As rescue teams and volunteers combed through debris across nine states this weekend looking for survivors, the unprecedented scale of devastation left behind by the storm began to come into focus.
Homes and businesses had been torn from their foundations. Two warehouses had collapsed, trapping and killing employees. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were left without power in mid-December, forcing Kentucky and Tennessee to open shelters where people could warm themselves.
In hardest-hit Kentucky, where multiple tornadoes touched down Friday night and into Saturday morning, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) said Monday that 74 deaths had been confirmed.
“Thousands of homes are damaged if not entirely destroyed,” Beshear said, “and it may be weeks before we have final counts on both deaths and levels of destruction.”
From a meteorological perspective, the storm will also stand out for its timing, duration and strength. For decades to come, meteorologists will focus on a particularly large supercell, or rotating thunderstorm, which spurred two twisters that caused the majority of the destruction, leading researchers to investigate if such events will happen more often in a warming world.
Advertisement
Both the human and economic costs of this 200-mile-long extreme weather event are still being tabulated. Here is a look at the devastation, by the numbers.
9
States impacted by the outbreak of tornadoes
The National Weather Service received tornado reports from nine states, but most destruction was concentrated in northeast Arkansas, southeast Missouri, northwest Tennessee and western Kentucky. The two most intense tornadoes carved a path of over 200 miles across the four states and caused numerous deaths and major damage.
Significant tornado damage was first noted near Monette, Ark., where a nursing home collapsed. The system continued through Mayfield, Ky., where the town was largely demolished and multiple fatalities took place at a candle factory. The storm continued to travel parallel to the Ohio River, about 35 miles to its south. It would eventually dissipate and join up with other storms as it entered Ohio.
Advertisement
Another tornado hit the St. Louis metropolitan area in Missouri and southwest Illinois. As it tore through Edwardsville, Ill., it killed at least six people at an Amazon warehouse and reduced large parts of the building to rubble, trapping employees beneath the debris. A seventh person was airlifted to a hospital.
Tornadoes were also reported in Indiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
88
Deaths confirmed as of Monday
Reports of deaths from the storm have ranged widely. After initially estimating that as many as 100 people were likely killed in Kentucky, Beshear said Monday that state officials had confirmed 74 deaths.
Of those, 20 deaths have been confirmed in Graves County, where some of the worst damage was inflicted on the city of Mayfield. Seven other counties reported deaths from the tornadoes, Beshear said, with victims ranging in age from 5 months to 86 years.
With more than 100 Kentuckians unaccounted for as of Monday morning, Beshear said he expected the death toll would rise in the coming days and weeks as emergency workers continue to comb through the rubble.
“Undoubtedly, there will be more,” he said. “We believe it will certainly be above 70, maybe even 80.”
Authorities in other states are still trying to determine the total dead. At least six deaths have been reported in Illinois, two in Missouri, two in Arkansas and four in Tennessee.
1
The deadliest tornado event in December in modern U.S. history
Before this year, the highest number of tornado-related fatalities during the month of December was 49 deaths in 1953.
December tornadoes aren’t exceptional. About two dozen form in the contiguous United States during the month. Two of the 15 deadliest outbreaks since 1950 have occurred outside of peak season, which lasts from March until June. But the violence and longevity of this storm was exceptional for December and any time of the year.
11
At 88 deaths, this storm ranks as the 11th deadliest tornado event in modern U.S. history
The event, which has 88 confirmed deaths as of Monday, so far ranks as the 11th deadliest tornado day in modern U.S. history. If the death toll surpasses 100, the outbreak will become a top 10 deadly tornado day since 1950.
Advertisement
Until Friday, only a dozen days since 1950 have experienced more than 60 tornado-related deaths. Nine tornadoes have caused more than 100 fatalities in a single day.
Friday’s event is almost certainly the deadliest since a tornado killed more than 150 in Joplin, Mo., on May 22, 2011.
165.7
The length in miles of the longest tornado track
The Mayfield tornado, part of the quad-state storm that swept from northeast Arkansas to western Kentucky, was on the ground continuously for 165.7 miles from the near the Tennessee-Kentucky border to Short Creek in west central Kentucky. That path length places is among the 8 longest since 1950 and in the top 0.01 percent of longest-track tornadoes out of more than 65,000. It was the longest on record during December by more than 40 miles. The other tornado from the same storm, which ravaged Monette, traveled about 80 miles from northeast Arkansas to northwest Tennessee before a 15-mile gap.
The 165.7-mile track is now the longest documented since a January 1975 tornado in Florida. It surpasses the Yazoo City tornado of 2010 that traveled 149 miles through parts of Louisiana and Mississippi. Only four tornadoes on record have journeyed beyond 200 miles, and there are questions about the reliability of their path length. The 1925 Tri-state Tornado is generally accepted as producing the longest track on record at 219 miles, but it is unclear whether the same twister was on the ground for this entire path.
11
The life span of the storm in hours
The rotating thunderstorm that tore through four states began around 3:30 p.m. on Dec. 10 and continued through 2:40 a.m. the following day, according to one analysis. A typical supercell lasts about two hours. A long-lived supercell may last for four hours or more.
Advertisement
Even produced from these engines of nature, tornadoes tend to last mere seconds or minutes. While it’s possible this storm “cycled” during its path — wherein a tornado dies off as a new one forms — at least one tornado was on the ground for at least two hours. The total amount of time that tornadoes were on the ground during the storm is likely to double or more.
128
The speed of rotation in miles per hour
How fast a supercell is spinning or its rotational velocity can be measured by radar. The rotational speed peaked at 128 mph after the supercell passed through Mayfield on Friday, indicative of an exceptionally intense tornado. The storm rotated at an average of 94 mph for four hours. Only 1.5 percent of all tornadoes spin so fast, according to Evan Bentley, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center.
70 to 80
Degrees marking record warm temperatures in the zone ravaged by tornadoes
On Friday, scores of record high temperatures were set from Texas to Pennsylvania, including in the nine-state region where tornadoes erupted. Temperatures in many areas were 20 to 30 degrees above normal. Memphis soared to 79 degrees, breaking its previous record for Dec. 10 by four degrees.
The warmth was supplied, in part, by record warm December waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
The exceptionally warm conditions fast-forwarded the atmosphere to conditions more typical of April, fueling the severity of the outbreak and raising questions about the possible role of human-caused climate change in the disaster.
2
The number of factory collapses responsible for fatalities from the tornadoes
An Amazon warehouse collapse in Illinois killed six and a candle factory collapse in Kentucky killed eight. An Amazon spokesperson reported that the Amazon facility had 11 minutes of warning, with managers “telling people to get to their shelter-in-place-area.”
59
Tornadoes confirmed by the National Weather Service from Friday night to Saturday morning
The unusually powerful storm slammed into parts of the Midwest and Tennessee Valley on Friday and Saturday, with the National Weather Service confirming 59 tornadoes in 9 states.
The Weather Service also received 411 reports of severe winds and 25 reports of large hail.
149
Tornado warnings issued over the course of 12 hours
The disaster spurred the most tornado warnings on record from noon to midnight for December. The event also ranks third for the most tornado warnings in winter, trailing major outbreaks in January 1999 and February 2008.
Eight of the issued warnings on Dec. 10 were tornado emergencies. Another 145 were severe thunderstorm warnings in areas where storms were not tornadic but still intense.
30,000 feet
The altitude that debris hurled by the storm reached in the air
The strongest of the tornadoes caved in roofs, crumbled walls and pulled up trees. All that debris had to go somewhere and, by some estimates, may have traveled more than 30,000 feet, or more than five and a half miles, into the air.
It’s unclear whether that sets a record, but it’s among the most intense. Plumes of debris lofted into the air by tornadoes, called a debris signature, are picked up by radar and used by forecasters to confirm the existence of a tornado, which can be especially helpful at night or in rural areas where it might not have been spotted.
750,000
From Arkansas to New York, the total number of customers without power in the aftermath Saturday
The tornadoes were part of a sprawling storm system that swept from the Rockies to the Great Lakes. In addition to the twisters, the system also generated damaging straight-line winds topping 60 mph in Michigan and New York. PowerOutage.US, a website that collects information on outages nationally, reported more than 750,000 customers were without power across the country Saturday evening in the storm’s aftermath.
In the zone affected by tornadoes, more than 100,000 homes and buildings were without power Saturday evening, with the majority of the outages concentrated in hard-hit areas of western Kentucky.
Advertisement
In Kentucky and Tennessee, at least 97 power towers and poles were also damaged, including at least 60 high-voltage transmission structures, according to the Tennessee Valley Authority. This is the most debilitating hit on the power grid in the region since the “Super Outbreak” of 2011.
Hundreds of linemen and other utility workers worked to restore service on Sunday. But tens of thousands of Americans remained in the dark, and there was limited data on some of the most devastated communities in western Kentucky, suggesting the damage from the tornadoes could be much greater.
Work to assess how many homes and businesses have been completely destroyed, or are not safe to enter, is underway. At least 18 Kentucky counties have reported damage, Beshear said Monday.
500,000 gallons
The storage capacity of a water tower in Mayfield, Ky., destroyed by the tornado
The tornado activity decimated the city of Mayfield, Ky., and outside of the candle factory collapse, the downtown area was heavily damaged. The historic clock tower crumbled, buildings along the main square became a pile of bricks, and a water tower collapsed.
“It looked like a bomb dropped on our town,” Ryan Mitchum, who owns a landscaping business in the region and is a Mayfield native, told Washington The Post.
Reporting by Anna Phillips, Ian Livingston and Jacob Feuerstein. Editing by Dayana Sarkisova, Kasha Patel and Jason Samenow. Video editing by Allie Caren. Photo editing by Karly Domb Sadof and Olivier Laurent. Design by Garland Potts. Design editing by Madison Walls.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLCttcyaq55llaPDqr7Op6SepqRkf3F%2BkGhoa2dhaHy1u9GnmJ2nXaKuurLInqOdZZuau7XBwqSwZpmdlsewuo4%3D