American rescuers are now going door-to-door to find victims of some of the worst devastating floods to ever hit Kentucky, as rain resumed after several hours of calm, the Kentucky governor Sunday told the state.
• Also read: Kentucky flood death toll rises to 25
• Also read: Phone location data is used by the US government to track Americans
Some mountain areas in eastern Kentucky remain inaccessible after floods that turned some roads into rivers, washed away bridges, swept away homes and killed at least 26 people, according to a new toll imposed by authorities.
The damage to the cell phone antennas made recovery difficult and prevented an estimate of the number of dead and missing.
“These floods are among the most devastating and deadly we have seen,” Gov. Andy Beshear said on NBC. “And when we try to clear away, it rains!”.
“We go door to door to find as many people as possible. We even do that when it rains. But the weather complicates things,” he added.
The Democratic governor previously tweeted that the death toll rose from 25 to 26 in torrential rains that fell overnight in this rural state from Wednesday to Thursday.
“We’re going to be finding bodies for weeks, many of which will have been carried hundreds of yards,” he told NBC.
In the city of Jackson, in the center of the hardest-hit area, rescuers and volunteers gathered in the parking lot of a Walmart hypermarket Sunday morning before responding.
Some distributed bottled water. A boat tied to a trailer read “FEMA Rescue 4,” a sign that rescuers from the US Civil Protection Agency were at the scene.
Under heavy black clouds heralding fresh rain, the roads were covered with a thick layer of mud.
The floods hit a region whose economy was already reeling from the decline of the mining industry, its most important resource.
“They wiped out areas where people already had very little,” Beshear said.
Some parts of Kentucky received about eight inches of rain in 24 hours, and in places, river water suddenly rose several feet before bursting its banks.
The National Weather Services announced a new risk of flooding in the eastern United States, including Kentucky, on Sunday.
“The risk of flash flooding will worsen throughout the day as heavy showers and thunderstorms develop,” they tweeted.
President Joe Biden declared the condition a “natural disaster” and dismissed federal reinforcements to assist areas hit by “storms, floods, landslides and mudslides.”
These floods are the latest manifestations of extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent with human-caused global warming.
In December, several dozen violent tornadoes devastated five states in the central United States, mostly western Kentucky, killing at least 79 people.