Death toll climbs from one of the costliest tornado events in history
The preliminary estimate of damages and economic impacts from the outbreak reveals just how devastating the tornadoes were for the eight states impacted.
Published Dec 13, 2021 12:52 PM EDT
|
Updated Dec 14, 2021 11:04 AM EDT
The long cleanup process is just beginning for many people across the Midwest and Southeast, as AccuWeather's Kim Leoffler showed in a live report on Dec. 13.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at a press conference on Monday afternoon that the confirmed death toll in his state had risen to 74 in the wake of the historic tornado outbreak, with at least another 109 unaccounted for throughout the state.
"We expect that this death toll will continue to grow," Beshear said, noting that the numbers he provided may differ slightly from those of individual coroner's offices. The governor said the actual number of those still missing was likely "way more" than the number he gave and that the search for the missing was ongoing.
Combined fatalities from the historic tornado outbreak in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri totaled at least 14, according to The Associated Press, making the death toll from the tornado outbreak 88 across five states.
There were a total of 34 confirmed tornados across eight states in the weekend outbreak, seven of which were rated EF-3 strength by the National Weather Service. One of the 34 confirmed tornadoes that occurred under cover of darkness Friday night had an approximate 227-mile-long-path of destruction spanning four states, with 200 miles of destruction in Kentucky alone. As of Tuesday, surveys are still ongoing and will continue throughout the week in what is expected to go down as one of the largest and deadliest tornado events in United States history.
Economically, the outbreak is already considered the costliest tornado event in U.S. history, as AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers estimated that the tornadoes are expected to cost about $18 billion in total damage and economic loss. Up until this outbreak, the one from 2011 had been the costliest tornado outbreak on record, causing $10.2 billion, or about $12.6 billion today when adjusted for inflation, in total damage and economic loss.
Small towns throughout Kentucky began the long process of picking up the scattered pieces on Monday. Mother Nature's force spared no one, with the ages of victims ranging from 5 months to 86 years in the state, Beshear told reporters earlier on Monday while holding back tears.
No area was brutalized quite like Mayfield, a town of about 10,000 in the western part of the state.
The Kentucky National Guard said on Monday that company officials of Mayfield Consumer Products, owners of the Mayfield candle factory, reported that 102 of the 110 workers who were inside the factory when the tornado hit are alive and have been accounted for, drastically reducing the initial death toll fears.
Martha Thomas stays warm with a bed comforter as volunteers help salvage possessions from her destroyed home in the aftermath of tornadoes that tore through the region several days earlier, in Mayfield, Ky., Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
“We are actively working to confirm that information,” Beshear said. “We pray that it is true.”
The total cost of the damage and economic loss that the impacted states face -- an estimated $18 billion, according to Myers -- includes damages to homes and businesses as well as their contents and cars, job and wage losses, infrastructure damage, auxiliary business losses, and school closures. The estimates also account for the costs of power outages to businesses and individuals as well as for economic losses due to highway closures, transportation disruption, evacuations and extraordinary government expenses for cleanup and rescue operations.
As of Tuesday, over 25,000 customers in western Kentucky were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.US. Graves County, the county where Mayfield is located, accounts for roughly 5,000 of those outages. In addition to the outages, more than 10,000 homes and businesses have no water, and another 17,000 are under boil-water advisories Michael Dossett, director of Kentucky Division of Emergency Management, told reporters.
"Our infrastructure is so damaged. We have no running water. Our water tower was lost. Our wastewater management was lost, and then there's no natural gas to the city, so we have nothing to rely on there," Mayfield Mayor Kathy Stewart O'Nan said on "CBS Mornings." "So that is purely survival at this point for so many of our people."
An incident support base was established at Fort Campbell to deploy personnel and supplies, including generators, meals, water, cots, blankets, childcare kits and pandemic shelter kits, Beshear said Monday evening.
AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell described the scene in Mayfield as "devastating and overwhelming" for many families in the community, with homes and businesses leveled around every corner.
Breaking down in tears, Terry Richards told AccuWeather’s Bill Wadell how he was terrified hiding in his basement with his mother and close friend on Friday as a massive tornado ripped through the town of Mayfield. He couldn’t help but think of all the people who had nowhere to go during the storm.
Schools in Mayfield and the surrounding areas have canceled classes until the holiday break that was set to begin later this month, Wadell reported, due to the extent of the damage and upheaval to lives in the storm zone.
On Sunday evening, President Biden declared a major federal disaster in Kentucky, which will pave the way for additional federal aid, the White House said in a statement. On Monday, he also approved an emergency declaration for Tennessee.
A few buildings were left standing in Mayfield, a town that resembled a war zone. One building among the rubble was the candle factory, which had been "going 24/7" in part to meet Christmastime candle demand, U.S. Rep. James Comer, who represents the area, told CNN.
The recovery efforts are more likely to be tracked by years, rather than months or weeks, Kentucky emergency officials said, according to NBC News.
“This is not going to be days or weeks. This will be a recovery effort that goes on for years,” Dossett said.
He added that officials were in the process of drafting a plan to move forward and reconstruct the damaged areas, but he warned “this doesn’t happen overnight.”
Mayfield residents told NBC News that they were ready to rebuild their town, slowly but surely.
"There's nothing left here. So, all we can do is just clean up and start again," Wayne Flint told the news outlet. "That's what we're going to do. ... I don't know what else to do."
Beshear fought back tears as he addressed his state, sharing that he lost several family members when the powerful tornadoes ripped through Kentucky on Friday.
“I’m still emotional after a couple of days. [I] just learned that my uncle lost a couple cousins in Muhlenberg County,” he told CBS, adding that half of his father’s hometown of Dawson Springs, Kentucky, “doesn’t exist anymore.”
Beshear has established the Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund to assist those impacted by the tornadoes. The money raised will go towards funeral expenses and then to rebuilding efforts.
Aerial footage captured over western Kentucky shows the devastation caused by multiple tornadoes, which swept through the state in the overnight hours of Dec. 10 and 11.
“We are tough people. We’re going to get through it, but it is not going to be easy,” Beshear stated.
While Kentucky was the hardest-hit state, bordering states felt the wrath of the twisters. One was confirmed dead after a tornado ripped through a nursing home in Monette, Arkansas. In Edwardsville, Illinois, six were confirmed dead after a tornado destroyed an Amazon distribution center.
The tornado catastrophe in Kentucky is coinciding with a rise in the number of new coronavirus cases in recent days, Beshear said in a press conference Monday evening, displaying a graph that showed cases had recently begun trending upward.
He said the state hadn't fully emerged from a surge that began back in late July. Also on the rise, according to the governor, is the number of Kentuckians being treated for COVID-19 in ICUs throughout the state. Beshear said he was confident hospitals would be able to handle a continued escalation of cases, but that the tornado outbreak has complicated health care in the state.
"Our hospital capacity is probably a little bit less than it was during the [most recent] surge," Beshear said.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP
It will take days, weeks and even months for the National Weather Service (NWS) and local officials to comb through the devastation and determine precisely where this particular outbreak ranks, but early indications point to it being one of the worst in recorded history.
Should this path length be confirmed by storm surveys, this tornado would beat the infamous Tri-State Tornado from March of 1925 for the longest distance in U.S. history. The Tri-State Tornado tore through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana for three and a half hours and 219 miles, leaving nearly 700 people dead.
This month has become the deadliest December for tornadoes since 2015 when 26 deaths were blamed on tornadoes. Furthermore, this year has become the deadliest for tornadoes in the United States since 2011, when 553 were killed by twisters, according to an analysis of NOAA data. There had been 14 tornado-related deaths in the U.S. this year until Friday.
AccuWeather's Director of Forecast Operations, Dan DePodwin, said that while severe weather can happen during this time of year, tornadoes at this time of year are usually confined to the Gulf Coast region. He said that the outbreak that occurred in the South and Midwest on Friday night was a "very rare situation."
These types of events, with numerous tornadoes, several violent, typically occur in the February through June time frames in most cases, according to DePodwin.
Kyanna Parsons-Perez told CNN the horror began when she felt the wind, despite being deep in the building where she and other workers were taking cover in a storm shelter. She was just one of many who were trapped under rubble in the candle factory that had been destroyed by a tornado Friday night. Seconds after the light flickered and her ears popped, the building around her "collapsed like a house of cards."
Parsons-Perez, trapped with her coworkers, under at least 5 feet of debris, started to broadcast to Facebook Live as she lost feeling in her toes and grew more and more concerned. "Y'all, please send us some help. We are trapped. The wall is stuck on me," she said.
When rescue workers arrived on the scene, they evacuated everyone before getting to her. Crew workers removed debris from under her while another person helped pull her up until she could climb over the 5 feet of rubble to get out.
She said, "Once I got out of there, I couldn't do anything but thank God. That's the only thing that saved me. It's unbelievable that anybody walked away from there."
In Bay, Arkansas, Jeffery Weir was home alone, watching the local news and tracking the storm on his iPad. Weir stepped outside to check on the weather when a strike of lightning lit up the night sky revealing a glimpse of an unexpected tornado. Being from Bay, Weir was familiar with wind storms, but nothing like this. Getting increasingly worried, he fled inside to safety once he started to hear tree limbs cracking.
He waited for the storm to pass inside with his dog. The following day when the sun had come up, he was able to see the destruction first-hand that the tornado caused in Trumann, a town about 5 miles away from his home.
"It was heartbreaking to see the damage and loss of life in the area. My heart aches for those that have lost their homes, especially just before Christmas." Weir shared.
The director of Kentucky's Division of Emergency Management, Michael Dossett, said efforts were already underway to start rebuilding following the disaster from this weekend. He said officials were drafting a plan to move forward but warned residents that "this doesn't happen overnight."
Additional reporting by Bill Wadell
For the latest weather news check back on AccuWeather.com. Watch the AccuWeather Network on DIRECTV, Frontier, Spectrum, fuboTV, Philo and Verizon Fios. AccuWeather Now is now available on your preferred streaming platform.
Report a Typo
News / Severe Weather
Death toll climbs from one of the costliest tornado events in history
The preliminary estimate of damages and economic impacts from the outbreak reveals just how devastating the tornadoes were for the eight states impacted.
Published Dec 13, 2021 12:52 PM EDT | Updated Dec 14, 2021 11:04 AM EDT
The long cleanup process is just beginning for many people across the Midwest and Southeast, as AccuWeather's Kim Leoffler showed in a live report on Dec. 13.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at a press conference on Monday afternoon that the confirmed death toll in his state had risen to 74 in the wake of the historic tornado outbreak, with at least another 109 unaccounted for throughout the state.
"We expect that this death toll will continue to grow," Beshear said, noting that the numbers he provided may differ slightly from those of individual coroner's offices. The governor said the actual number of those still missing was likely "way more" than the number he gave and that the search for the missing was ongoing.
Combined fatalities from the historic tornado outbreak in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri totaled at least 14, according to The Associated Press, making the death toll from the tornado outbreak 88 across five states.
There were a total of 34 confirmed tornados across eight states in the weekend outbreak, seven of which were rated EF-3 strength by the National Weather Service. One of the 34 confirmed tornadoes that occurred under cover of darkness Friday night had an approximate 227-mile-long-path of destruction spanning four states, with 200 miles of destruction in Kentucky alone. As of Tuesday, surveys are still ongoing and will continue throughout the week in what is expected to go down as one of the largest and deadliest tornado events in United States history.
Economically, the outbreak is already considered the costliest tornado event in U.S. history, as AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers estimated that the tornadoes are expected to cost about $18 billion in total damage and economic loss. Up until this outbreak, the one from 2011 had been the costliest tornado outbreak on record, causing $10.2 billion, or about $12.6 billion today when adjusted for inflation, in total damage and economic loss.
Small towns throughout Kentucky began the long process of picking up the scattered pieces on Monday. Mother Nature's force spared no one, with the ages of victims ranging from 5 months to 86 years in the state, Beshear told reporters earlier on Monday while holding back tears.
No area was brutalized quite like Mayfield, a town of about 10,000 in the western part of the state.
The Kentucky National Guard said on Monday that company officials of Mayfield Consumer Products, owners of the Mayfield candle factory, reported that 102 of the 110 workers who were inside the factory when the tornado hit are alive and have been accounted for, drastically reducing the initial death toll fears.
Martha Thomas stays warm with a bed comforter as volunteers help salvage possessions from her destroyed home in the aftermath of tornadoes that tore through the region several days earlier, in Mayfield, Ky., Monday, Dec. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
“We are actively working to confirm that information,” Beshear said. “We pray that it is true.”
The total cost of the damage and economic loss that the impacted states face -- an estimated $18 billion, according to Myers -- includes damages to homes and businesses as well as their contents and cars, job and wage losses, infrastructure damage, auxiliary business losses, and school closures. The estimates also account for the costs of power outages to businesses and individuals as well as for economic losses due to highway closures, transportation disruption, evacuations and extraordinary government expenses for cleanup and rescue operations.
As of Tuesday, over 25,000 customers in western Kentucky were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.US. Graves County, the county where Mayfield is located, accounts for roughly 5,000 of those outages. In addition to the outages, more than 10,000 homes and businesses have no water, and another 17,000 are under boil-water advisories Michael Dossett, director of Kentucky Division of Emergency Management, told reporters.
"Our infrastructure is so damaged. We have no running water. Our water tower was lost. Our wastewater management was lost, and then there's no natural gas to the city, so we have nothing to rely on there," Mayfield Mayor Kathy Stewart O'Nan said on "CBS Mornings." "So that is purely survival at this point for so many of our people."
An incident support base was established at Fort Campbell to deploy personnel and supplies, including generators, meals, water, cots, blankets, childcare kits and pandemic shelter kits, Beshear said Monday evening.
AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell described the scene in Mayfield as "devastating and overwhelming" for many families in the community, with homes and businesses leveled around every corner.
Breaking down in tears, Terry Richards told AccuWeather’s Bill Wadell how he was terrified hiding in his basement with his mother and close friend on Friday as a massive tornado ripped through the town of Mayfield. He couldn’t help but think of all the people who had nowhere to go during the storm.
Schools in Mayfield and the surrounding areas have canceled classes until the holiday break that was set to begin later this month, Wadell reported, due to the extent of the damage and upheaval to lives in the storm zone.
On Sunday evening, President Biden declared a major federal disaster in Kentucky, which will pave the way for additional federal aid, the White House said in a statement. On Monday, he also approved an emergency declaration for Tennessee.
A few buildings were left standing in Mayfield, a town that resembled a war zone. One building among the rubble was the candle factory, which had been "going 24/7" in part to meet Christmastime candle demand, U.S. Rep. James Comer, who represents the area, told CNN.
The recovery efforts are more likely to be tracked by years, rather than months or weeks, Kentucky emergency officials said, according to NBC News.
“This is not going to be days or weeks. This will be a recovery effort that goes on for years,” Dossett said.
He added that officials were in the process of drafting a plan to move forward and reconstruct the damaged areas, but he warned “this doesn’t happen overnight.”
Mayfield residents told NBC News that they were ready to rebuild their town, slowly but surely.
"There's nothing left here. So, all we can do is just clean up and start again," Wayne Flint told the news outlet. "That's what we're going to do. ... I don't know what else to do."
Beshear fought back tears as he addressed his state, sharing that he lost several family members when the powerful tornadoes ripped through Kentucky on Friday.
“I’m still emotional after a couple of days. [I] just learned that my uncle lost a couple cousins in Muhlenberg County,” he told CBS, adding that half of his father’s hometown of Dawson Springs, Kentucky, “doesn’t exist anymore.”
Beshear has established the Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund to assist those impacted by the tornadoes. The money raised will go towards funeral expenses and then to rebuilding efforts.
Aerial footage captured over western Kentucky shows the devastation caused by multiple tornadoes, which swept through the state in the overnight hours of Dec. 10 and 11.
“We are tough people. We’re going to get through it, but it is not going to be easy,” Beshear stated.
While Kentucky was the hardest-hit state, bordering states felt the wrath of the twisters. One was confirmed dead after a tornado ripped through a nursing home in Monette, Arkansas. In Edwardsville, Illinois, six were confirmed dead after a tornado destroyed an Amazon distribution center.
The tornado catastrophe in Kentucky is coinciding with a rise in the number of new coronavirus cases in recent days, Beshear said in a press conference Monday evening, displaying a graph that showed cases had recently begun trending upward.
He said the state hadn't fully emerged from a surge that began back in late July. Also on the rise, according to the governor, is the number of Kentuckians being treated for COVID-19 in ICUs throughout the state. Beshear said he was confident hospitals would be able to handle a continued escalation of cases, but that the tornado outbreak has complicated health care in the state.
"Our hospital capacity is probably a little bit less than it was during the [most recent] surge," Beshear said.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP
It will take days, weeks and even months for the National Weather Service (NWS) and local officials to comb through the devastation and determine precisely where this particular outbreak ranks, but early indications point to it being one of the worst in recorded history.
Should this path length be confirmed by storm surveys, this tornado would beat the infamous Tri-State Tornado from March of 1925 for the longest distance in U.S. history. The Tri-State Tornado tore through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana for three and a half hours and 219 miles, leaving nearly 700 people dead.
This month has become the deadliest December for tornadoes since 2015 when 26 deaths were blamed on tornadoes. Furthermore, this year has become the deadliest for tornadoes in the United States since 2011, when 553 were killed by twisters, according to an analysis of NOAA data. There had been 14 tornado-related deaths in the U.S. this year until Friday.
AccuWeather's Director of Forecast Operations, Dan DePodwin, said that while severe weather can happen during this time of year, tornadoes at this time of year are usually confined to the Gulf Coast region. He said that the outbreak that occurred in the South and Midwest on Friday night was a "very rare situation."
These types of events, with numerous tornadoes, several violent, typically occur in the February through June time frames in most cases, according to DePodwin.
Kyanna Parsons-Perez told CNN the horror began when she felt the wind, despite being deep in the building where she and other workers were taking cover in a storm shelter. She was just one of many who were trapped under rubble in the candle factory that had been destroyed by a tornado Friday night. Seconds after the light flickered and her ears popped, the building around her "collapsed like a house of cards."
Parsons-Perez, trapped with her coworkers, under at least 5 feet of debris, started to broadcast to Facebook Live as she lost feeling in her toes and grew more and more concerned. "Y'all, please send us some help. We are trapped. The wall is stuck on me," she said.
When rescue workers arrived on the scene, they evacuated everyone before getting to her. Crew workers removed debris from under her while another person helped pull her up until she could climb over the 5 feet of rubble to get out.
She said, "Once I got out of there, I couldn't do anything but thank God. That's the only thing that saved me. It's unbelievable that anybody walked away from there."
In Bay, Arkansas, Jeffery Weir was home alone, watching the local news and tracking the storm on his iPad. Weir stepped outside to check on the weather when a strike of lightning lit up the night sky revealing a glimpse of an unexpected tornado. Being from Bay, Weir was familiar with wind storms, but nothing like this. Getting increasingly worried, he fled inside to safety once he started to hear tree limbs cracking.
He waited for the storm to pass inside with his dog. The following day when the sun had come up, he was able to see the destruction first-hand that the tornado caused in Trumann, a town about 5 miles away from his home.
"It was heartbreaking to see the damage and loss of life in the area. My heart aches for those that have lost their homes, especially just before Christmas." Weir shared.
The director of Kentucky's Division of Emergency Management, Michael Dossett, said efforts were already underway to start rebuilding following the disaster from this weekend. He said officials were drafting a plan to move forward but warned residents that "this doesn't happen overnight."
Additional reporting by Bill Wadell
More to see:
For the latest weather news check back on AccuWeather.com. Watch the AccuWeather Network on DIRECTV, Frontier, Spectrum, fuboTV, Philo and Verizon Fios. AccuWeather Now is now available on your preferred streaming platform.
Report a Typo