Deadly Tornado AftermathAt Least 74 Dead in Kentucky Tornadoes; Biden to Visit This Week

Follow our live coverage of the deadly tornado outbreak.

At least 74 people are confirmed dead in Kentucky, with more than 100 unaccounted for.

As the death toll continued to fluctuate from Friday night’s devastating swarm of tornadoes, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said on Monday that there were 74 confirmed deaths in his state — the hardest hit — though he predicted that the number would rise as crews search the ruins.

“We expect that this death toll will continue to grow,” the governor said in an afternoon news conference. He said that at least 109 people in Kentucky were considered unaccounted for, but quickly added that, in looking at county reports, the true number had to be “way more.”

Seven children were killed in Bowling Green, including two infants and a 4-year-old, according to a release by the coroner’s office in Warren County. In the tiny town of Bremen, the youngest victim was 5 months old.

The White House announced that President Biden would travel to Fort Campbell, Ky., on Wednesday for a storm briefing, and then visit Mayfield and Dawson Springs, parts of which were flattened by the tornadoes.

“We’re going to be there as long as it takes to help,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference, adding that he was worried about the mental health of survivors and the uncertainty they now face.

Full recovery seemed particularly remote on Monday amid the ruins in Mayfield, where heavy machinery was lifting power lines and downed trees. Local residents were preparing meals in outdoor kitchens amid the remnants of people’s homes.

A candle factory in the town was completely crushed in the storm. An estimated 110 people were at work there on Friday night when the tornado hit. For days, it was unclear how many had made it out.

On Sunday night, a glimmer of hope emerged, with executives at the company that operated the factory suggesting that the number of missing employees was much lower than initially thought. Troy Propes, the chief executive of Mayfield Consumer Products, said in an interview that eight employees were dead and fewer than 10 were still missing.

The governor told reporters that Kentucky State Police investigators were working through a list of employees provided by the company to confirm the tally given by the company. This would, he said, be “the Christmas miracle we hope for, but we have to make sure it’s accurate.”

Even so, Mr. Beshear continued to emphasize that the recovery ahead would be long and difficult. At least a thousand homes had been damaged or destroyed, officials have estimated, and Mr. Beshear said that state parks were providing free housing to those whose homes were uninhabitable. Power was still out for more than 25,000 customers as of Monday afternoon. And a full accounting of the damage was far from finished.

“The long and the short of it is, we don’t really know, by any stretch of the imagination, of all the infrastructure damage yet,” said Michael Dossett, director of the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.

Throughout the weekend and again on Monday, the governor has choked up during his briefings when describing the deaths of children or the scale of devastation. Monday afternoon, when the state’s first lady, Britainy Beshear, began to speak about a toy drive for the families affected by the storm, she was overwhelmed and unable to continue; the governor had to pick up where she had stopped.

Other places in the path of the Friday storms, which cut a deadly swath across at least six states, were also recovering and grieving on Monday.

In Illinois, six people were killed at an Amazon warehouse in the city of Edwardsville, and one person is still receiving medical treatment, officials said. In a news briefing on Monday, Amazon executives defended the safety procedures at the warehouse, while Gov. J.B Pritzker of Illinois said that an investigation was underway into the building’s partial collapse.

The toll also included four people who died in Tennessee. In Arkansas, at least one person was killed in a nursing home in Monette, and another died at a Dollar General store in nearby Leachville. Deaths were also reported in Missouri.

What to know about the deadly tornado outbreak.

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The Dawson Village Apartments complex in Dawson Springs, Ky., which sustained catastrophic damage after the tornado.Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times

What happened?

A tornado outbreak tore through six states on Friday night: Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

The tornadoes were part of a weather system that also caused substantial snowfall across parts of the upper Midwest and western Great Lakes.

Scores of people died.

At least 88 people across five states were killed. Most of the dead were in Kentucky, where the confirmed death toll on Tuesday afternoon was 74, including at least eight at a candle factory in Mayfield that was demolished. Gov. Andy Beshear said on Tuesday that 122 people were still unaccounted for. “I still expect that we will find at least some more bodies,” he said at a news conference.

The dead in Kentucky ranged in age from 2 months to 98 years old.

In Illinois, a tornado caused the walls and roof of an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville to collapse, killing six people. At least four people in Tennessee were killed, as well as two in Arkansas and two in Missouri.

What’s next?

President Biden flew to Kentucky on Wednesday to tour the damage.

The tornadoes, which included the largest in Kentucky’s history, mangled many communities beyond recognition, and officials cautioned that recovery would be slow.

Federal and officials in Illinois said on Monday that they would investigate the collapse of the Amazon delivery depot in Edwardsville. Amazon officials have defended their safety procedures.

Early estimates of damage and economic losses have ranged into the billions. Corelogic, a property information and analytics company, estimated that nearly 15,000 structures were damaged or destroyed throughout the storms’ path, at a cost of $3.7 billion.

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‘A Nightmare’: Kentucky Tornado Victims Sort Through Rubble

Residents of Princeton, Ky., sifted through debris for salvageable items and cherished belongings after a tornado destroyed dozens of homes on Friday night.

“People that we know, just pictures in our yard, that don’t even live around here. Street signs in the back of the yard, I mean, it’s just, it’s literally a nightmare. A nightmare.” “Me and my dad and my little sister were in our basement, in the living room, and all of a sudden the lights just go out and we felt the pressure from it. Our ears were popping, and my little sister was just in a panic. Everybody was in a panic. My dad headed upstairs, and can barely get the basement door open. We came out to this and just — everybody was speechless when we saw it in daylight the next day.” “My mom is kind of one of the stubborn ones, and when she saw there was tornado watches, she said, ‘Oh, we’ll go on the front porch and see if we can hear the sirens.’ Right there is the front porch. Luckily, we had a half-basement, so that saved my mom and my boy, so. People ask me, ‘What do we do?’ I don’t know, I’ve never done this, you know? My middle boy is a wrestler, a state-qualifier wrestler, since he was in fifth grade. He had a whole wall full of plaques and medals and trophies. We’re trying to find them. It don’t matter who you are or where you’re from. People that don’t even know you is looking for your personal stuff and helping you find the things that mean a lot. I was sitting here. and they rolled in this morning, and they’ve been here working their tails off. It’s not a community, it’s a family.” “Come over here and join hands. We can make the circle bigger. How many of you believe God’s been good to you today?” “Amen.” “Let’s go.” “If you’re here, I know a lot of you lost your homes right now. Obviously, this is what I grew up in. It’s gone. But this isn’t gone. Each other. We know that for some reason, this was allowed to happen in some weird way and that out of it, good things are going to happen.” “Give God praise.”

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Residents of Princeton, Ky., sifted through debris for salvageable items and cherished belongings after a tornado destroyed dozens of homes on Friday night.CreditCredit...Yousur Al-Hlou/The New York Times

Did climate change play a role?

Scientists have been able to draw links between a warming planet and hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, attributing the likelihood that climate change played a role in individual isolated events. The same can’t be said for tornadoes.

“For a lot of our questions about climate change and tornadoes, the answer is we don’t know,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Although severe tornadoes are rare in December, Friday’s cluster was not unprecedented. Similar destructive storms have hit parts of the United States in December in 2000, 2015, 2018 and 2019.

It’s the latest challenge for Kentucky.

The aftermath of the tornadoes has compounded what was already a challenging year in Kentucky.

In February, a powerful ice storm downed trees and cut off power to 150,000 people in eastern Kentucky. In July, a flash flood left people stranded in their homes. Autumn brought a frightening spike in the coronavirus that made the pandemic “as bad in Kentucky as it has ever been,” Mr. Beshear said.

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The victims included a Sunday school teacher, a doting grandmother and a corrections officer credited with saving inmates in his care.

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A wall of framed family pictures inside a damaged apartment in Dawson Springs, Ky., on Monday.Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times

Days after a set of tornadoes killed dozens of people in six states, the emotional toll of the devastation also spanned state lines as friends, families and co-workers grieved loved ones.

There was a loving father, who doted on his grandchildren, in Illinois, where at least six people died in an Amazon warehouse. A young mother left behind a 2-year old. And a Sunday school lost a beloved teacher who died in Kentucky.

Here are some of those who were lost.

Robert Daniel

Robert Daniel, a veteran corrections officer at the county jail, was keeping a watchful eye on seven inmates assigned to work at a candle factory in Mayfield, Ky., when the emergency sirens went off. He moved quickly to direct the inmates in his care, along with other workers, to a room with a heavy door designated as a “safety area.”

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Robert Daniel

“He led many people to safety,” said Alonzo Daniel, a younger brother of Robert’s. “When they turned around, they did not see him anymore.”

After Robert Daniel’s body was found under the shattered building, Alonzo Daniel mustered the courage to call all seven of his brother’s children and other relatives to share the news. “I had to tell them, ‘Your daddy is no longer here.’”

Mae Frances White

Mae Frances White, 76, died when the storm struck her home in Bowling Green, Ky.

Her eldest daughter, Taronda Bell, said that her mother was a selfless person who helped anyone who needed it, whether that meant giving them money or somewhere to stay. “Whatever Mae White needed to be done, she did it,” Ms. Bell said.

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Mae Frances White, right, with her daughter Taronda Bell.

Ms. Bell said her mother was always looking forward to the summer, when her grandchildren would stay with her in Kentucky.

Lately, Ms. White had been helping Ms. Bell, who uses a wheelchair because of injuries to both of her knees. “She just wanted to see me walk again, now she won’t be able to,” her daughter said.

Jennifer Ann Bruce

Jennifer Ann Bruce died in her home in Dawson Springs during Friday’s storms. Her family described her as generous, the kind of person who bought groceries for people standing behind her in line.

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Jennifer Ann bruce, center, with her grandchildren.Credit...No credit

Her stepdaughter, Brandy Wiser, remembered her buying a prom dress for a girl who couldn’t afford one and buying Christmas presents for those without them.

“She was a walking example of Jesus,” she said. “She would do anything for anyone at anytime. She did so much anonymously that people didn’t know she was doing.”

Kevin Dickey

Kevin Dickey was among those who died when a tornado struck an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Ill., on Friday. His daughter, Kristen Anastasi has many memories of her father, but there is one that she has cherished the most — the image of her father every time they parted, showing her the “I love you” sign in American Sign Language: pinkie finger and pointer finger raised, middle fingers folded down, and his thumb out.

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Kristen Anastasi, right, with her father, Kevin Dickey.

He would hold the position for as long as they were still in view of each other, even while either of them was driving away, she said.

“In a rural area that is sometimes a long time,” Ms. Anastasi, now 42, said in an interview on Monday.

It was a signal of love that has endured since her childhood, even though, she said laughing through tears, no one in the family was deaf. The last time she saw him flash her the “I love you” gesture was Thanksgiving. “At 42, that still happened,” she said.

Janine Williams

When Darryl Johnson got the message from his niece that his younger sister, Janine Williams, had been working at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory when it was leveled by a tornado, he drove there as quickly as he could.

Intermittent cell service made his car’s GPS unreliable, so as he neared Mayfield, Ky., he began following a helicopter that he assumed was heading to the center of the crisis. When the helicopter stopped, he knew he was in the right place.

“It smelled like perfume or like somebody had busted a big can of incense and I thought, ‘I’m in the right place, it smells like candles,’” he said.

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Janine Williams with her son Joshua.

He and his brother-in-law began looking for Ms. Williams in the rubble, but did not find her. She was confirmed dead by the local coroner’s office on Sunday. She was 50.

Brian Crick

Brian Crick, a district judge for Muhlenberg and McLean Counties, died on Saturday in Bremen, Ky., the state that had the largest number of casualties. He was 43.

Judge Crick’s wife, Amanda, and two of their children were treated for minor injuries after the tornadoes. His youngest child was not home when the storms hit.

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District Judge Brian CrickCredit...Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts, via Associated Press

Judge Crick was an elder and a Sunday school teacher at Sacramento Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, Ky. At the church, Judge Crick was always playing with all the children and was thought of as their honorary uncle, said Dana Brantley, a close friend of the Crick family.

“He always had a kid turned upside down, tossing them in the air,” Ms. Brantley said. “He was a devout Christian and family man. If something like this happened to someone else, he would have been leading the cleanup, he would have his work gloves on, be digging through the rubble, out with his saw helping. That’s just who he was.”

Federal and state regulators will investigate the Amazon warehouse collapse.

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The site of an Amazon distribution center that collapsed in Edwardsville, Ill. Credit...via Reuters

Federal and state officials said on Monday that they would investigate the collapse of an Amazon delivery depot in Edwardsville, Ill., that was struck by a tornado on Friday, killing six people.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois said at a news conference that a state investigation into whether the building was constructed according to building codes was ongoing, while federal workplace safety regulators said they had opened an investigation after the collapse.

Company officials have defended their safety procedures.

At the news conference, an Amazon spokeswoman, Kelly Nantel, said the company believed that the building was constructed properly, despite the catastrophic damage. “Obviously we want to go back and look at every aspect of this,” she said.

Mr. Pritzker said he was already speaking with lawmakers about whether the state’s building codes should be updated “based upon the climate change we are seeing all around us.” He added, “That is something we are deeply concerned about, to make sure code is where it ought to be.”

The federal investigation will be undertaken by the local office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which has had compliance officers on the ground since Saturday, said Scott Allen, a regional spokesman for the agency. He said the agency had six months “to complete its investigation, issue citations and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and or health regulations are found.”

John Felton, an Amazon logistics executive, said at the news conference with the Illinois governor that “everything that we have seen, it was all procedures were followed correctly.” He said the 46 people in the delivery depot at the time that the tornado hit acted “heroically,” using phones, bullhorns and other tools to move as many people to safety as possible.

Thirty-nine people sheltered in a space on the north side of the building that was “nearly undamaged,” Mr. Felton said, and seven people congregated on the south side of the facility, which fell directly in the tornado’s path.

The shelter spaces were not separate rooms, but were interior locations away from windows and other hazards, Ms. Nantel said.

Mr. Pritzker said the risk of flooding in the industrial area where the building sits prohibited the construction of basement structures that could have provided better protection. He said there was an “ongoing look” at the initial confusion over how many people were at the building, which was staffed by many contractors who were not required to scan their badges when they entered the building at the end of their shifts.

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Scenes of damage and recovery in Kentucky.

Here is what we know about tornadoes and climate change.

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Damage to a church in the aftermath of a tornado that struck Idabel, Okla., earlier this month.Credit...LM Otero/Associated Press

Forecasters warned that parts of the South could experience strong tornadoes on Tuesday, as severe thunderstorms in the lower and mid-Mississippi Valley and other areas produce damaging hail and powerful gusts of wind.

Scientists have been able to draw links between a warming planet and hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, attributing the likelihood that climate change played a role in individual isolated events. The same can’t be said for tornadoes yet.

Even as scientists are discovering trends around tornadoes and their behavior, it remains unclear the role that climate change plays. “For a lot of our questions about climate change and tornadoes, the answer is we don’t know,” said Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. “We don’t see evidence for changes in average annual occurrence or intensity over the last 40 to 60 years.”

What causes a tornado?

Tornadoes form inside large rotating thunderstorms and the ingredients have to be just right. Tornadoes occur when there is a perfect mix of temperature, moisture profile and wind profile.

When the air is unstable, cold air is pushed over warmer humid air, creating an updraft as the warm air rises. When a wind’s speed or direction changes over a short distance, the air inside the clouds can start to spin. If the air column begins spinning vertically and rotates near the ground, it can intensify the friction on Earth’s surface, accelerating the air inward, forming a tornado.

How are they measured?

Like hurricanes and earthquakes, tornadoes are rated on a scale. The Enhanced Fujita, or EF, scale runs from 0 to 5.

The National Weather Service warned that storms on Tuesday in parts of the lower Mississippi Valley region and Mid-South could produce tornadoes with an EF rank of at least 3, meaning their gusts could exceed 136 miles per hour.

Because it’s challenging to measure the winds in a tornado directly, surveyors usually evaluate tornadoes by their level of damage to different structures.

For instance, they may look to see if the damage is limited to missing roof shingles or whether entire sections of roofs or walls are missing. Based on the level of damage, scientists then reverse-engineer the wind speeds and assign a tornado a rating on the scale.

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Damage to a neighborhood in Round Rock, Texas, after tornadoes ripped through in March 2022.Credit...Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press

Have tornadoes changed over the years?

Researchers say that in recent years tornadoes seem to be occurring in greater “clusters,” and that the region known as tornado alley in the Great Plains, where most tornadoes occur, appears to be shifting eastward. The overall number of tornadoes annually is holding steady around 1,200.

In December 2021, a burst of deadly tornado activity across central and southern states came at a highly unusual time for the United States. March, with its warmer weather, is typically when tornado activity starts to increase.

Is climate change the cause?

The ingredients that give rise to tornadoes include warm, moist air at ground level; cool dry air higher up; and wind shear, which is the change in wind speed or direction. Each of these factors may be affected differently by climate change.

As the planet warms and the climate changes, “we don’t think they are all going to go in the same direction,” said Dr. Brooks of NOAA. For instance, overall temperature and humidity, which provide energy in the air, may rise with a warming climate, but wind shear may not.

“If there is not enough shear to make something rotate, it doesn’t matter how strong the energy is,” he said. “If there is all kind of wind shear, but you don’t have a storm, you won’t get a tornado, either.”

Although we know that climate change may be playing a role in making some storms more powerful, the complexity of tornadoes means that it is hard to extend that connection with certainty, especially for an individual event.

Scale is everything

A tornado’s relatively small size also makes it harder to model, the primary tool that scientists use when attributing extreme weather events to climate change. “We are working at such small scales that the model you would use to do the attribution studies just can’t capture the phenomenon,” Dr. Brooks said.

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Inside the candle company’s effort to find its employees.

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The Mayfield Consumer Products factory was destroyed by a tornado on Friday.Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

MAYFIELD, Ky. — In the hours after the tornado descended on Mayfield, shredding this small town in Western Kentucky, the authorities said dozens of people at a candle factory were likely lost.

But by Sunday, that number had dropped precipitously: MVP Group International, which operates the Mayfield Consumer Products factory, said that eight people were dead and roughly a half-dozen people remained unaccounted for.

The shift came as a result of a sprawling effort led by the company’s human resources department to try to find out who was in the factory at the time and their whereabouts in the chaos that followed the storm.

“It’s just been an around-the-clock effort,” said Bob Ferguson, a spokesman for the company. “People sitting shoulder to shoulder, dialing numbers, dialing numbers — calling friends, associates, calling employee’s listed emergency numbers.”

A breakthrough came on Sunday as power started coming back, allowing people to recharge their phones. Some employees were showing up at local high schools that had become emergency response centers just so they could plug in their phones.

But now, the company is confronting a fresh batch of challenges. Many employees were injured and transported to hospitals across the region, and their conditions and the extent of their injuries were not fully known. “We don’t understand the gravity of their conditions at this point,” Troy Propes, the chief executive of the company, said in a telephone interview.

He said that the company has heard from people from across the country, offering all sorts of help, including asking about sponsoring employees and their families for Christmas.

“I think in a time when our country has felt so divided, it’s unbelievable the feeling of uniting — not even the feeling, the showings of unity of how people come together for a common cause.”

Employees and relatives of workers have asked why the factory was open, questioning if company officials failed to properly heed warnings about the storm. “Never in history have they had a tornado like this in December in Kentucky,” Mr. Ferguson, the spokesman, said.

Company officials said employees followed protocol, rushed into tornado designated areas and were taking roll call to make sure people were accounted for as the tornado touched down.

The company is a major employer in Graves County, with hundreds of employees. The company was started by Mr. Propes’s mother, Mary Propes, in the 1990s. Mr. Propes recalled what his mother told the company’s executive in a meeting right after the tornado. “People come to me saying, ‘I’m sorry this has happened to your family,’” Mr. Propes remembered his mother telling the executives. “Me too,” she would reply.

When a warning is not enough.

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The storm lifted freight train cars from their tracks and destroyed homes in rural Hopkins County, Ky.Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times

Unlike with hurricanes, there are no ways to predict with relative certainty the arrival and ferocity of tornadoes.

But as officials reviewed preparations for the devastating tornadoes that ravaged the nation’s midsection Friday, many said that if anything went wrong before the storms hit, it was more a lack of response to warnings than a lack of information about the dangers.

Severe weather warnings began on Thursday and were issued throughout Friday in a host of states. Sirens woke residents in some areas late Friday and early Saturday to warn them that a tornado was near and that they should take shelter away from windows.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas on Sunday cited the “importance of the early warning system, the sirens, and taking action whenever you hear that.” In his state, one person died at a nursing home, a comparatively low death toll that Mr. Hutchinson called “a miracle.”

In Tennessee, where three people were killed, Gov. Bill Lee said at a news conference on Saturday that the toll was not higher because “people were prepared.”

“There was a very strong warning effort in many of the communities,” Mr. Lee said. “The residents of these communities were notified of the danger and notified of the imminence of these storms and, in many cases, we know that there were significant evacuations in the communities.”

Of course, even good preparation can’t negate the capriciousness of volatile and unpredictable storms. But meteorologists were issuing warnings to residents early on Friday across the six states where tornadoes appeared to touch down. In Kentucky, the hardest-hit state, forecasters said on Thursday and throughout Friday that severe weather was likely Friday night.

In Mayfield, Ky., where several people were killed at a candle factory, workers who survived began to ask why they had been left to work inside the building when everyone knew that severe weather was coming.

Workers at the candle factory described hearing sirens on and off throughout the night. The tornado hit after a day of increasingly urgent warnings — by 3 p.m., the local National Weather Service office in Paducah, Ky., said that “several strong tornadoes” were “likely.” And by 8 p.m., the agency said people needed to have a “shelter-in-place plan.”

Isaiah Holt, 32, was on his shift in the wax and fragrance department when he heard sirens. A little more than a day later, on Sunday, he was in a hospital bed in Nashville, aching from a bruised lung and broken ribs and worrying about his brother, who also worked at the factory. His brother had been showered with bricks when the building collapsed.

Mr. Holt questioned whether the company should have kept people working after tornado warnings were issued. “They should have just canceled,” he said.

For some structures, warnings were not enough to prevent damage.

In Edwardsville, Ill., home to an Amazon warehouse where six people were killed, a tornado watch was in effect by midafternoon, and it became a tornado warning before 9 p.m. local time, with radar capturing the destructive tornado not long after.

At the Amazon facility, workers sheltered in two places. An Amazon spokeswoman, Kelly Nantel, said “the company calculated that about 11 minutes elapsed between the first warning of a tornado and when it hit the delivery station.”

One of the two areas was “directly struck by the tornado,” she said.

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Fluctuating estimates of the death toll are common in the early days after disasters.

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A swing set damaged by a tornado in Dawson Springs, Ky.Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times

Determining how many people died in the tornadoes that ravaged the central U.S. on Friday has been a challenging task so far, with estimates fluctuating as search teams continue to spread out amid vast fields of rubble in an effort to rescue the living and account for the dead.

The difficulty of arriving at a death toll quickly is one of the hallmarks of a truly overwhelming disaster. In this case, much of the destruction occurred in remote rural areas where cellphone service can be spotty and electricity may be out. The scope of this disaster has been breathtaking, with a trail of destruction more than 200 miles long.

Deaths have been reported in at least five states — Illinois, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky — but of those, Kentucky has been far and away the hardest hit. On Monday morning, Gov. Andy Beshear said in an emotional news conference that the confirmed number of dead stood at 64. But he also noted that as many as 105 people were unaccounted for in his state alone.

Many communities are still in a phase in which officials are chasing down rumors and leads. Instead of firm numbers, the toll, in many cases, is being measured in pages: This weekend, Mr. Beshear noted that in the town of Dawson Springs, Ky., the list of the missing was eight pages long and single-spaced.

Discrepancies in the counting are bound to emerge as reports surface among an array of responding agencies. A local sheriff may tell a TV station that four people were killed in a collapsed house. That number may take some time to show up in the official state tally. It is not unusual for both official and media death tolls to be revised as chaos settles.

When a condominium tower collapsed in Surfside, Fla., in late June, 159 people were initially declared missing and four dead. After sifting through millions of pounds of debris, officials in late July announced a final death toll of 98 people.

Even after the immediate fog of confusion lifts, final death tolls sometimes vary, depending on officials’ and researchers’ methodology and definitions.

Video: Residents of a devastated town search for whatever can be salvaged.

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‘A Nightmare’: Kentucky Tornado Victims Sort Through Rubble

Residents of Princeton, Ky., sifted through debris for salvageable items and cherished belongings after a tornado destroyed dozens of homes on Friday night.

“People that we know, just pictures in our yard, that don’t even live around here. Street signs in the back of the yard, I mean, it’s just, it’s literally a nightmare. A nightmare.” “Me and my dad and my little sister were in our basement, in the living room, and all of a sudden the lights just go out and we felt the pressure from it. Our ears were popping, and my little sister was just in a panic. Everybody was in a panic. My dad headed upstairs, and can barely get the basement door open. We came out to this and just — everybody was speechless when we saw it in daylight the next day.” “My mom is kind of one of the stubborn ones, and when she saw there was tornado watches, she said, ‘Oh, we’ll go on the front porch and see if we can hear the sirens.’ Right there is the front porch. Luckily, we had a half-basement, so that saved my mom and my boy, so. People ask me, ‘What do we do?’ I don’t know, I’ve never done this, you know? My middle boy is a wrestler, a state-qualifier wrestler, since he was in fifth grade. He had a whole wall full of plaques and medals and trophies. We’re trying to find them. It don’t matter who you are or where you’re from. People that don’t even know you is looking for your personal stuff and helping you find the things that mean a lot. I was sitting here. and they rolled in this morning, and they’ve been here working their tails off. It’s not a community, it’s a family.” “Come over here and join hands. We can make the circle bigger. How many of you believe God’s been good to you today?” “Amen.” “Let’s go.” “If you’re here, I know a lot of you lost your homes right now. Obviously, this is what I grew up in. It’s gone. But this isn’t gone. Each other. We know that for some reason, this was allowed to happen in some weird way and that out of it, good things are going to happen.” “Give God praise.”

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Residents of Princeton, Ky., sifted through debris for salvageable items and cherished belongings after a tornado destroyed dozens of homes on Friday night.CreditCredit...Yousur Al-Hlou/The New York Times

Volunteers poured into the Country Club Hills neighborhood of Princeton, Ky., on Sunday to help residents sort through the rubble of dozens of homes destroyed by the powerful tornado that swept through the area on Friday.

Families assessed the damage and looked for anything that could be saved.

“Everybody was just speechless when we saw it in daylight the next day,” said Claire Knoth, 16, who was in the basement with her father and younger sister when a powerful tornado hit the town of around 6,000 residents around 10:20 p.m. Friday.

As they sorted through the debris, residents reported finding items on their property belonging to friends living in other parts of town that had been picked up and dropped by the storm. As of Sunday, many were also still searching for lost pets.

“Everybody yesterday that just lived out here was just kind of wandering around, kind of in a zombie trance,” said Shawn Hicks, 50, a resident whose home was destroyed.

On Mr. Hicks’s property, a crew of friends and volunteers helped him start clearing his lot. “Today, you see all the people from all over, that are just helping,” he said. “And that’s the amazing thing.”

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‘The scariest moment in my life.’ A candle factory survivor recalls the moment the tornado hit.

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Search and rescue crews work at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory early Sunday in Mayfield, Ky.Credit...Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated Press

MAYFIELD, Ky. — In the first video Isaiah Holt posted on Snapchat on Friday evening, he walked around the candle factory where he worked, sipping on pink lemonade as a siren howled behind him. “My only question,” he said, joking, “is do I still get my lunch break in 15 minutes.”

In the next video, Mr. Holt is pinned to the ground, a coating of dust and a painful grimace on his face. In the series of videos that followed, rescuers’ radios beep in the distance and the co-workers he had huddled together with could be heard gasping. “They’re trying to get us,” Mr. Holt, 32, said, pausing to spit out dust that had gotten in his mouth. Still, he feared he would not make it.

“I love y’all,” he said as he held his cellphone’s camera up to his face. “Every one of y’all, I love y’all. I’m sorry.”

Hours later, he was in a hospital room in Nashville. One of his lungs was bruised. Ribs were broken. But he was alive, and for that, he was grateful. “I’ve seen better days,” he said in a telephone interview, as a nurse checked his vital signs and brought him apple juice. “I’m not missing any limbs and I’m not dead.”

He questioned whether he should have gone in for that night shift. He also questioned if the company, Mayfield Consumer Products, should have even stayed open in light of the bad weather. Still, he reported for his evening shift at 5 p.m. on Friday at the plant where he works in the wax and fragrance department, where he mixes the chemicals to pour into kettles to make candles. He had gotten the job two months ago through a temporary worker service. “They paid well. They gave a lot of leeway to people,” he said.

As the warnings grew increasingly dire, he said, some of his co-workers were still joking around. “Everybody is looking at their phones,” he said. “My phone’s saying there’s a tornado, they’ve seen one. People were still taking it lightly.”

“Hey, man,” he told one co-worker, “get underneath this and ball up.” He heard the wind and rain come and then it all seemed to happen in a flash.

He shoved his older brother, who also works at the factory, to the ground and grabbed a few others who were trying to run away. They sought cover behind the towering racks holding the buckets of chemicals used to give the candles their scents. “I’ve been deployed, done tours,” Mr. Holt said, noting that he had served in the U.S. Army and was a door gunner on a Chinook helicopter. “This is the scariest thing I’ve been through in my life because there’s nothing you can do. You’re at the mercy of somebody else and you hope they care enough to get you out. That was the scariest moment in my life.”

He believes his military training saved him. “I went into that mode of ‘I might be losing a leg, I might be losing an arm, but I will survive,’” he recalled.

He was grateful to emerge intact, pulled from the rubble at around 2 a.m. on Saturday. Still, he worried. His brother had been taken to a hospital in Paducah, their hometown, almost 30 miles from the factory. Bricks had fallen on his neck and he’d had trouble breathing. “I still don’t know all the severity of all that,” Mr. Holt said from his own hospital bed.

He was waiting for a cousin who was driving to Nashville to see him and fill him in on his brother’s condition. “I’m pretty sure he’s messed up real bad.”

Finally, by Saturday evening, his phone’s battery was recharged. He had been bombarded by messages. “Now that I look, everybody is like, ‘you made me cry, I thought you was dead for real,’” he said. “I thought I was dead. That’s why I made the video.”

In one Kentucky city, homes and lives were shattered in an instant.

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Residents looking at the damage following a tornado in Bowling Green, Ky., on Saturday.Credit...Gunnar Word/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Amy Moore was awakened at her home in Bowling Green, Ky., early Saturday morning by a litany of cowbell-like alerts going off on her phone. She shook her husband awake and they both got out of bed.

They turned on the television to find out what was happening. “But then WBKO went black, and that’s when I knew something was wrong,” recalled Ms. Moore, 33, who works as a customer service supervisor.

Her husband, Brad, a court security officer for the Warren County Sheriff’s office, opened their front door to see if he could see the storm, but it was too dark.

What they did not know was that a tornado had already touched down right in the heart of Bowling Green, Kentucky’s third-largest city. And it was headed toward their home on Nutwood Street.

They heard it first — like a train whistle, and growing closer by the second.

They grabbed their dogs, a Husky and an Aussie, and piled into the hall closet. Mrs. Moore wrapped her arms around each dog and Brad threw his body on top of hers.

Almost instantly, windows began shattering outside the closet.

They heard parts of the roof being sucked upward and outward, and wood chips and debris started falling on them. A mini-cyclone of shingles swirled around their bedroom, scratching up the walls. And then, silence.

Brad recalled how, still holding his wife in the closet after the noise subsided, he had teared up as he told her how grateful he was that he had not lost her.

When the couple emerged, they found all their windows blown out and a large hole torn in the middle of their roof. Shingles, pieces of timber and shards of glass strewn all over the floors. But the rest of their home had been spared.

Not everyone in Bowling Green was that fortunate.

Several children were among about a dozen people killed there, according to a county coroner.

A four-month old was killed about 50 miles from Bowling Green in Bremen, Ky.

All of the children that were killed in Bowling Green “were in residential homes, in residential apartments,” Warren County Coroner Kevin Kirby said Sunday afternoon in a telephone interview. Mr. Kirby declined to say precisely how many children were among the dozen killed in the county, but said the victims represented “a broad spectrum of ages.”

“It’s just sad to lose anyone but it’s really sad to lose a child,” Mr. Kirby said. “It’s not supposed to be that way.”

Mike Buchanon, the county judge-executive in Warren County, said at least 500 homes and 100 businesses were destroyed or damaged.

The National Weather Service has classified the tornado that hit Bowling Green as an EF-3 tornado, with winds in excess of 150 miles per hour. It was a separate tornado from the one that struck western Kentucky and Arkansas.

A main business district in the center of Bowling Green along Highway 31-W was among the hardest hit, with local landmarks like the Cardinal Hotel, a throwback single-story motel demolished. An iconic red concrete cardinal statue in front of the motel was untouched, standing sentinel now over piles of wood, roof sheeting and pink insulation.

The National Corvette Motorsports Park was also heavily damaged, as were several warehouses.

Ms. Moore said she considered herself among the more fortunate, since she has family nearby to help.

“Going through this, it’s life-changing,” Ms. Moore said. “It makes you more humble, more appreciative, and now more grateful you are here. All the other stuff, it doesn’t matter. Family is what matters.”

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Scenes of the damage from across Kentucky.

How to help victims of the tornadoes.

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Damian Smith removed items from his father’s destroyed apartment in Dawson Springs, Ky., on Monday.Credit...William Widmer for The New York Times

The recovery efforts are just beginning for those in the path of the devastating tornadoes that tore through six states on Friday night. Local and national volunteers and aid groups are prepared to rescue and feed and give shelter to those who have been affected by the storms, which killed at least 90 people.

The tornado outbreak created almost unfathomable levels of destruction across Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, the authorities said. From a flattened candle factory in Kentucky to a ravaged Amazon warehouse in Illinois, the storms showed no mercy for those who were in its path. Kentucky in particular was hit hard by the storms.

Here are some ways you can help relief efforts.

Before you give, do your research.

Before you make a donation, especially to a lesser-known organization, you should do some research to make sure it is reputable. Sites like Charity Navigator and Guidestar grade nonprofits based on transparency and effectiveness. The Internal Revenue Service also allows you to search its database to find out whether an organization is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions. And if you suspect an organization or individual of committing fraud, you can report it to the National Center for Disaster Fraud, part of the Justice Department.

Here are some local groups that are pitching in.

Blood Assurance, which collects blood donations across its locations in the South, is asking people to make appointments because of a “critical need” for supply in Tennessee and Kentucky.

For people in the area of Bowling Green, Ky., the Bowling Green Fire Department is seeking volunteers to help with recovery efforts. Send the department a Facebook message with your name, contact information and the type of assistance you can provide.

Brother’s Brother Foundation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that provides disaster relief, is accepting donations so it can donate to food banks in Arkansas and Kentucky. It is also sending items to victims and emergency crews in affected areas.

Kentucky Baptist Convention, an organization of Baptist groups, is raising funds to help its teams on the ground in affected areas of the state.

Kentucky Branded, a clothing store in Lexington, is donating all of the proceeds from the sales of its “Pray for Kentucky” T-shirt to communities affected by the tornadoes. The shirt costs $20.

The Kentucky State Police in Mayfield are asking interested volunteers to call 270-331-1979.

Taylor County Bank in Campbellsville, Ky., is accepting donations by mail to its fund for tornado victims. Its mailing address is P.O. Box 200 Campbellsville, Ky., 42719.

The Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund, created by Gov. Andy Beshear, is collecting donations for victims in the western portion of the state.

Some national organizations are helping out.

AmeriCares, a health-focused relief and development organization, has sent an emergency response team to Kentucky and has offered assistance to health care facilities in several states. The organization is accepting donations to help fund these efforts.

CARE, an organization that works with impoverished communities, is collecting money to provide food, cash and clean water to the tornado victims.

Convoy of Hope, an organization that feeds the hungry, is asking for donations to help the survivors across the affected states.

A Feeding America location in Kentucky is raising funds to help provide people with “ready-to-eat bags of food.”

Global Empowerment Mission, a disaster-relief organization, has partnered with local groups and is raising money to help its team on the ground in Kentucky.

GoFundMe has created a centralized hub with verified fund-raisers to help those affected by the tornadoes. It will be updated with new fund-raisers as they are verified.

International Medical Corps, an organization that provides emergency medical services, is raising funds to give people shelter and essential items.

The Red Cross has opened shelters and is asking people to make appointments to give blood. Both its national arm and its local chapter in Western Kentucky are collecting donations.

The Salvation Army is soliciting donations to help tornado victims in Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee.

Team Rubicon, a disaster-relief organization, is raising money to help its team of military veterans and volunteers clear roads in Western Kentucky.

The United Way of Kentucky is asking for donations to provide support services for families in the state who were affected by the tornadoes.

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