Dec 13, 2021: U.S. rescuers are searching for survivors of Sunday’s storm that killed at least 94 people, and emergency crews are scrambling over time to find dozens of missing people from a collapsed Kentucky factory.

President Joe Biden described the wave of tornadoes, including waves of more than 200 miles, as one of the “biggest” storm outbreaks in U.S. history.

The genesis of the tornado outbreak was a series of overnight thunderstorms, including a supercell storm that formed in northeast Arkansas. That storm moved from Arkansas and Missouri and into Tennessee and Kentucky.

“It’s a tragedy,” a shaken Biden, who pledged support for the affected states, said in televised comments. “And we still don’t know how many lives are lost and the full extent of the damage.”

With the death toll sure to rise, dozens of search and rescue personnel in the American heartland were helping to evacuate stunned citizens overnight from the rubble of their homes and businesses.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said on Sunday raised the state’s death toll by 10, to more than 80 and said he expected the tally to rise. “That number is going to exceed more than 100,” Beshear told CNN.

“This is the deadliest tornado event we have ever had.” The extent of the destruction is devastating, he said. “I have places that are gone. I mean, just gone.”

The tornado tore through the Midwest and South of the United States on Friday night, leaving hundreds of miles of trail of death and destruction on its way.

In the town of Dawson Springs alone, with a population of about 2,700, the list of missing people spanned eight pages, Beshear said. “The massive, widespread damage makes rescue efforts challenging.”

But nowhere was there as much damage as in the small town of Mayfield, Kentucky, where powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in winter, destroyed a candle factory – fire and police station. In a town of 10,000 people in the southwestern corner of the state, flats or roofs disappeared, giant trees were uprooted and road signs disappeared.

Jeremy Creason, Mayfield’s fire chief and emergency services director, said rescuers had to crawl over the dead to get to the living.

If initial reports are confirmed, the tornado will “possibly go down as one of the longest violent hurricanes in the history of the United States,” said Victor Gansini, of the University of Northern Illinois.

The storm was most notable because it came in December, when the cold weather usually limits the storm. President Biden told reporters he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to assess the role climate change has played in storms.

Biden’s Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, in a break from tense bilateral relations, said his country “shares in the grief” of those who lost loved ones and expressed hope that victims quickly overcome the tornadoes’ consequences.

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