Tornado Hits Kentucky And Nearly 100 People Die, President Biden: This Is A Tragedy

JAKARTA - United States rescue teams continued their search for survivors on Sunday, after a tornado killed at least 94 people, leaving cities in ruins, a race against time to find those missing from this Kentucky disaster.

President Joe Biden called the hurricane waves, including those that traveled more than 200 miles (320 kilometers), as one of the largest hurricanes in United States history.

"This is a tragedy," said shaken President Biden, pledging support for the affected cities, in televised comments, citing Al Jazeera Dec. 13.

"And we still don't know how many lives were lost and how severe the damage was," President Biden continued.

With the death toll sure to rise, dozens of search and rescue workers helped dumbfounded residents across the disaster area, sifting through the rubble of their homes and businesses overnight.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said Sunday raised the death toll in the state by 10, to more than 80 and said he expected the tally to rise.

"That number will exceed more than 100. This is the deadliest tornado event we have ever experienced. The level of damage is very severe," said Beshear told CNN.

A tornado swept across the Midwest and southern United States on Friday night last week, leaving a trail of death and destruction on a path that stretched for hundreds of miles.

In the city of Dawson Springs alone, with a population of about 2,700, the list of missing persons spans eight pages, Beshear said. "The massive and widespread damage made rescue efforts difficult."

But nowhere has suffered as much as the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, where a powerful cyclone, which experts say is unusual in winter, destroyed a wax factory, killing many people as well as a fire and a police station.

In the city of 10,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state, houses are flattened or roofed missing, giant trees are uprooted and road signs shattered.

Al Jazeera's Heidi Zhou-Castro was quoted as saying Dec. 13, reporting from central Mayfield, saying "there is devastation as far as the eye can see" in the city.

"It's a very close-knit city. People are coming from the outskirts offering whatever help they can," he said.

Separately, Jeremy Crreason, fire chief and director of Mayfield's emergency services, said rescuers had to crawl over bodies to get to the living.

Mayfield resident Jamel Alubabr, 25, said his three-year-old nephew died and his sister was in hospital with a fractured skull after being trapped under the rubble of their home.

"Everything happened in an instant," says Alubabr, who now lives with another sister in Mayfield.

The origin of the tornado outbreak was a series of lightning storms overnight, including a supercell storm that formed in northeastern Arkansas. The storm was moving from Arkansas and Missouri toward Tennessee and Kentucky.

William Gallus, a professor of meteorology at Iowa State University, told Al Jazeera from Ames, Iowa before the tornado came, there was a very intense system developing near Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean called Kona Low.

"So we have very strong currents coming from the southwest to the northeast, across the central United States and this allows for very long periods of strong southerly winds that are able to move a lot of warm air and very humid air, from the Gulf of Mexico. at two locations surprisingly far north for December," Gallus said.

If initial reports are confirmed, this hurricane is likely to be recorded as one of the longest-traveling powerful tornadoes in US history, said Victor Gensini, an extreme weather researcher at Northern Illinois University.

The storm is all the more extraordinary because it comes in December, when usually cooler weather limits tornadoes.

President Biden told reporters he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to examine what role climate change might play in triggering the storm.

As Americans grappled with the magnitude of the disaster, condolences poured in, as Pope Francis said he prayed "for the victims of the tornado that hit Kentucky."

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a hiatus from strained bilateral relations, said his country "shares in the sorrow" of those who have lost loved ones, expressing hope that the victims quickly cope with the consequences of the tornado.