A series of powerful storms tore through the central and southern U.S. over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, killing at least 22 people and leaving a wide trail of destroyed homes, businesses and power outages.
The destructive storms caused deaths in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky and was just north of an oppressive early-season heat wave that set records from South Texas to Florida.
Forecasters said the severe weather could shift to the East Coast later Monday and warned millions of people outside for the holidays to watch the skies. A tornado watch was issued from North Carolina to Maryland.
Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who previously declared a state of emergency, said at a news conference on Monday that five people have died in his state. The fifth death was a 54-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while cutting down fallen trees in Caldwell County in western Kentucky, the governor’s office said.
The death toll of 22 also included seven fatalities Cooke County, Texas, of a tornado on Saturday that ripped through a mobile home park, officials said, killing eight across Arkansas.
Two people died in Mayes County, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa, authorities said. Among the injured were guests at an outdoor wedding.
The last community to leave with homes destroyed and without power was the small town of Charleston, Kentucky, which was hit Sunday evening by a tornado that the governor said appeared to be on the ground for 40 miles.
“It’s a big mess,” said Rob Linton, who lives in Charleston and is fire chief of nearby Dawson Springs, hit by a tornado in 2021. “Trees down everywhere. Houses moved. The power lines are down. No utilities of any kind – no water, no power.”
Farther east, some rural areas of Hopkins County hit by the 2021 tornado around the community of Barnsley were damaged again Sunday evening, said Nick Bailey, county Emergency Management director.
“There were a lot of people who were just trying to get their lives back on track, and then this,” Bailey said. “Almost the same place, same houses and everything.”
Beshear has traveled to the area where his father grew up several times for ceremonies where people who had lost everything received the keys to their new home.
The visits came after a series of tornadoes on a terrifying night in December 2021 81 people killed in Kentucky.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Beshear said of the Memorial Day weekend storms. “People in Kentucky are very weather savvy, given everything we’ve been through.”
More than 400,000 customers in the eastern US were without power Monday afternoon, including about 125,000 in Kentucky. Twelve states reported at least 10,000 outages earlier in the day PowerOutage.us.
The area with the highest severe weather warning Monday is a broad swath of the eastern U.S., from Alabama to New York.
President Joe Biden has expressed his condolences to the families of those who died. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is conducting damage assessments on the ground and that he has reached out to governors to see what federal support they may need.
It’s been a grim month with tornadoes and severe weather in the center of the country.
Tornadoes in Iowa left last week at least five people dead and dozens injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month. The intense thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes occurred during a historically bad season for tornadoes, at a time when climate change contributes to the severity of storms around the world. April had the second highest number of tornadoes registered in the country.
Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, said a persistent pattern of warm, moist air is to blame for the string of tornadoes over the past two months.
That warm moist air is at the northern edge of a heat dome and produces temperatures normally seen at the height of summer until the end of May.
The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate what the heat feels like to the human body — approached triple digits in parts of South Texas on Monday. Extreme heat was also forecast for San Antonio and Dallas.
In Florida, Melbourne and Ft. Pierce set new daily record highs on Monday. Both hit 98 F (36.7 C). Miami set a record high of 96°F (35.5°C) on Sunday.
