A series of powerful storms swept across the central and southern United States 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 occurred just north of an oppressive early-season heat wave, setting records from south Texas to Florida.
Forecasters said severe weather could move to the East Coast on Monday and warned millions of people outdoors for the holiday to watch the sky. A tornado warning was issued from North Carolina to Maryland.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who previously declared a state of emergency, said at a news conference Monday that five people had died in his state. The fifth death was a 54-year-old man who had 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 deaths in Cooke County, Texas, since a tornado Saturday that destroyed a mobile home park, authorities said, and eight deaths across Arkansas.
Two people died in Mayes County, Oklahoma, which is east of Tulsa, authorities said. The injured included guests at an outdoor wedding.
The last community left with destroyed homes and without power was the small city of Charleston, Kentucky, which was hit directly on Sunday night by a tornado that, according to the governor, appeared to be on the ground for 40 miles.
“It’s a big mess,” said Rob Linton, who lives in Charleston and is the fire chief of nearby Dawson Springs, which was hit by a tornado in 2021. “Trees were down everywhere. The houses have changed. Power lines are down. Without any public services – no water, no power.”
Further east, some rural areas of Hopkins County hit by the 2021 tornado around the community of Barnsley were damaged again Sunday night, said county Emergency Management Director Nick Bailey.
“There were a lot of people who were just getting their lives back together and then this,” Bailey said. “Almost in the same place, same houses and everything.”
Beshear traveled several times to the area where his father grew up for ceremonies where people who had lost everything were given the keys to their new homes.
The visits came after a series of tornadoes on a terrifying night in December 2021 killed 81 people in Kentucky.
“It could have been a lot worse,” Beshear said of the Memorial Day weekend storms. “The people of Kentucky are very aware of the weather, with everything we’ve been through.”
More than 400,000 customers across the eastern US have been no energy Monday afternoon, including about 125,000 in Kentucky. Twelve states reported at least 10,000 outages earlier in the day, according to PowerOutage.us.
The area on high alert for severe weather on Monday is a wide swath of the eastern US, from Alabama to New York.
President Joe Biden sent condolences to the families who killed people. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the ground conducting damage assessments and has reached out to governors to see what federal support they might need.
It was a dark month of tornadoes and severe weather in the central region of the country.
Tornadoes in Iowa last week left at least five dead and dozens injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month. The severe storms and deadly tornadoes came during a historically bad season for tornadoes, at a time when of 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, senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, said a persistent pattern of warm, moist air is to blame for the series of tornadoes over the past two months.
This warm, moist air is at the northern end of a heat dome, bringing temperatures typically seen in the height of summer through the end of May.
The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate how heat is felt by the human body — approached triple digits in parts of South Texas on Monday. Extreme heat was also predicted for San Antonio and Dallas.
In Florida, Melbourne and Ft. Pierce set new daily records on Monday. Both reached 98 F (36.7 C). Miami set a record of 96 F (35.5 C) on Sunday.
—Schreiner reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Associated Press reporters Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas, and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
