‘100 DEAD’ IN AMERICA’S MONSTER TORNADO
AT LEAST 70 people have died and scores more are still missing after a series of ‘monster’ tornados tore through six US states yesterday.
Trains were blown off tracks and entire communities were flattened. Kentucky governor Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency and warned the death toll was likely to exceed 100.
At least 18 tornados were recorded, propelling debris as high as 30,000ft.
Meteorologists believe one of them may have been the biggest ever recorded – it stayed on the ground for several hours and tore a swathe across 227 miles.
Kathy Stewart O’Nan, mayor of Mayfield in Kentucky, called her town ‘ground zero’ of the disaster, confirming that 18 people had perished when a candle factory was destroyed. A further 40 are missing.
Kyana Parsons-Perez, 32, was trapped under the rubble of the flattened candle factory for two hours. ‘I could hear the screams of people around me crying for help,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t move my legs.
‘I could hear the screams of people near me crying for help’
When the rescuers came they said the whole building had collapsed and there was 5ft of rubble on top of me, so they had to dig me out from below.
‘I was trapped in a corner with some other folks. When the twister hit there was a loud boom and everything came down on top of us.’
Prisoners from a nearby jail which had its roof blown off joined the hunt for survivors. ‘They could have run and escaped but they stayed to help,’ she said.
The storm also tore the roof off an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, killing two, and flattened part of a nursing home in Arkansas. Buildings were also flattened in Missouri and Tennessee, with one police chief saying: ‘It’s chaos. We don’t know how many people are gone. These were monster tornados and they hit one after another.’
President Joe Biden pledged federal support, adding: ‘To lose a loved one in a storm like this is an unimaginable tragedy.’