The downtown of Mayfield, Kentucky resembled a pile of "matchsticks," the small city's mayor said this evening, hours after devastating tornadoes roared through several US states and left more than 75 people dead.
"When I walked out of city hall this morning, It looked like matchsticks," Mayor Kathy O'Nan told CNN.
"Our downtown churches have been destroyed, our courthouse, which is of course right in the centre of town, is destroyed, our water system is not functioning at this time, there is no power," she said.
The powerful twisters, which weather forecasters say are unusual in cooler months, demolished a candle factory and the fire and police stations in a small town in Kentucky, tore through a nursing home in neighboring Missouri, and killed at least two workers at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.
Video and photos posted on social media showed brick buildings in downtown Mayfield flattened, with parked cars nearly buried under debris. The steeple on the historic Graves County courthouse was toppled and the nearby First United Methodist Church partially collapsed.
Mayfield Fire Chief Jeremy Creason, whose own station was destroyed, said the candle factory was diminished to a "pile of bent metal and steel and machinery" and that responders had to at times "crawl over casualties to get to live victims."
US President Joe Biden approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky, ordering federal aid to supplement the response from state and local authorities.
"It's a tragedy. And we still don't know how many lives were lost and the full extent of the damage," Biden told reporters.
Mr Biden referred to the storm system as likely to be "one of the largest tornado outbreaks in our history".
Asked if he thought climate change played a role in the devastation of the storms, Mr Biden said he would be asking the Environmental Protection Agency and others to take a look.
"Acknowledging that the likelihood of fewer weather catastrophes, absent a continued movement on dealing with global warming, is just not going to happen," he said.
Mr Biden also said a longer-term question, beyond the immediate response, sparked by the disaster for the states and the nation would be about the tornado warning systems.
"One of the questions that are going to be raised, I'm confident, is: What warning was there? And was it strong enough and was it heeded?" Mr Biden said.
Earlier today, Mr Biden had spoken with the governors of five of the states hit by the storms - Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee - to express condolences and a commitment to delivering aid quickly, according to the White House.
Several counties in Kentucky were devastated, with the strongest tornado tearing 320km through the state, governor Andy Beshear said earlier.
"I fear that there are more than 50 dead ... probably closer to somewhere between 70 and 100, it's devastating," he said, adding this was the "most severe tornado event in Kentucky's history".
"Before midnight I declared a state of emergency," Mr Beshear said.
A handful of deaths were also reported in four other states.
Tornadoes: Devastating but still not well understood
In Arkansas, one person was killed and 20 others were trapped after a tornado struck the Monette Manor nursing home, US media reported.
Craighead county official Marvin Day told local news channels that rescuers had successfully pulled out those trapped in the building while the structure was "pretty much destroyed".
In Tennessee, at least two people were killed in storm-related incidents, an emergency management official told local media.
