Mayfield: At least 100 people are feared dead in Kentucky as a tornado ripped apart 200 miles in the US Midwest and South, demolishing homes, leveling businesses and surviving under rubble. The search for the missing has begun, officials said Saturday.


Powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in colder months, have destroyed a candle factory and a fire and police station in a small Kentucky town, a nursing home in neighboring Missouri. Tore down, and killed at least six workers in an Amazon warehouse. In Illinois


Kentucky Governor Andy Bashir said the hurricane was the most devastating in the state's history. He said about 40 workers were rescued at a candle factory in the town of Mayfield, which contained about 110 people when it was reduced to rubble. Bashir said it would be a "miracle" to find someone alive under the rubble.


"The catastrophe is unlike anything I've ever seen in my life and I have a hard time putting it into words," Bashir told a news conference. "It's very likely that more than 100 people will be lost here in Kentucky."


Bashir said 189 National Guard personnel have been deployed to assist in the recovery. Rescue efforts will focus on Mayfield, home to about 10,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state where it meets Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas.


Video and photos posted on social media show brick buildings flattening in Mayfield in the center of the city, with parked cars almost buried under rubble. The building on the historic Graves County Courthouse was demolished and the nearby First United Methodist Church partially collapsed.


Mayfield Fire Chief Jeremy Cresson, whose own station was destroyed, said the candle factory had shrunk to "piles of bent metal and steel and machinery" and that respondents sometimes had to "reach the living victims". Had to crawl for casualties. "


Page Tingle said she drove for four hours to find her 52-year-old mother, Jill Monroe, who was working in the factory, and was last heard at 9:30 p.m.


"We don't know how to feel, we're just trying to find it," he said. "It's a disaster here."


The epicenter was reported below the Pacific Ocean floor, however; no tsunami alert was issued. The epicenter was reported below the Pacific Ocean floor, however; no tsunami alert was issued. The hurricane moved from Arkansas and Missouri to Tennessee and Kentucky.


Victor Gansini, a professor of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Northern Illinois, said the unusually high temperatures and humidity created the conditions for such an extreme weather event at this time of year.


"It's a historic event, if not a generational one," Gensini said.


Saying the disaster was possibly one of the biggest hurricanes in US history, President Joe Biden on Saturday approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky.


He told reporters that he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to assess the role of climate change in storming, and raised questions about the storm's warning system.


"What warning was there? And was it strong enough and was it addressed?" Biden said.