| Translate This News In |
|---|
A massive tornado ripped across the middle of the United States, killed scores and destroying a candle factory, a nursing home, a train, and an Amazon warehouse in a stormfront that could equal the longest on record.
“I sincerely hope and pray for another successful rescue.” “I pray that there will be another one or two,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said as firefighters combed through the wreckage of a candle factory in Mayfield, where 110 people were working late Friday when the storm struck. Forty persons were saved in total.
Jeremy Creason, the city’s fire chief and EMS director, said, “At times, we had to crawl over casualties to get to live victims.”
By Saturday afternoon, 22 people had been reported deceased in Kentucky, with 11 of them in the Bowling Green area. However, Beshear said that up to 70 people were murdered when a twister swept through his state for more than 200 miles (320 kilometres), and that the death toll could rise to more than 100 in ten or more counties.
Six people were killed in Illinois, when an Amazon facility was targeted; four people were killed in Tennessee; two people were killed in Arkansas, where a nursing home was destroyed; and two people were killed in Missouri.
If early reports are correct, the tornado “would certainly go down as one of the longest track powerful tornadoes in US history,” according to Victor Genzini, a researcher at Northern Illinois University who studies extreme weather.
In March 1925, the world’s longest tornado tracked for nearly 220 miles (355 kilometres) across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. However, according to Genzini, this twister may have lasted approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers). The storm was even more surprising because it occurred in December, when cooler weather generally prevents tornadoes, he explained.
In Mayfield, a city of around 10,000 people in western Kentucky, debris from wrecked buildings and shredded trees blanketed the ground. The streets were littered with twisted metal sheeting, broken power lines, and smashed vehicles. The buildings that were left standing had their windows and roofs blown off.
Janine Denise Johnson Williams, a 50-year-old mother of four whose family held vigil outside the candle factory on Saturday, was among the missing.
Her brother, Darryl Williams, explained, “It is Christmastime, and she works at a facility that makes candles for gifts.” “To make a gift by foregoing the gift of life.” We have not received any information, and I am not going to make any assumptions. But I am bracing myself for disaster.”
Johnson, he claimed. The last time anyone heard from Williams was when she called her husband overnight to say the weather was very terrible.
An employee at the facility, Kyanna Parsons-Perez, was trapped for at least two hours under 5 feet (1.5 metres) of debris before being rescued.
