Memorial Day weekend storms leave at least 22 dead in U.S. | CBC News

A series of powerful storms swept over the central and southern United States over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, killing at least 22 people and leaving a wide trail of destroyed homes, businesses and power outages.

The destructive storms, which caused deaths in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky, were just north of an oppressive early-season heat wave setting records from south Texas to Florida.

Forecasters said the severe weather could shift to the East Coast later on Monday and warned millions of people outdoors for the holiday to watch the skies. A tornado watch was issued from North Carolina to Maryland.

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

The death toll of 22 also included seven people in Cooke County, Texas, from a Saturday tornado that tore through a mobile home park, officials said, and eight people across Arkansas.

Two people died in Mayes County, Okla., which is east of Tulsa, authorities said. The injured included guests at an outdoor wedding.

The latest community left with shattered homes and no power was the tiny Kentucky town of Charleston, which took a direct hit on Sunday night.

“It’s a big mess,” said Rob Linton, who lives in Charleston and is the fire chief of Dawson Springs, which was hit by a tornado in 2021. “Trees down everywhere. Houses moved. Power lines are down. No utilities whatsoever — no water, no power.”

Further east in Kentucky, some rural areas of Hopkins County hit by the 2021 tornado around the community of Barnsley were damaged again Sunday night, said county emergency management director Nick Bailey.

“There were a lot of people that were just getting their lives put back together, and then this,” Bailey said. “Almost the same spot, the same houses and everything.”

More than 400,000 customers across the eastern U.S. were without power on Monday afternoon, including more than 125,000 in Kentucky. Twelve states reported at least 10,000 outages earlier in the day, according to PowerOutage.us.

A grim month

The area on highest alert for severe weather on Monday is a broad swath of the eastern U.S., from Alabama to New York.

It’s been a grim month of tornadoes and severe weather in the nation’s midsection.

Tornadoes in Iowa last week left at least five people dead and dozens injured. Storms killed eight people in Houston earlier this month.

The severe thunderstorms and deadly twisters have spawned during a historically bad season for tornadoes, at a time when climate change contributes to the severity of storms around the world. April had the second-highest number of tornadoes on record in the country.

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

That warm moist air is at the northern edge of a heat dome bringing temperatures in late May typically seen at the height of summer.

The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity, to indicate how the heat feels to the human body — is expected to reach 49 C in parts of south Texas on Monday.