East-Central United States | Tornado toll exceeds 78 dead, several cities devastated

(Mayfield) Flattened houses as far as the eye can see, tangles of rubble, and at least 78 dead in Kentucky alone. The Americans were stunned on Saturday by the violence and the number of tornadoes that swept through the center and south of the country.

President Joe Biden spoke of an “unimaginable tragedy” and assured that the federal administration was working in concert with the governors of the affected states. “It’s a tragedy,” he said, “and we still don’t know how many lives were lost or the full extent of the damage,” while at least 78 deaths, including more than 70 in the only state of Kentucky, have already been identified.

Tennessee has three, two people have died in Arkansas, officials and local media say. In Illinois, two other people have also died in an Amazon warehouse collapse, while at least one is dead in Missouri.

But Kentucky, in the center-east of the country, records a horrific toll after the passage of this devastating meteorological phenomenon, which particularly affects the immense American plains.

“We were pretty sure we were going to lose over 50 Kentuckians. I’m now sure that number is over 70, and it could well be over 100 by the end of the day, ”said state governor Andy Beshear. He called on residents to donate blood to treat the injured.

“A pile of matches”

“It’s indescribable, the level of devastation is incomparable,” he added.

“This will be, I think, the deadliest series of tornadoes to ever pass through Kentucky,” said the elected official.

Mayfield, a town of 10,000 people, appears to have been at the epicenter of the disaster.

The heart of the city looks “like a pile of matches,” Mayor Kathy O’Nan told CNN.

“The churches in the center have been destroyed, and the courthouse in the heart of the city has been destroyed,” she added, saying Mayfield was now without water or electricity.

Like a bomb

“It’s as if a bomb had exploded in our neighborhood,” Alex Goodman, a resident of Mayfield, told AFP after a trying night in the dark and in anguish.

The people of Mayfield were proud of the buildings that gave their small town a historic character. “They are all destroyed,” she laments.

Across the city, buildings were gutted, metal twisted, vehicles overturned, and trees and bricks strewn across the streets.

Michael Dossett, a local relief official, interviewed on CNN referred to him as “ground zero” in Mayfield, a phrase used to describe the ruins of the World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York.

Employees of a candle factory were trapped there after the roof gave way under the strong winds. We still had no news of dozens of employees out of the hundred present.

According to the mayor in the afternoon of Saturday, no one had been able to come out alive from the rubble since the morning, raising fears of a worsening of the toll.

“At first, we could just hear the rain. And then, suddenly, there was a very loud noise, like that of a train, ”Lori Wooton, a resident of Dawson Springs, Kentucky, told CNN.

“It didn’t seem like long… three or four seconds and it was gone. But then we went out to see and the damage was unimaginable, ”she continued.

400 km

American channels filmed the passage of the tornadoes: black columns sweeping the ground, illuminated by intermittent lightning. About 30 of these storms hit the United States on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

One of the tornadoes traveled more than 400 km, according to the National Weather Service (NWS), while on average these do not exceed more than 6 km in distance.

Further northwest, in Illinois, strong winds partially tore off the roof of a storm-ravaged Amazon warehouse. These are employees of the distribution giant who worked nights to process orders before the holiday season.

Police confirmed at least two deaths in the warehouse and the local emergency management agency cited “many people trapped” in the building.

The emergency services worked until the early hours of Saturday to try to free these people from the installation, a third of which is nothing more than rubble.