Severe Memorial Day weather: At least 22 dead in violent storms

A series of severe storms swept across the central and southern United States over the Memorial Day weekend, killing at least 22 people and causing destruction of homes and businesses and power outages.

The destructive storms claimed lives in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky and occurred just north of a sweltering early-season heat wave that set records from South Texas to Florida.

Meteorologists said the severe weather could move to the East Coast later Monday and warned millions of people outdoors for the holidays to watch the skies. A tornado warning was issued from North Carolina to Maryland.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who had previously declared a state of emergency, said at a press conference on Monday that five people had died in his state. The fifth death was a 54-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while cutting down fallen trees in Caldwell County in western Kentucky, the governor’s office said.

The death toll is 22, including seven deaths in Cook County, Texas, of a tornado that swept through a mobile home park on Saturday, officials said, and left eight people dead across Arkansas.

Two people died in Mayes County, Oklahoma, east of Tulsa, authorities said. Among the injured were guests at an outdoor wedding.

Most recently, the small town of Charleston in Kentucky had to deal with destroyed houses and no electricity. It was hit by a tornado on Sunday evening that, according to the governor, had a range of 64 kilometers.

“It’s a big mess,” said Rob Linton, a Charleston resident and fire chief of nearby Dawson Springs, which was hit by a tornado in 2021. “Trees are down everywhere. Houses have been moved. Power lines are down. No services at all – no water, no power.”

Further east, some rural areas of Hopkins County hit by the 2021 tornado around the community of Barnsley suffered further damage Sunday evening, said county emergency management director Nick Bailey.

“A lot of people were just trying to get their lives back together, and then this,” Bailey said. “Almost the same place, the same houses and everything.”

Beshear has traveled to the area where his father grew up Several ceremonies took place in which people who had lost everything were given the keys to their new homes.

The visits came after a series of tornadoes on a terrible night in December 2021 81 people died in Kentucky.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Beshear said of the Memorial Day weekend storms. “Kentuckians are very weather conscious after everything we’ve been through.”

More than 400,000 customers in the eastern United States were without electricity Monday afternoon, including about 125,000 in Kentucky. Twelve states reported at least 10,000 outages earlier in the day, according to PowerOutage.us.

The region in which the highest severe weather warning is in effect on Monday stretches across a broad strip of the eastern United States, from Alabama to New York.

President Joe Biden sent his condolences to the families of those killed. He said FEMA was on the ground conducting damage assessments and that he had contacted governors to see what federal assistance they might need.

It was a gloomy month full of tornadoes and severe weather in the central part of the country.

Tornadoes in Iowa last week left at least five dead and dozens of injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month. The severe thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes occurred during a historically bad tornado season, at a time when Climate change contributes to the severity of storms around the world. In April, the second highest number of tornadoes on record in the country.

Harold Brooks, a senior scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, said a persistent pattern of warm, moist air is responsible for the series of tornadoes over the past two months.

This warm, moist air is located on the northern edge of a heat dome and brings temperatures that normally prevail from mid-summer to late May.

The heat index – a combination of air temperature and humidity that indicates how heat feels to the human body – reached nearly triple digits in parts of South Texas on Monday. Extreme heat was also forecast for San Antonio and Dallas.

In Florida, Melbourne and Fort Pierce recorded new daily highs on Monday, both reaching 36.7 °C (98 °F). Miami recorded a new high of 35.5 °C (96 °F) on Sunday.

For more information on current tornado reports, visit The Associated Press. Tornado Tracker.

___

Schreiner reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Associated Press reporters Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas, and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.