Survivors of Kentucky’s devastated tornadoes pick up the rubble, a shelter with relatives told Reuters

By Cheney Orr and Gabriella Borter

MAYFIELD, Ky. (Reuters) – Neighbors in Kentucky, many without electricity, gas or roofs, woke up on Sunday to a landscape scarred by a string of powerful tornadoes, and officials killed at least 100 people as they demolished their homes. and nothing else in their path.

Authorities said they had little hope of surviving under the rubble. Instead, rescue workers, volunteers and residents had to start a long process of recovering what they could and cleaning up the waste areas.

At least 100 people were believed to have been killed in Kentucky alone after tornadoes struck a 200-mile (320 km) road across the U.S. Midwest and South on Friday night. Six employees were killed in an Amazon warehouse in Illinois. They moved into a nursing home in Missouri. More than 70,000 people were left without power in Tennessee.

But nowhere did it suffer as much as the small town of Mayfield in Kentucky, where unusual winter weather forecasters say a strong factory was destroyed by a candle factory and firefighters and police stations. Across the 10,000-strong town on the southwest corner of the state, houses were leveled or roofs were missing, giant trees were uprooted and street signs were damaged.

People were combing through household rubbish in search of things until Saturday night. At that time, the powerless people were immersed in darkness, except for the occasional flashlight and the lights of emergency vehicles.

Janet Kimp, 66, and her son Michael Kimp, 25, survived wrapped up in their hallway, the only part of the house where the roof or walls did not fall, he said Saturday.

This was only the last catastrophe that damaged her: Kimp said she burned down her house a year ago and then had to file for bankruptcy after her husband died.

“I’ve lost everything again,” Kimp said as he stood in the remains of his living room, where the furniture overturned and the debris splashed on the ground. She spent the night at her daughter’s house in Mayfield, and she was saved.

On the road, war veteran Robert Bowlin, 59, and his son Christopher Bowlin, 24, were laying hard-boiled eggs outside a campground. They used wood from a fallen tree, narrowly avoiding their home.

SENSITIVE, UNUSUAL

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said the tornado collection was the most devastating in state history. He said about 40 workers were rescued at the Mayfield candle factory, which had about 110 people inside when it was reduced to a pile of debris. It would be a “miracle” to find anyone else alive under the rubble, Beshear said Saturday afternoon.

In Illinois, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ 🙂 confirmed that six employees were killed https://www.reuters.com/world/us/injuries-reported-after-roof-collapse-amazon-warehouse-illinois-ap-2021- After the roof of the 12-11 warehouse was torn down on Saturday, 11-inch-long concrete walls that collapsed from the football fields collapsed.

At least 45 Amazon employees were evacuated from the 500,000-square-foot facility in Edwardsville, Illinois, according to fire chief James Whiteford. It was unclear how many employees were still missing, as Amazon did not have an exact count of the number of people working at the classification and delivery center when the tornadoes occurred, Whiteford said.

The onset of the tornado’s outbreak was a series of night-time thunderstorms, including a super-cell storm that formed in northeast Arkansas. That storm went from Arkansas and Missouri and to Tennessee and Kentucky.

Unusual temperatures and humidity created an environment for an extreme weather event at this time of year, experts say.

“I was watching the radar last night and I was saying, ‘Wait, this is December. How is this in December?’ It’s the kind of thing you would only see at the peak of the season – you know, March, April, May, ”said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections.

President Joe Biden told https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/biden-approves-kentucky-emergency-declaration-tornado-disaster-2021-12-11 that he would ask reporters to the Environmental Protection Agency to look into the role of climate. changes may have been played in feeding the storms.

Mayfielder resident Jamel Alubahr, 25, said his three-year-old nephew had died and that his sister was in hospital with a fractured skull after she was stuck under the rubble of a three-story house.

“It all happened at the touch of a finger,” said Alubahr, who is now left with another sister in Mayfield.