Biden will travel to Kentucky on Wednesday, where governor says 74 are confirmed dead

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 at 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 the tornado or series of twisters that caused the majority of the destruction, leading researchers to investigate if such events will happen more often in a warming world.

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.

MAYFIELD, Ky. — Jimmy Finch hauled rare commodities into Mayfield in the predawn hours Sunday morning: hot food and optimism for a community reeling from the deaths and destruction wrought by the worst tornado event in Kentucky’s history.

Finch, 42, drove from his home in Clarksville, Tenn., to spend the day feeding residents who had been without heat or water since Friday night. He worked his meat smoker with chicken, hot links, burgers and soy patties as he surveyed what remained of the packs of bottled water and frozen meat in the bed of his pickup truck.

“Y’all come on in, we got free food!” Finch called from behind the smoker perched on a trailer.

Finch did not ask where people were from or what had happened — he only asked what they wanted to eat. Throughout the day, bleary-eyed families with children filled paper plates with the day’s meal while volunteer cleanup crews and workers with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet grabbed a burger before heading back to clear more debris.

Finch said he has no ties to Mayfield — he lives an hour and a half away and has never been hit by a devastating tornado. But the decision to borrow a relative’s smoker and drive in the dark so he could start lighting coals by 4:30 a.m. was a simple one.

The tornadoes took everything when they barreled through Judy and Billy Miller’s house in Kentucky, leaving just a ring of cinder blocks.

But their photos — documenting a 56-year marriage cut short — survived.

A farmer in Indiana found a picture of the Millers as young parents. A 50th anniversary photo blew upstate. A black and white childhood portrait flew more than 100 miles to Louisville, where Ellen Sears went to the park Saturday to take in a stormy sunrise. Soon Sears spotted something nestled in the grass that “just didn’t belong” — a girl’s photo, labeled “Judy,” somehow unscathed.

Sears shared the picture at 6:39 p.m. in a rapidly growing Facebook group called “Quad State Tornado Found Items.” The Millers’ granddaughter, 25-year-old Haley Burton, saw the photo quickly.

Kentucky officials working to identify residents killed in the weekend tornado outbreak are still trying to verify information from a candle manufacturer indicating that the death toll at the factory is far lower than feared.

A spokesman for Mayfield Consumer Products told The Washington Post on Monday evening that eight employees are confirmed dead and 102 have been found alive — after officials initially thought that dozens had perished.

“Oh, my gosh, it’s incredible,” spokesman Bob Ferguson said of the survivors.

The governor of Kentucky said earlier Monday that his office was still working to confirm the company’s numbers, but he said the possibility that early estimates were wrong had offered some hope during very dark days in his state.

“We are working on verifying the information from the candle factory that right now would only have eight confirmed dead, which is the Christmas miracle we hope for,” the governor said at a news briefing. “But we have to make sure it’s accurate.”

The governor asked that all of the workers check in with His House Ministries in Mayfield, where officials are coordinating search and recovery efforts.

Ferguson said the company was able to locate many of the employees Sunday, after people had a chance to charge their cellphones and could receive calls from workers in human resources trying to track them down.

“We were very fortunate yesterday,” he said.

Despite accurate forecasts and timely warnings, Friday night’s tornado outbreak was December’s deadliest on record. Researchers of many stripes, from engineers and forecasters to social scientists, now face the burning question: why?

Experience from past tornado disasters assures that the answers will be complex and multidimensional, taking months if not years to pin down.

But the evidence so far suggests the timing of the tornadoes, coming in the dark of night, their exceptional intensity and the population density of the region hit were all key factors in the catastrophe — which advanced warning could not overcome.

The official death toll in Kentucky after tornadoes swept through its western region has reached 74 people, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) announced Monday afternoon

“Again, we expect that this death toll will continue to grow,” Beshear said at a news conference. “One-hundred-nine Kentuckians now unaccounted for. But as I look at this broken down by county, it’s way more people unaccounted for than this.”

Beshear said the number of deaths and those unaccounted will continue to rise as multiple towns remain under rubble.

The governor said 448 National Guardsmen are on the ground with 95 engaging in fatality and missing-people searches. Another 55 Guardsmen are providing logistics support, along with three National Guard members serving as chaplains.

The state is also working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has deployed cadaver-finding dogs in Mayfield and other counties.

“We’ve got a fatality count that’s going up every day, which means we’re still finding people,” he said.

At least 64 people in western Kentucky are dead and 105 are missing after at least four tornadoes swept through the state this weekend, Beshear said, adding that “there will be more” fatalities confirmed.

The identified victims range in age from 5 months to 86 years, and six were juveniles, Beshear told reporters. Eighteen of the dead remain unidentified.

Most of the deaths were reported in Graves County — where Mayfield is located — with others in Hopkins, Muhlenberg, Warren, Caldwell, Marshall, Taylor, Fulton and Lyon counties.

At the devastated Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in Mayfield, eight of the approximately 110 people in the building are dead, Beshear said, citing information from the company that the state was working to verify. Mayfield Consumer Products spokesman Bob Ferguson told The Post on Monday afternoon that four people at the factory were unaccounted for; the others are alive and accounted for.

The state plans to provide $5,000 for burial expenses to each Kentucky family that lost a member in the storms, Beshear said.

Federal regulators are investigating the collapse of an Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Ill., which occurred Friday night during a tornado in the region.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration confirmed Monday that compliance officers have been on-site at the building collapse since this weekend. It has six months to conduct the investigation, it said in a statement.

The 1.1-million-square-foot Amazon facility was severely damaged Friday when a tornado ripped through the area. Six people died in the building, and a seventh is injured, Governor J.B. Pritzker said at a news conference Monday.

An investigation to look at potential structural issues and ensure the building is up to code is ongoing, officials said at the news conference. Amazon spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said at the conference that the Amazon facility was “constructed consistent with code.”