Daily Mail
Survivors of the deadliest twister in Kentucky’s history have described the harrowing ‘screams of people’ as they lay cowering in devastated factories and homes during the storm – as the governor warned the death toll could exceed 100 amid continued rescue efforts on Monday.
Governor Andy Beshear said going door-to-door was out of the question because in the Bluegrass State’s hardest-hit areas: ‘There are no doors.’
‘I’ve got towns that are gone, that are just, I mean gone. My dad’s hometown – half of it isn’t standing,’ Beshear said of Dawson Springs.
The state, which has a confirmed death toll of 80, was by far the worst struck on Friday night by 30 tornadoes that ripped across the Midwest, killing another 14 people in Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri.
One twister carved a track that could rival the longest on record, as the stormfront smashed apart a candle factory in Kentucky, crushed a nursing home in Arkansas and flattened an Amazon distribution center in Illinois.
At least eight people were killed in the candle factory when the tornado rampaged through the small town of Mayfield, bringing the walls crashing down and tearing the roof off. Another eight workers are still missing.
Kyanna Parsons-Perez was among the 110 employees working the night shift during the busy Christmas rush.
She told NBC: ‘They had us in the area where you go in case there’s a storm, and we were all there and then the lights got to flickering and all of a sudden we felt a gust of [wind], we could feel the wind and then my ears kind of started popping as they would as if you were on a plane.’
After they were rocked by the winds, Parsons-Perez said ‘everything came down on us.’ After that, she said, ‘all you heard was screams.’
In further developments:
Fellow employee Dakota called his girlfriend to tell her he loved her, believing that he was going to die in the chaos.
‘I wasn’t able to get a hold of him,’ Brandy told ABC. ‘You know, so I started panicking and then a while later he called me and he said that he’s trapped under all the debris and he can’t see nothing, he wasn’t sure if anyone was going to be able to find him.’
‘I could hear people screaming left and right, and I got scared because he called me and said “I love you, tell mom I love her. I’m sorry, I tried.”
‘In that moment I collapsed because I thought he was going to die, I thought my worst nightmare was coming true, and I didn’t her from him for hours.
‘I felt like my whole world had ended, I felt like I was moving in slow motion, not knowing anything, and then when he called me when he got out of the rubble, it was just instant relief.’
But Dakota said he could not immediately come home, as he helped get others out of the rubble. ‘After we got out we started pulling the rest of the team out, and then we were able to get first responders,’ he said.
‘I found people with broken legs, pulling them out, some were nonresponsive,’ he recounted. ‘It was rough.’
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