Tornadoes Hit Several States, With at Least 50 Likely Dead in Kentucky

Dozens of people were feared dead and communities across the Midwest and southern United States were left scrambling to assess the damage on Saturday morning after a string of unseasonably powerful storms and tornadoes swept across five states overnight.

Officials said that tornadoes had killed at least one person at an Arkansas nursing home and caused a roof to collapse at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, leaving workers trapped inside. Kentucky’s governor said that at least 50 had been killed in a tornado’s path of over 200 miles, and that the state’s death toll was likely to increase to more than 70 in the coming hours.

“Daybreak is going to bring more tough news,” Gov. Andy Beshear said in a news briefing. “It has been one of the toughest nights in Kentucky history,” he added. “Some areas have been hit in ways that are hard to put into words.”

At least five states were hit by tornadoes on Friday night, including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee, said Bill Bunting, the operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center, part of the National Weather Service.

He said the tornadoes were part of a weather system that was wreaking havoc in many parts of the country, causing substantial snowfall across parts of the upper Midwest and western Great Lakes.

A tornado hit an Arkansas nursing home, Monette Manor in the city of Monette, about 8:15 p.m. Friday, prompting a large response from the police and emergency workers in the area, according to Marvin Day, the Craighead County judge.

Search-and-rescue workers found one person who had died and five who had been seriously injured, Mr. Day said, correcting an earlier report that at least two people had been killed. Mr. Day said that other residential buildings in the area had also been damaged.

“It’s just really heartbreaking,” he said.

Police officers and emergency workers also responded to reports that the roof of an Amazon warehouse had collapsed in Edwardsville, Ill.

The Edwardsville Police Department said in a brief statement early Saturday that an Amazon warehouse had sustained a “partial building collapse” after a severe weather event occurred on the city’s west end at 8:33 p.m. Friday. A search-and-rescue operation was underway, the statement said.

A dispatcher who answered the phone at the police department on Saturday morning said that he had no comment.

Herbert Simmons, the director of the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency, said late Friday that local officials were responding to an “active scene” at the warehouse. “Right now, our concern is trying to get people who are trapped,” he said, adding that he was not sure how many people might be in the building.

A BBC reporter at the scene said around the same time that about 100 people were believed to have been inside.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said on Twitter that the state police and emergency management officials were working with local officials. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As of Saturday morning, more than 132,000 homes were without power in Tennessee, nearly 60,000 in Kentucky, more than 25,000 in Arkansas, nearly 24,000 in Illinois and nearly 10,000 in Missouri, according to reports compiled by PowerOutage.us.

The damage in Arkansas came after a severe thunderstorm produced a tornado that was tearing through the region, according to the National Weather Service. As of 9:17 p.m., the storm was near Trumann, Ark., and moving northeast at 55 miles per hour, bringing with it a tornado and quarter-size hail, the Weather Service said.

“Remember, there are people affected by all these tornadoes,” Craig Ceecee, a meteorologist and a graduate student at Mississippi State University, said on Twitter late Friday as he tracked tornadoes across Kentucky. “Communities being hit hard. And we won’t know how bad it is until morning. We have to think and pray for those being affected.”

Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Twitter late Friday that he had declared a state of emergency as a result of “major tornado damage” in the state.

He said that he had activated the state police and the Kentucky National Guard to help respond to the situation, and that he would provide updated information on Saturday morning.

Officials said that Mayfield, a town of nearly 10,000 people in the state’s western corner, had endured some of the worst of the destruction. About 110 people were inside a candle factory in the area when the tornado ripped through.

“We believe we’ll lose at least dozens of those individuals,” Gov. Andy Beshear said.

About 60,000 people in the state were without power as of Saturday morning, according to PowerOutage.us.

The storms also caused a freight train to derail, although no injuries were reported.

The freight railroad company CSX said that initial reports, including from a police department in the city of Madisonville in western Kentucky, indicated that several rail cars on one of its trains had derailed after the train was stopped amid severe weather in the area.

“There are no reported injuries to the crew,” Cindy Schild, a CXS spokeswoman, said in a statement after midnight. “CSX personnel are on route to the scene and will coordinate with local emergency responders to assess the situation.”

The Madisonville Police Department could not immediately be reached for comment early Saturday.

Mr. Beshear said that it was likely that at least 50 people had died in the storms in his state and that the number was expected to climb sharply after what he described as “a historic weather event.”

“The reports are really depressing,” he told the local news channel WLKY. “We had one tornado on the ground continuously for more than 200 miles in Kentucky. It hit Mayfield as hard as just about any town, maybe other than West Liberty, has ever been hit.”

“We know that we are likely to have 50 deaths, if not significantly north of that, from this event,” he said. “We are hurting for our Kentucky families out there.”

As residents in at least five U.S. states assessed the damage on Saturday from a spree of powerful storms and tornadoes, forecasters warned of more inclement weather looming across the country.

Severe storms, tornadoes and damaging wind gusts were likely to occur from the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Ohio Valley into Saturday, the National Weather Service said in an advisory at 3 a.m. Eastern time. It said the system would also produce heavy snow over the Upper Great Lakes and rain over parts of the Northeast.

At least five states were swept by tornadoes on Friday, including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee.

On Friday night, the Weather Service issued tornado warnings for several counties in eastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. Forecasters said they expected that system to move into Ohio, eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee.

The National Weather Service office in Nashville said early Saturday that tornado warnings were in effect for several Tennessee counties, and that a “large and extremely dangerous tornado” was moving northeast at 60 miles per hour near over Kingston Springs, about 30 miles west of Nashville.

Tornadoes are relatively small, short-lived weather events. And scientists are not yet able to determine whether there is a link between climate change and the frequency or strength of tornadoes, in part because they have a limited data record.

But researchers say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater “clusters,” and that a so-called tornado alley in the Great Plains — where most tornadoes occur — appears to be shifting eastward.

“This is what we would call a tornado outbreak, where you have a storm system which produces a number of tornadoes over a large geographical area,” Dan Pydynowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said on Friday.

But such a large and powerful system in December is highly unusual, and something the region usually experiences in May or April.

“It’s certainly not unheard of,” he said of tornadoes this late in the year, “but to have an outbreak of this magnitude, with this many tornado reports — it’s a little unusual for this time of year.”

Temperatures in Arkansas and Kansas on Friday were “spring weather,” Mr. Pydynowski said. Highs were in the 70s and 80s.

“It was unusually warm, and there was moisture in place,” he said, “and you had a strong cold front end. These are the ingredients for big storms in the spring, but not in mid-December.”