As of Monday morning, tornado-producing thunderstorms that ravaged the Southern Plains and Ozarks of the United States have destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed at least twenty-one people in four states. Weather forecasters were also predicting additional severe weather.
According to counts by state emergency agencies, the death toll during the Memorial Day weekend includes at least eight fatalities in Arkansas, seven in Texas, four in Kentucky, and two in Oklahoma.
While the National Weather Service, opens new tab, stated a severe thunderstorm watch was issued for areas of Georgia and South Carolina until at least Monday afternoon, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced a state of emergency early on Monday.
“It was a difficult evening for our people,” the governor of Kentucky stated on Monday on the social media site X. Afterwards, he declared that “devastating storms” had affected nearly the whole state during a press conference. Officials reported that the storms had damaged 100 state highways and roads.
Governor Greg Abbott announced at a press conference on Sunday that a strong tornado that devastated communities in north Texas near the Oklahoma border on Saturday night resulted in at least seven fatalities, including two children from a single family, who were ages two and five. The tornado also caused approximately 100 injuries.
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas stated late on Sunday that the storms had resulted in at least eight deaths in the state. When the lights went out, an Arkansas citizen with chronic obstructive lung disease passed away from a lack of oxygen.
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The weather on Monday caused power disruptions for hundreds of thousands of Americans, with over 180,000 outages in Kentucky alone, according to the PowerOutage.US tracking website.
During a Monday news briefing, the governor of Kentucky, Beshear, stated that the restoration of electricity could take several days in some places.
Additional storms that were expected to produce destructive winds, big hail, more tornadoes, and torrential downpours that might cause flash floods were warned about by the National Weather Service as they moved across the Tennessee and Ohio valleys.
The most recent bout of severe weather occurred only a few days after a strong tornado devastated a hamlet in Iowa, killing four people, and more tornadoes made landfall in Texas last week.
In the meantime, US officials were preparing for what they described as a possibly “extraordinary” June 1–July 1 Atlantic hurricane season in 2024.
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