Cries and candle scents: Scores feared dead after twisters
MAYFIELD, Ky. — Workers on the night shift at Mayfield Consumer Products were in the middle of the holiday rush, cranking out candles, when a tornado closed in on the factory and the word went out: “Duck and cover.”
Autumn Kirks pulled down her safety goggles and took shelter, tossing aside wax and fragrance buckets to make room. She glanced away from her boyfriend, Lannis Ward, and when she looked back, he was gone.
On Sunday, he was among scores of people feared dead in the rubble of the factory and elsewhere across the state.
Gov. Andy Beshear initially warned Sunday that the state’s overall death toll from the outbreak of twisters Friday night in Mayfield and other communities could exceed 100. But later in the day, he said the number of dead might turn out to be half that, citing details from the candle company.
“We are praying that maybe original estimates of those we have lost were wrong. If so, it’s going to be pretty wonderful,“the governor said.
Kirks and others could only wait in agony for news of their loved ones amid the rescue effort.
“Not knowing is worse than knowing right now,“she said. “I’m trying to stay strong. It’s very hard right now.”
Kentucky was the worst-hit state by far in an unusual mid-December swarm of twisters across the Midwest and the South that leveled entire communities and left at least 14 people dead in four other states.
Forty people who were inside the candle factory were pulled out soon after the twister struck, authorities said. The number of people who had been in the factory was initially put at 110. Rescuers had to crawl over the dead to get to the living at a disaster scene that smelled like scented candles.
But by the time churchgoers gathered Sunday morning to pray for the lost, more than 24 hours had elapsed since anyone had been found alive. Instead, crews recovered pieces of peoples’ lives — a backpack, a pair of shoes and a cellphone with 27 missed messages were among the items.
Layers of steel and cars 15 feet deep were on top of what used to the factory roof, the governor said. Also, more than 1,000 homes in Kentucky were lost, he said.
“We’re going to grieve together, we’re going to dig out and clean up together, and we will rebuild and move forward together. We’re going to get through this,“Beshear said. “We’re going to get through this together, because that is what we do.”
Four twisters hit the state in all, including one with an extraordinarily long path of about 200 miles (322 kilometers) long, authorities said. The outbreak was all the more remarkable because it came at a time of year when cold weather normally limits tornadoes.
Eleven people were reported killed in and around Bowling Green alone.
With afternoon high temperatures forecast only in the 40s, tens of thousands of people were without power, and about 300 National Guard members were going house to house, checking on people and helping to remove debris. Cadaver dogs searched for victims..”
The outbreak also killed at least six people in Illinois, where an Amazon distribution center 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.