, a path of snapped trees and downed power lines was visible around Porters Chapel Road and Wisconsin Avenue. A construction trailer was flipped upside down near the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer Research and Development Center’s Information Technology Laboratory, where roof damage to the geotechnical and structures lab annex building was termed “major” this morning by public affairs chief Wayne Stroupe.

A storage shed near the levee breach repair facility was damaged, and several vehicles were moved 10 to 20 feet by the wind, Stroupe said.

Fallen trees smashed the black security fence across the road from the lab and blocked traffic for the rest of the day.

“Luckily, no one got hurt,” Stroupe said.

Tammie Brooks was at work when neighbors informed her three trees crushed the left side of her home on Gay Boulevard, just off Porters Chapel, about a half-mile from the IT lab.

“It’s a loss, but it can all be replaced,” she said after surveying the home, partially buried under bark and branches.

The Derryberrys’ home was ripped from its foundation and came to rest about 100 feet from where concrete blocks marked its former outline. The couple has owned the house for a little more than a year, but they have been part of the hunting club for about 20 years.

“We had another (trailer), but it got caught in the flood,” Ruth Derryberry said. “Then we moved up here and got hit by a tornado.”

Several hundred yards away, wind had pinned the seat cushion from her granddaughter’s rocking chair to a fence, Ruth Derryberry said.

“She’s going to be so disappointed,” Derryberry said.

To the northeast of the hunting camp, shingles were blown from several rooftops and two barns were destroyed at 825 Gullett Road.

“That’s all we really sustained were loss of shingles,” Al Gullett said.

The county responded to 33 calls of roads blocked by downed trees or power lines, Pace said. At 5 p.m. Wednesday, Entergy had just given clearance to begin clearing trees in the Campbell Swamp area, he said.

At about 5 this morning, another tree had fallen, blocking both lanes of Mount Alban Road.

On Wednesday, trees and power lines were reported down on Mount Alban, U.S. 80, Yorktown Road, Oak Ridge Road, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Sky Farm Avenue, North Washington Street at Chickasaw, Indiana Avenue, Wisconsin Avenue, Chapel Hills at Lakewood, Short Jack Drive, Campbell Swamp Road, Jeff Davis Road and Culkin Road.