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Night of devastating tornadoes likely kills more than 100 in Kentucky

MAYFIELD: Not less than 100 individuals have been feared dead in after a swarm of tore a 200-mile path through the US Midwest and South, demolishing houses, levelling companies and setting off a scramble to search out survivors beneath the rubble, officials stated Saturday.

The powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in cooler months, destroyed a candle factory and the fire and police stations in a small town in Kentucky, ripped through a nursing home in neighboring Missouri, and killed at least six workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear stated the collection of tornadoes was essentially the most destructive within the state’s historical past. He mentioned about 40 staff had been rescued on the candle manufacturing facility within the metropolis of Mayfield, which had about 110 individuals inside when it was lowered to a pile of rubble. It will be a “miracle” to search out anybody else alive beneath the debris, Beshear said.

“The devastation is unlike anything I’ve seen in my life and I’ve trouble placing it into phrases,” Beshear stated at a press conference. “It is very likely going to be over 100 individuals lost right here in Kentucky.”

Beshear stated 189 National Guard personnel have been deployed to help with the restoration. The rescue efforts will focus largely on Mayfield, home to some 10,000 individuals within the southwestern nook of the state where it converges with Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas.

Video and pictures posted on social media showed brick buildings in downtown Mayfield flattened, with parked vehicles almost buried underneath debris. The steeple on the historic Graves County courthouse was toppled and the close by First United Methodist Church partially collapsed.

Mayfield Fire Chief Jeremy Creason, whose personal station was destroyed, stated the candle manufacturing facility was diminished to a “pile of bent steel and metal and equipment” and that responders needed to at instances “crawl over casualties to get to stay victims.”

Paige Tingle said she drove four hours to the site in the hope of finding her 52-year-old mother, Jill Monroe, who was working at the factory and was last heard from at 9:30 p.m.

“We don’t know how to feel, we are just trying to find her,” she said. “It’s a disaster here.”

The genesis of the tornado outbreak was a series of overnight thunderstorms, including a super cell storm that formed in northeast Arkansas. That storm moved from Arkansas and Missouri and into Tennessee and Kentucky.

Unusually excessive temperatures and humidity created the environment for such an extreme weather occasion at this moment of year, said Victor Gensini, a professor in geographic & atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University.

“This is an historic, if not generational occasion,” Gensini said.

Saying the disaster was likely one of the largest tornado outbreaks in US history, President Joe Biden on Saturday approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky.

He told reporters he would be asking the Environmental Protection Agency to examine what role climate change may have played in fuelling the storms, and he raised questions about the tornado warning systems.

“What warning was there? And was it strong enough and was it heeded?” Biden said.

‘Like an enormous bomb’

About 130 miles east of Mayfield in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Justin Shepherd said his coffee shop was spared the worst of the storm, which struck other businesses hard on the busy commercial strip simply off the bypass to US Highway 31 West.

“We’ve got some siding and roof damage here, but just across the road there’s a brewery that half of it is gone. It’s just totally gone, like a big bomb exploded or something.”

One individual was killed and 5 severely injured when a twister tore through a nursing home with 90 beds in Monette, Arkansas, a small community close to the border with Missouri, according to Craighead County Judge Marvin Day

“We have been very blessed that more individuals weren’t killed or injured in that. It might have been a complete worse,” Day told Reuters.

Just a few miles away in Leachville, Arkansas, a twister destroyed a Dollar General Store, killing one individual, and laid waste to a lot of the city’s downtown, said Lt. Chuck Brown of the Mississippi County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas.

“It actually seemed like a train roaring through town.”

In Illinois, at least six workers were confirmed killed after an Amazon.com Inc warehouse collapsed in the town of Edwardsville, when the winds ripped off the roof and reduced a wall longer than a football field to rubble.

Amazon truck driver Emily Epperson, 23, said she was anxiously waiting for information on the whereabouts of her workmate Austin McEwan late Saturday afternoon to relay to his girlfriend and parents.

“We’re so worried because we believe that, you know, he would have been found by now,” she told Reuters.

In Tennessee, the severe weather killed at least three people, said Dean Flener, spokesperson for the state’s Emergency Management Agency. And two people, including a young child, were killed in their homes in Missouri, Governor Mike Parson said in a statement.

The National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center said it received 36 reports of tornadoes touching down in Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The weather forecast was broadly clear for Saturday night, but temperatures were expected to drop and thousands of residents lack power and water after the storm. As of Saturday afternoon, nearly 99,000 customers in Kentucky and more than 71,000 in Tennessee were without power, according to PowerOutage.US, a website tracking power outages.

Kentucky officials called on residents to stay off the roads and to donate blood, as responders rushed to rescue survivors and account for people in communities that had lost communications.

“We’ve got Guardsmen who are out doing door knocks and checking up on folks because there’s no other communication with some of these people,” said Brigadier General Haldane Lamberton of the Kentucky National Guard.

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