(Dawson Springs) Severe storms hit the Midwestern region of the United States on Wednesday evening, hours after President Joe Biden visited the state of Kentucky, struck by a deadly tornado on Friday, in which he pledged federal government assistance to disaster victims.
The US meteorological service NWS warned of an “extremely violent” storm system on Wednesday evening, which could “break records” and cause “a plethora of dangerous weather phenomena” in several states in the center and north of the country, with including “dangerous” winds, snow, thunderstorms, tornadoes and fire hazards.
“These storms will have the potential to produce extreme gusts of up to 100 miles per hour (160 km / h), as well as one or two powerful tornadoes” in Iowa and Minnesota, has the National Weather Service, of which local agencies urged people to take shelter through their Twitter accounts.
More than 400,000 people were without electricity in several states Wednesday evening, including Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Iowa, according to the Poweroutage site.
The latest weather events come days after severe tornadoes hit several central and southern states, including Kentucky, which Biden visited earlier on Wednesday.
« Ces tornades ont tout dévoré sur leur passage », « les maisons, les entreprises, les lieux de culte, vos rêves, vos vies », a dit le président américain dans un court discours à Dawson Springs, l’une des localités les plus touchées.
Le gouvernement fédéral « va couvrir à 100 % le coût des travaux de déblaiement pendant trente jours », a-t-il promis. « Gardez la foi. Nous allons y arriver, je vous le promets. […] No one will let you down. ”
Joe Biden, after flying over a disaster area, visited Mayfield, another small town devastated by the tornado that swept through this rural and conservative state on Friday, killing at least 74 people.
During these two visits, the president stopped several times, to chat with a woman sitting in the rubble of a building, to hug a disaster victim or to speak with a young girl carrying an American flag.
Around him, collapsed buildings, heaps of bricks, branches, sheet metal, where construction machinery and workers dressed in fluorescent yellow were busy.
“What I saw was a bunch of amazing people coming together, helping each other. And who are full of hope, ”he told reporters.
PHOTO BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, FRANCE-PRESS AGENCY
President Joe Biden at a media briefing in Mayfield, Ky. On December 15, 2021.
During a meeting with local officials in a shed where food and water bottles were stored, the president said: “There are no red tornadoes or blue tornadoes”, referring to the respective colors. from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, his.
Empathy
In this exceptional meteorological phenomenon, which also claimed at least fourteen victims in Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, Joe Biden finds a rare opportunity for national unity, he who had promised during his campaign to bring together a America deeply divided.
The US president is not going to conquered land, politically speaking: While Kentucky has a Democratic governor, the state gave Republican Donald Trump a very large majority in the 2020 election. And during his visit on Wednesday, reporters saw a flag with Trump’s name on a pickup truck.
Joe Biden had taken care, before his departure, not to politicize the visit and he also remained in a register that is familiar to him: that of empathy and comfort.
The president wore a cap from the “Beau Biden Foundation”, in tribute to his son, who died of cancer at the age of 46. A way of remembering that he himself went through hardships: this mourning and the death in 1972 of his first wife and their still baby daughter.
“The president sees people through the tragedy they are going through – the pain of losing loved ones, of losing their home. […] He sees them as human beings, not as people with partisan ties, ”spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.
Joe Biden spoke with great caution about a link between these tornadoes and climate change, while in September, noting the devastation of Storm Ida in New York and New Jersey, he spoke of a “red alert” climate change and seized the opportunity to praise its major investment projects.
“We have to be very careful. We cannot say with absolute certainty that this is linked to climate change, ”he said on Monday, only calling the storms of the previous Friday“ unusual ”.