Tag Archives: Tennessee

Historic flood disaster leaves at least 25 dead

Important Takeaways:

  • A deadly barrage of severe weather, tornadoes and torrential rain has come to an end, but the danger is far from over in communities across the Midwest and South as angry rivers continue to rise, forcing families from their homes.
  • At least 25 people in seven states have been killed due to the severe weather, including deaths from tornadoes and extreme weather in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, and fatalities from flooding in Kentucky.
  • One of those monster tornadoes was captured live on FOX Weather on Wednesday, April 2, by FOX Weather Exclusive Storm Tracker Brandon Copic.
  • That tornado that touched down in northwestern Arkansas prompted forecasters to issue a rare Tornado Emergency as the supercell thunderstorm passed through communities such as Lake City and Blytheville.
  • Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at a news conference on Monday. “Remember, this event is not over until the waters have receded. Until the areas that are flooded are fully dry. Until we don’t have saturated ground that could create mudslides over roads and bridges.”
  • Beshear said on Monday that more than 500 roads across the state were closed due to historic flooding, mudslides and landslides.
  • Tennessee flooding leads to mandatory evacuations
  • The order also had a dire warning – those who don’t comply with the evacuation order may not be able to receive help from first responders. In addition, residents may be held personally liable for any damage or injuries sustained.
  • Meteorologist-in-Charge at the National Weather Service office in Memphis, Tennessee, Darone Jones, joined FOX Weather on Tuesday morning and said there’s still a lot of recovery ahead for waterlogged communities.
  • “It’s very hard to contextualize this,” Jones continued. “You know, you mentioned the 223 warnings. Just in comparison to last year, 2024, we issued 262 warnings for the entire year. So, we did all of that in like a four-day span.”
  • Jones went on to say that the event is still unfolding.
  • “The worst is yet to come for a lot of areas,” he said. So, you know, it’s not over. So, it’s hard to talk about the uniqueness from a historical perspective at this time.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

The Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee valleys under mandatory evacuations as rivers hit peak levels

Train derailed flood

Important Takeaways:

  • As a record rain event comes to an end for the Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee valleys, flooding impacts will continue this week amid mandatory evacuations as floodwaters flow into streams and rivers, likely causing more flooding in previously spared areas.
  • The FOX Forecast Center said the storm system that brought six Flash Flood Emergencies and a deadly tornado outbreak across multiple states since last week will finally exit off the East Coast by Tuesday.
  • Over a foot of rain fell in Kentucky, western Tennessee and Arkansas throughout this event. Now, all this water needs to go somewhere.
  • The Kentucky River in Frankfort reached 48.27 feet at 5 a.m. ET Monday morning. This is only 0.2 feet (2.4 inches) below the all-time record crest of 48.47 feet, set on Dec 10, 1978.
  • Meanwhile, more than 50 river locations are currently experiencing or expected to reach major flood stage over the next few days, and another 90 river locations are forecast to reach moderate flood stage.
  • According to the National Weather Service, the Ohio River in Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky, is expected to crest at its highest level in seven years.
  • According to the FOX Forecast Center, rainfall water on the Mississippi River is forecast to reach Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in more than two and a half weeks, and water levels could rise to the highest level in four years.
  • “That’s the biggest threat here with communities that live along the river expected to see that water rise,” Minar said. “We can expect to see some concerns for businesses and buildings, just driving along the way as well. You don’t ever want to drive through floodwaters, but this is gonna be a really difficult task.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

Threat level 5 out of 5 as severe weather moves over more than a dozen states placing 55 million Americans in destructive path

Important Takeaways:

  • A deadly tornado outbreak spawned more than 20 reports of twisters across the lower and mid-Mississippi Valley on Wednesday and Wednesday night.
  • At least two people have died in Tennessee due to the severe weather, the state’s Department of Health confirmed early Thursday. The storms also injured multiple others and destroyed several homes from Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee through Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana.
  • A massive tornado was spotted by FOX Weather Storm Tracker Brandon Copic as it roared near Lake City, Arkansas. Authorities issued a Tornado Emergency – the most dire of tornado alerts – for towns in the path of the storm, such as Leachville and Monette.
  • “You need to be underground,” Copic said. “You will not survive this tornado if you are above ground.”
  • NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center labeled Wednesday’s event as a “Particularly Dangerous Situation,” with the threat level reaching a Level 5 out of 5 “high risk” on its severe thunderstorm risk scale.
  • The high-risk designation marks only the second time this year and the first instance of two such high-risk alerts in a single year since 2021 that a Level 5 threat has been issued. The previous Level 5 alert was issued on March 15 when the National Weather Service confirmed 13 tornadoes, including six powerful EF-3s, which tragically resulted in seven deaths and 12 injuries.
  • More severe weather is forecast through the end of the week and into the weekend, as well.
  • The deadly severe weather system continues to charge east Thursday and is expected to tear across more than a dozen states, from parts of Texas to the densely populated mid-Atlantic and Northeast, placing over 55 million Americans directly in the path of its destructive forces.
  • The numerous rounds of rain and storms will also lead to potentially generational flooding in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Series of powerful tornadoes and storms tore through Tennessee over weekend

Tennessee-Tornados

Important Takeaways:

  • Thousands of Tennesseans are displaced or facing prolonged power outages after a series of powerful tornadoes and storms tore through the state over the weekend, shredding hundreds of homes and killing at least six people, including a mother and her toddler.
  • The destruction caused by storms in Tennessee, where at least two tornadoes touched down Saturday, has prompted officials in some of the hardest-hit areas to declare local states of emergency, open shelters for displaced families and announce the closure of schools on Monday.
  • More than 17,000 homes and businesses were without power Monday morning in the state, where early temperatures were below freezing and are expected to remain below 50 degrees through the day.
  • In Nashville, a local utility estimates it may take days to restore power to some, while residents of Clarksville have been told it could take weeks.

Read the original article by clicking here.

South hit by tornadoes causing extensive damage

Alabama Tornado

Luke 21:25-26 “And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

Important Takeaways:

  • Storms, Tornadoes Cause Extensive Damage Across U.S. Southeast; at Least 7 Dead
  • Storms and tornadoes caused extensive damage to several communities across the U.S. Southeast on Thursday, including in Alabama, where at least 25 tornadoes were reported, according to the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.
  • At least six fatalities have been confirmed in Autauga County, Alabama, located in the central part of the state, Emergency Management Director Ernie Baggett told Weather.com. “The best we can tell is about 40 homes have major damage or have been completely destroyed,” Baggett added.
  • Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency Thursday in six counties, including Chambers, Coosa, Dallas, Elmore, and Tallapoosa.
  • “I — along with my partners at the Alabama EMA — will continue monitoring to determine if an expanded state of emergency is needed. I am ready to be a helping hand to our local officials”
  • Power outages have affected over 88,300 residents, 41,500 in Alabama, 16,500 in Tennessee, 12,300 in North Carolina, and 9,600 in South Carolina, according to utility tracker poweroutage.us.

Read the original article by clicking here.

3,000-acre Fire now burning in Tennessee

2 Timothy 3:1 “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Tennessee wildfire now 3K acres and is only 5% contained, evacuations remain in place
  • A mandatory evacuation was issued in Tennessee as a more than 3,000-acre fire rages near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
  • “It was surreal,” resident Robert Goodhue told Knox News. “I could see the smoke coming off of Walden’s Creek back there, and I was like, ‘That’s coming from where I live.’”
  • The fire had grown to about 1,000 acres Wednesday evening and jumped to about 3,700 acres by Thursday, according to Lt. Gov. Rand McNally and state Sen. Art Swan.
  • High winds and dry conditions reportedly sparked the brush fire, Knox News reported.
  • More than 70 fire departments have been deployed to area.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Biden visits tornado-stricken Kentucky bringing federal aid, empathy

By Jarrett Renshaw

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden flew to Kentucky on Wednesday to survey the areas hardest hit by one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in recent U.S. history, a system that killed at least 74 people in the state and at least 14 elsewhere.

Biden, no stranger to tragic personal losses, will reprise his familiar role as consoler in chief, while promising to bring the might of the federal government to rebuild devastated communities that suffered billions of dollars in damage.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear offered a grim update on Tuesday, saying the dead included a dozen children, the youngest of whom was a 2-month-old infant. He added that he expected the death toll to rise in the coming days, with more than 100 still missing.

Biden will visit the Army installation at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for a briefing on the storm before continuing on to Mayfield and Dawson Springs, two towns separated by roughly 70 miles (112 km) that were largely flattened by the twisters.

The president will be “surveying storm damage firsthand, (and) making sure that we’re doing everything to deliver assistance as quickly as possible in impacted areas to support recovery efforts,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sent search-and-rescue and emergency response teams to Kentucky, along with teams to help survivors register for assistance, Psaki said.

FEMA has also sent dozens of generators into the state, along with 135,000 gallons (511,000 litres) of water, 74,000 meals and thousands of cots, blankets, infant toddler kits and pandemic shelter kits.

Biden has approved federal disaster declarations for Kentucky and the neighboring states of Tennessee and Illinois, offering residents and local officials increased federal aid.

Credit ratings agency DBRS Morningstar said the tornadoes were likely the most severe in the United States since 2011. Insurers are sufficiently prepared to cover claims without significant capital impact, it said in a report.

The trip marks one of the few that Biden, a Democrat, has taken to areas that tilt heavily toward the Republican Party, many of whose voters and leaders have embraced Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that he won the 2020 election. The White House has been careful not to bring politics into the disaster relief efforts, including not focusing on what role, if any, climate change may have played in the tragic events.

“He looks at them as human beings, not as people who have partisan affiliations,” Psaki said. “And in his heart, he has empathy for everything that they’re going through.”

“The message he will send to them directly and clearly tomorrow is: ‘We’re here to help, we want to rebuild, we are going to stand by your side and we’re going to help your leaders do exactly that,'” she added.

Biden lost his first wife and daughter in a 1972 car crash, and his older son, Beau, died in 2015 after a fight with brain cancer.

(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, additional reporting by Rod Nickel; Editing by Tim Ahmann, Heather Timmons, Peter Cooney and Jonathan Oatis)

Death toll now 74 from weekend tornadoes, expected to rise -Kentucky governor

(Reuters) – The death toll from a string of tornadoes that tore through six states rose to 74 with at least 109 people still missing, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said on Monday. He said the number of fatalities would likely rise in the coming days.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Chris Reese

 

By Gabriella Borter

MAYFIELD, Ky. (Reuters) – At least 64 people, including six children, lost their lives in Kentucky after a raft of tornadoes tore through six states, with power still out for thousands and strangers welcoming survivors who lost everything into their homes.

While the toll from the deadly twisters was lower than initially feared, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said he expects it to increase as searchers continue to sift through a flattened landscape of twisted metal, downed trees and homes reduced to rubble.

“It may be weeks before we have counts on both deaths and levels of destruction,” Beshear told reporters, adding that the victims ranged in age from 5 months to 86 years old, and that 105 people were still unaccounted for.

On Monday, Beshear said officials were working to confirm that eight people had perished when a candle factory in Mayfield, a town of about 10,000 in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, was hit in the storm.

Out of the 110 workers who had been toiling at the Mayfield Consumer Products LLC factory, 94 were believed to have made it out alive, according to the owners of the business, the governor said.

“We feared much, much worse,” he said. “I pray that it is accurate.”

In the hard-hit small town, the tornado destroyed not only the candle factory but also the police and fire stations. Homes were flattened or missing roofs, giant trees uprooted and street signs mangled.

Kentucky’s emergency management director, Michael Dossett also at the briefing, said 28,000 homes and businesses remained without power.

More than 300 National Guard personnel and scores of state workers were distributing supplies and working to clear roads so that mountains of debris can be removed in the aftermath of the disaster, the governor said.

He added that authorities were coordinating an “unprecedented amount of goods and volunteers,” and President Joe Biden was expected to visit the state but no date had been set.

Beshear, at times chocking up, said the search, rescue and recovery process in the swath of destruction has been an emotional roller coaster for all those involved, including him.

“You go from grief to shock to being resolute for a span of 10 minutes and then you go back,” he said.

Biden on Sunday declared a major federal disaster in Kentucky, paving the way for additional federal aid, the White House said.

While Kentucky was hardest hit, six workers were killed at an Amazon.com Inc warehouse in Illinois after the plant buckled under the force of the tornado, including one cargo driver who died in the bathroom, where many workers told Reuters they had been directed to shelter.

A nursing home was struck in Arkansas, causing one of that state’s two deaths. Four were reported dead in Tennessee and two in Missouri.

(Reporting by Gabriella Borter in Mayfield, Kentucky; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Maria Caspani; Editing by Robert Birsel and Lisa Shumaker)

In U.S. Supreme Court case, the past could be the future on abortion

By Lawrence Hurley

OXFORD, Miss. (Reuters) – Just months before she was set to start law school in the summer of 1973, Barbara Phillips was shocked to learn she was pregnant.

Then 24, she wanted an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion nationwide months earlier with its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But abortions were not legally available at the time in Mississippi, where she lived in the small town of Port Gibson.

Phillips, a Black woman enmeshed in the civil rights movement, could feel her dream of becoming a lawyer slipping away.

“It was devastating. I was desperate,” Phillips said, sitting on the patio of her cozy one-story house in Oxford, a college town about 160 miles (260 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital.

At the time of the Roe ruling, 46 of the 50 U.S. states had some sort of criminal prohibitions on abortion. Access often was limited to wealthy and well-connected women, who tended to be white.

With a feminist group’s help, Phillips located a doctor in New York willing to provide an abortion. New York before Roe was the only state that let out-of-state women obtain abortions. She flew there for the procedure.

Now 72, Phillips does not regret her abortion. She went on to attend Northwestern law school in Chicago and realize her goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer, with a long career. Years later, she had a son when she felt the time was right.

“I was determined to decide for myself what I wanted to do with my life and my body,” Phillips said.

U.S. abortion rights are under attack unlike any time since the Roe ruling, with Republican-backed restrictions being passed in numerous states. The Supreme Court on Dec. 1 is set to hear arguments in a case in which Mississippi is seeking to revive its law, blocked by lower courts, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi has raised the stakes by explicitly asking the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Such a ruling could turn back the clock in Mississippi, which currently has just one abortion clinic, and other states to the kind of environment on abortion access that Phillips experienced nearly a half century ago.

Large swathes of America could return to an era in which women who want to end a pregnancy face the choice of undergoing a potentially dangerous illegal abortion, traveling long distances to a state where the procedure remains legal and available or buying abortion pills online.

Mississippi’s abortion law is not the only one being tested at the Supreme Court. The justices on Nov. 1 heard arguments in challenges to a Texas law banning abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy, but have not yet ruled.

TRIGGER LAWS

Mississippi is one of a dozen states with so-called trigger laws that would immediately ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Many are in the South, so a Mississippi woman would be unable to obtain an abortion in neighboring Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee or Alabama. The nearest states where abortion would remain legal, at least in the short term, would be Illinois and Florida.

The average distance a Mississippi woman would need to drive to reach a clinic would increase from 78 miles to 380 miles (125 to 610 km) each way, according to Guttmacher.

While some abortion rights advocates fear a return to grisly illegal back-alley abortions, there has been an important development since the pre-Roe era: abortion pills. Mississippi is among 19 states imposing restrictions on medication-induced abortions.

Mississippi officials are cagey on what a post-Roe world might look like. Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who asked the court to overturn Roe, declined an interview request, as did Republican Governor Tate Reeves.

Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson, who as a Republican state legislator helped shepherd the 2018 passage of the 15-week ban, called Roe v. Wade “antiquated, old law based on antiquated and old science.”

Gipson in an interview declined to answer questions about what Mississippi – or the southeastern United States – would be like without abortion rights, focusing on the specifics of the 15-week ban.

“It’s a false narrative to paint this as a picture of an outright ban throughout the southeast,” Gipson said, noting that the Supreme Court does not have to formally overturn Roe to uphold Mississippi’s law.

In court papers, Fitch said scientific advances, including contested claims that a fetus can detect pain early in a pregnancy, emphasize how Roe and a subsequent 1992 decision that reaffirmed abortion rights are “decades out of date.”

Abortion rights advocates have said any ruling upholding Mississippi’s law would effectively gut Roe, giving states unfettered power to limit or ban the procedure.

Phillips worries about a revival of dangerous, unregulated abortions that imperil women’s lives.

“I’m afraid that many more women and girls will be in back alleys,” Phillips said. “I’m worried we are going to find them in country roads, dead.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

Tennessee supermarket shooting leaves 2 dead, including gunman, 12 injured

(Reuters) – One person was killed and at least 12 were injured when a lone gunman opened fire on Thursday at a supermarket in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, before the suspect was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound, the police chief said.

Law enforcement officers swarmed to the scene just after the shooting unfolded at a Kroger grocery store in Collierville, Tennessee, and began helping victims and others found hiding inside the supermarket, chief Dale Lane told reporters.

“We found people hiding in freezers and in locked offices,” Lane said.

The gunman, who was believed to have acted alone, was found dead in a parking lot outside the store, Lane said. Local media reported the suspect’s body was discovered inside his vehicle.

“We are waiting for some special equipment to search that vehicle as well as the property that is on him,” Lane said about two hours after the shooting, which erupted at about 1:30 p.m. local time.

He called the gun violence “the most horrific event that has occurred in Collierville history.” The town is located about 30 miles (50 km) east of Memphis in southwestern Tennessee.

No immediate explanation for a possible motive was offered by authorities.

Lane said some of the surviving victims sustained “very serious” injuries. All were taken to area hospitals, he said.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Barbara Goldberg in New York; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Sonya Hepinstall)