Tornado Death Toll Is Likely to Rise as States Assess Damage

Rescue workers across the middle of the country were set to resume combing through wreckage on Sunday after a flurry of tornadoes ripped through at least six states on Friday night, killing more than 90 people.

Officials warned that the toll, which included at least 80 in Kentucky alone, was almost certain to rise as they sifted through the ruins.

The tornadoes tore through states including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, said Bill Bunting, the operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center, part of the National Weather Service.

The tornado outbreak killed people who were working the Friday night shifts at a candle factory in Kentucky, where scores are believed to have died, and at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois, where at least six people were killed and where recovery operations were continuing. Officials said on Saturday that they did not know how many workers at the warehouse were unaccounted for but that they expected recovery efforts to continue on Sunday.

In a speech on Saturday afternoon in Delaware, where he was spending the weekend, President Biden said his administration would do “everything it can possibly do to help” the states that had sustained serious damage in the tornado outbreak.

“This is likely to be one of the largest tornado outbreaks in our history,” he said, adding that he had approved the emergency declaration that was requested by Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

In remarks to the news media after touring some of the hardest-hit places, Mr. Beshear paused at times, unable to describe the sheer scale of damage. “The level of devastation is unlike anything I have ever seen,” he said. He called it the most devastating tornado event in Kentucky history.

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Several tornadoes touched down in Kentucky, one of them traveling for more than 200 ruinous miles. At least 80 people had been killed in the state, a toll that was likely to rise.

While the destruction was spread throughout western Kentucky, much of the estimated death toll came from a single building, the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, just southwest of the small city of Mayfield. Officials described an almost unfathomable level of destruction there, a knot of concrete and metal strewn with cars and 55-gallon drums leaking corrosive fluids into the wreckage.

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning, Mr. Beshear said that it would be “a miracle” to find anyone still alive in the factory. He added that across the state, many people were still missing.

In Tennessee, at least four people were confirmed dead, with the worst damage reported in the northwestern corner of the state. In Arkansas, one person died at a Dollar General store in Leachville, and a 94-year-old man was killed when the tornado slammed into a nursing home in the city of Monette.

And in Missouri, at least one person died and two others were injured when a tornado slammed down in the community of Defiance.

Officials in Edwardsville, Ill., a small city across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, said that at least six people had been killed at an Amazon warehouse when a direct hit from a tornado around 8:30 on Friday night caused two of the building’s 40-foot-high concrete walls to collapse.

At a news conference on Saturday evening, officials said that a mission initially focused on search and rescue had transitioned to one focused on recovery.

“We don’t expect that anyone could be surviving,” said James Whiteford, the chief of the Edwardsville Fire Department. The chief said that the tornado had come at the time of a shift change and that it was unclear how many people would have been in the building.

What happened?

A tornado outbreak tore through several states on Friday night. At least six were struck, including Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

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

Dozens of people were killed.

Kentucky’s governor said on Saturday morning that at least 70 people had been killed in a tornado’s path of over 200 miles, and that the state’s death toll could increase to more than 100.

A tornado caused the walls and roof of an Amazon warehouse in Illinois to collapse, leaving workers trapped inside. At least six people died, and recovery efforts were continuing.

Four people died in Tennessee. In Arkansas, at least one person was killed at a nursing home in Monette, and another at a Dollar General store in nearby Leachville.

Across the affected states, the total number of people killed and injured was not yet known, and search-and-rescue operations were continuing in several places on Saturday.

What’s the damage like?

Officials across the six-state area were still assessing the extent of the damage on Saturday. Local news reports and videos on social media showed crumbled buildings and downed trees across the storm’s path.

As of Saturday night, there were about 77,000 customers without power in Kentucky and 53,000 in Tennessee, according to PowerOutage.us.

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

— The New York Times

Carla Cope and her husband spoke to their son, Clayton Cope, 29, by phone on Friday night as a tornado veered toward the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Ill., where Mr. Cope was working. He assured his parents that he and other workers were on their way to the tornado shelter on site.

About 10 minutes later, the tornado struck the warehouse, sending the walls crashing down.

The Copes tried numerous times to reach their son again by phone and eventually drove to the warehouse from their home in Brighton, Ill., a half-hour away.

“When we pulled up to the building it was pretty devastating,” said Ms. Cope. “There were trucks and rescue vehicles everywhere, a lot of chaos.”

Their son, they learned, was among at least six people killed when the building was hit.

When her husband saw the damage to the warehouse, he immediately feared the worst, Ms. Cope said. He works the same job as a maintenance mechanic that Mr. Cope did, splitting the night shifts with his son, except on Wednesdays, when the two work together. He knew that their son was likely to have been in the part of the building that collapsed.

“If it wasn’t my son, it would have been my husband,” said Ms. Cope.

The couple waited at the warehouse until 4:30 a.m., when officials finally informed them that they had recovered their son’s body.

“There’s just really no words to describe it when they tell you your son’s dead,” said Ms. Cope, her voice cracking. “It’s surreal, unbelievable, devastating.”

On the phone before the tornado struck, Mr. Cope didn’t sound scared, Ms. Cope said. She imagines that her son, whom she described as having a “big heart,” had left the shelter to try to help a co-worker. On the phone, he had said that he needed to make sure everyone knew to take shelter.

Mr. Cope had worked at the warehouse for a year. Previously, he spent six years in the Navy, including deployments to the Mediterranean, before he was given an honorable discharge five years ago. He loved to ride his motorcycle and go fishing, said Ms. Cope, and spend time with his hound dog, Draco. He would often come to his parents’ house — about a 10-minute drive from his house in Alton, Ill. — to cook dinner together.

“It’s a horrible tragedy,” said Ms. Cope. “That’s about all I can say at this point.”

MAYFIELD, Ky. — Churches were reduced to rubble. The courthouse was wiped out. A building where the utility company parked its trucks had seemingly vaporized, taking the vehicles with it.

And the candle factory was nothing more than a spread of assorted debris. The only indication of what it once was: The scents of vanilla and lavender, along with aromas that conjured up springtime and fresh laundry — all from the chemicals used in the candles — were picked up by powerful winds.

“I don’t know how Mayfield will rebound,” Joe Crenshaw, 37, said as he stood along the perimeter of the factory on Saturday afternoon, hoping to help, somehow, with efforts to find survivors in the rubble.

Mayfield, a city of roughly 10,000 people perched in the western corner of the state, is a community in shock. One person after the next told harrowing accounts of hiding as the tornado ripped through the town, sounding like a freight train. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky called it the worst tornado disaster in the state’s history. Of the 110 people working in the candle factory when the tornado hit, he said, just 40 have been rescued.

But amid anguish and worry, there was also gratitude among those who survived.

“By the grace of God, I woke up late,” said Jamal Morgan, 25, who had been scheduled to work an overnight shift at Mayfield Consumer Projects, the candle factory on the southwestern end of town.

Although severe tornadoes are rare in December, the cluster that hit at least six states on Friday was not unprecedented.

Here’s a roundup of some notable tornadoes and tornado clusters that have hit the United States in December.

2000

A band of tornadoes ripped across Alabama, killing 12 people; the deadliest of the storms struck a Tuscaloosa trailer park and an upscale neighborhood nearby.

2015

Tornadoes pummeled Mississippi, Tennessee and several other states before Christmas, causing more than a dozen deaths, and reducing homes and businesses to rubble.

Dallas also experienced a deadly outbreak of nearly a dozen tornadoes later that week that left 13 people dead, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database, sweeping across more than 100 miles. It was the deadliest tornado system to hit the Dallas area since 1927, the National Weather Service wrote in a post on Twitter at the time.

2018

Stormy weather coincided with the Christmas season again, when a rare tornado touched down in Port Orchard, just west of Seattle, and several low-intensity tornadoes touched down in Florida, damaging more than 70 homes in a mobile home park.

Earlier that month, tornadoes also swept through central and southwest Illinois; at the time, the National Weather Service called it the state’s largest December outbreak since 1957.

On the same day, a tornado struck a motel in Lawrence County, Mo., according to the NOAA database, leaving one man dead.

2019

A day of multiple tornadoes mid-month, across four Southern states, left three people dead, according to the NOAA database, in Lawrence County, Ala., and Vernon Parish, La.

Tornadoes are relatively localized, 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.”

Even though scientists are observing more clusters, it is unclear the role that climate change plays. “For a lot of our questions about climate change and tornadoes, the answer is we don’t know,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. “We don’t see evidence for changes in average annual occurrence or intensity over the last 40 to 60 years.”

In recent years, scientists have been able to draw links between a warming planet and hurricanes, heat waves and drought, attributing the likelihood that climate change played a role in isolated events.

“This is the hardest phenomenon to connect to climate change,” said Michael Tippett, an associate professor of applied physics and mathematics at Columbia University who studies extreme weather and climate.

The complexity of tornadoes, as well as a more limited data record, makes those types of studies challenging to perform.

The tornado record is still sparse compared with other types of events. One reason for this might be that tornadoes are relatively local weather events. Tornado records have largely been based on someone seeing a tornado and reporting it to the National Weather Service. This means that smaller tornadoes that occur in rural areas and have not caused property damage or injury may not be reported.

“We are pretty sure we know how many hurricanes make landfall in the United States each year,” Dr. Brooks said. “With tornadoes, we may not know how many occurred yesterday and last night.”

A more significant problem, however, is the complexity of tornadoes themselves. There are several ingredients that give rise to tornadoes, including warm, moist air at ground level; cool dry air aloft; and wind shear, or the change in wind speed or direction — each of which may be affected differently by climate change.

A tornado’s small size also makes it harder to model, the primary tool that scientists use when attributing climate change to extreme weather events.

Still, Dr. Tippett said that based on all the evidence, computer modeling showed that the environmental conditions favorable to tornadoes might increase in the future. “Our confidence is low, but the evidence points to the same direction.”