Residents of a Kentucky town devastated by a tornado could be without heat, water and electricity in chilly temperatures for a “long time,” the mayor warned Monday, as officials struggled to restore services after a swarm of twisters levelled neighbourhoods and killed dozens of people in five states.
Authorities are still tallying the devastation from Friday’s storms, though they believe the death toll will be lower than initially feared since it appeared many more people escaped a candle factory in Mayfield, Ky., than first thought.
Kentucky was the worst-hit by far in the cluster of twisters across several states, remarkable because they came at a time of year when cold weather normally limits tornadoes. At least 64 people died in the state, Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday, and another 105 were unaccounted for.
There were at least another 14 deaths in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri.
“This is a tough morning … but it’s OK. We’re still going to be all right,” Kathy Stewart O’Nan, the mayor of Mayfield, Ky., said on CBS Mornings.
But those who survived faced a low temperature below freezing Monday without any utilities.
“We lost a water tower, so we have no water within the city limits. All the power was cut just for safety reasons after everything fell,” O’Nan told NBC’s Today show. “And the natural gas has been turned off because of so many leaks. So we have no resources.”
“The resources are gonna take a long time to be restored here,” she added.
Across the state, about 26,000 homes and businesses were without electricity, according to poweroutage.us, including nearly all of those in Mayfield. National Guard members went house to house, checking on people and helping to remove debris. Cadaver dogs searched for victims.
Authorities are still trying to determine the total number of dead, and the storms made door-to-door searches impossible in some places. “There are no doors,” said Beshear.
“We’re going to have over 1,000 homes that are gone, just gone,” he said.
Beshear had said Sunday morning that the state’s toll could exceed 100. But he later said it might be as low as 50.
Lower death toll than feared at candle factory
Initially as many as 70 people were feared dead in the candle factory in Mayfield, but the company said Sunday that eight were confirmed dead and eight remained missing, while more than 90 others had been located.
“Many of the employees were gathered in the tornado shelter and after the storm was over they left the plant and went to their homes,” said Bob Ferguson, a spokesman for the company. “With the power out and no landline they were hard to reach initially. We’re hoping to find more of those eight unaccounted as we try their home residences.”
Debris from destroyed buildings and shredded trees covered the ground in Mayfield, a city of about 10,000 in western Kentucky. Twisted sheet metal, downed power lines and wrecked vehicles lined the streets. Windows were blown out and roofs torn off the buildings that were still standing.
Ripped off doors
Firefighters in the town had to rip the doors off the fire station to get vehicles out, according to Fire Chief Jeremy Creason on CBS Mornings.
“Words cannot describe the bravery, the selflessness that they’ve exhibited,” he said of his employees. “We had to try and navigate through all the debris up and down our streets. We were responding with ambulances with three and four flat tires.”
O’Nan said historic downtown churches have been destroyed — just a week after she and others visited them on a pre-Christmas “advent walk.”
“Little did we know it would be the last time we did that,” she said on Today. “But we’re so, so thankful to have had that opportunity, which will be in our hearts forever — every Christmas, that’s what we’ll think of.”
At the candle factory, night-shift workers were in the middle of the holiday rush when the word went out to seek shelter.
For Autumn Kirks, that meant tossing aside wax and fragrance buckets to make an improvised safe place. She glanced away from her boyfriend, Lannis Ward, who was about three metres away at the time.
Suddenly, she saw sky and lightning where a wall had been, and Ward had vanished.
“I remember taking my eyes off of him for a second, and then he was gone,” Kirks said.
Later in the day, she got the terrible news — that Ward had been killed in the storm.
“It was indescribable,” Pastor Joel Cauley said of the disaster scene. “It was almost like you were in a twilight zone. You could smell the aroma of candles, and you could hear the cries of people for help. Candle smells and all the sirens is not something I ever expected to experience at the same time.”
Four twisters hit Kentucky in all, including one with an extraordinarily long path of about 322 kilometres, authorities said.
In addition to the deaths in Kentucky, the tornadoes also killed at least six people in Illinois, where an Amazon distribution centre in Edwardsville was hit; four in Tennessee; two in Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed and the governor said workers shielded residents with their own bodies; and two in Missouri.
