At least 21 dead in Memorial Day weekend storms that devastated several states

A series of powerful storms in the central and southern U.S. over the Memorial Day holiday weekend killed at least 21 people and left a wide trail of destroyed homes, businesses and power outages.

The destructive storms caused deaths in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky and 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 Monday and warned millions of people outdoors for the holiday to watch the skies.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who earlier declared a state of emergency, said at a Monday press conference that four people had died in four different counties.

The death toll of 21 also included seven deaths in Cooke County, Texas, from a Saturday tornado that tore through a mobile home park, officials said, and eight deaths 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 Charleston, Ky., which took a direct hit Sunday night from a tornado that the governor said appeared to be on the ground for 40 miles.

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

Further east, 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.”

Beshear has traveled to the Dawson Springs area, where his father, former two-term Gov. Steve Beshear, grew up, several times for ceremonies where people who lost everything were given the keys to their new homes.

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

“It could have been much worse,” Beshear said of the Memorial Day weekend storms. “The people of Kentucky are very weather-aware with everything we’ve been through.”

More than 500,000 customers across the eastern U.S. were without power Monday afternoon, including more than 170,000 in Kentucky. Twelve states reported at least 10,000 outages, according to PowerOutage.us.

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

President Biden sent condolences to the families whose relatives were killed. He said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on the ground conducting damage assessments and that he has contacted governors to see what federal support they might need.

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 last two months.

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

The heat index — a combination of air temperature and humidity to indicate how the heat feels to the human body — was expected to reach 120 degrees in parts of Texas on Monday. Record highs are forecast for Brownsville, San Antonio and Dallas.

Miami set a record high of 96 degrees on Sunday.

Schreiner reported from Louisville, Ky. Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.