Tornadoes in the United States | “The city has disappeared”

(Mayfield) Rubble as far as the eye can see, flattened houses and a heavy toll: Desolation reigned nearly 400 kilometers in the United States on Saturday after around 30 tornadoes swept through six states in the east-central of the country.

Thousands of Americans woke up Saturday morning to the grim scenes of small towns on the plains ravaged by a multitude of violent tornadoes, on the night of Friday to Saturday.

“I didn’t see the tornado, but I felt it,” told Press Terra Utley, a resident of Mayfield, Kentucky. The 32-year-old was in her home with her partner and mother-in-law when the tornado struck on Friday. “Everything was shaking around us,” she described, her voice still quavering. Then we heard the windows smashing, the boards shattering, a loud noise, like a helicopter. Then it was dead silence. ”

Kentucky was particularly affected by the disaster, with 70 of the 83 victims in total on Saturday. The death toll could reach more than 100, announced Andy Beshear, governor of the state.

Mayfield, a small town of 10,000 people, was the epicenter of the disaster. On the spot, the building of a candle factory collapsed, trapping a hundred people inside, reported the Guardian.

In neighboring Illinois, at least six people have died in an Amazon warehouse collapse, the Edwardsville fire chief said. “The news out of Edwardsville is tragic,” tweeted Jeff Bezos, boss of the e-commerce giant. “We are heartbroken at the loss of our colleagues there, and our hearts and prayers are with their families and loved ones,” he added.

La famille de Terra Utley a tout perdu : sa maison, ses voitures, un chien. Heureusement, ses cinq enfants, en visite chez des proches, ne se sont pas retrouvés piégés avec eux dans les décombres. « Je suis anéantie, a confié Terra Utley. La ville au complet a disparu. »

« Tragédie inimaginable »

Le président des États-Unis, Joe Biden, a déploré « l’une des pires séries de tornades » de l’histoire des États-Unis. C’est une « tragédie inimaginable », a-t-il ajouté.

Pour Rita, une Américaine de Providence, dans le Rhode Island (à près de 2000 km des ravages), la catastrophe a pris une tournure personnelle. « J’ai été réveillée ce matin par un appel de mon père, pour me dire que ma sœur était l’une des victimes de la tempête », a-t-elle confié par écrit à La Presse, samedi.

La sœur de Rita (ou plutôt sa demi-sœur) était âgée de 18 ans. Elle habitait aussi à Mayfield. « Ils m’ont dit qu’elle rentrait à pied à la maison quand un immeuble s’est effondré sur elle, a poursuivi Rita, qui a préféré taire son nom de famille. Elle était censée partir lundi pour venir passer Noël [avec moi et notre père], but she hadn’t, because she wanted to make sure her friends and her mom were going to be OK. ”

A disaster like no other

Trucker from Trois-Rivières, Denis Tremblay, slept in his heavy truck in Effingham, Illinois, overnight from Friday to Saturday. If he was spared by the tornado, he was woken up by a particularly violent thunderstorm, with wind and heavy rain. “I was in Arkansas [vendredi] midday and it was 20 ° C. That night, it dropped drastically to 4 or 5 ° C, described the sexagenarian. We saw that there was a cold front coming, ”he said.

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

While tornadoes in December are not uncommon, such a powerful storm system normally occurs in April or May. “These are the ingredients of big storms in the spring, but not in mid-December,” told the New York Times Dan Pydynowski, senior meteorologist for Accuweather.

One of the tornadoes, nicknamed “Quad-State”, would have traveled 400 km and crossed four states in four hours, namely Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky, according to the United States Meteorological Service (NWS) .

However, on average, tornadoes do not travel more than 6 km in distance.

If the distance traveled by the “Quad-State” tornado is confirmed by subsequent studies, it would be the record for the longest continuous tornado in US history, according to NBC News.

The links between tornadoes and climate change are not clearly established by scientists. In recent years, however, studies have shown that tornadoes are more clustered and that in the United States they are moving east.

After deploring the expected tornadoes’ toll, Joe Biden stressed that the meteorological phenomena were “more intense” with global warming, without however establishing a direct causal link between climate change and the disaster.

Help on the way

More than 180 members of the United States National Guard have been deployed to Kentucky to take part in the search for survivors and assist the population, reported Saturday the New York Times.

In Mayfield, in a parking lot in the center of town, volunteers were hard at work collecting essential items for affected families, an AFP reporter found on the spot. They included warm clothes, diapers for babies and bottles of drinking water, while the water and electricity distribution networks are no longer operational.

Federal disaster response agencies have also already started to be deployed there, Biden said. The US president has promised that “the federal state will do all it can to help”.

With Agence France-Presse