Washington (EFE) about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert.
The exact death toll is unknown and could rise in the coming hours as emergency services in the hardest-hit states hit the streets to assess the damage and find survivors, sometimes going door-to-door.
So far, local authorities have confirmed the deaths of seven people in Tennessee, five in Arkansas, three in Indiana, one in Alabama, one in Illinois and one more in Mississippi.
Given the devastating impact of tornadoes in the United States, President Joe Biden spoke by phone this Saturday with the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deanne Criswell, who is coordinating the federal response to the disaster.
State of emergency in Arkansas
The president also spoke by phone with Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Little Rock Mayors Frank Scott, Jr. and Wynn Mayor Jennifer Hobbs, who represent two of the Arkansas cities hardest hit by tornadoes, detailed the White House in a statement.
The governor of Arkansas, who between 2017 and 2019 was a White House spokesperson with Donald Trump, has mobilized 100 members of the National Guard reservist corps to respond to the disaster and has declared a state of emergency in order to put the state resources at the service of search efforts.
In Little Rock, the Arkansas capital, some 2,000 homes have been damaged by tornadoes and at least 30 people have been hospitalized, according to Mayor Frank Scott Jr.
“We know Little Rock’s neighbors are resilient and we will get through this together,” Scott Jr. said Saturday in a video on Twitter, in which the wind could still be heard blowing hard.
Caos in Illinois
In northern Illinois, the tornadoes left a scene of “absolute chaos,” in the words of Belvidere Police Chief Shane Woody, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Specifically, the tornadoes caused the roof of a theater where 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert to partially collapse, leaving at least one person dead and 28 injured, five of whom are in serious condition. according to the Belvidere Fire Department.
In Sullivan (Indiana) the strong winds and torrential rains have rendered some areas “unrecognizable,” the mayor of the town, Clint Lamb, said this Saturday at a press conference, who assured that the recovery process “will be very long”.
“Honestly, I’m surprised there wasn’t more damage,” Lamb acknowledged, explaining that luckily for his city the tornadoes passed through the south and did not cross the city.
Without electricity due to tornadoes in the United States
Apart from the human and infrastructure damage, the tornadoes have left some 60,000 homes without electricity in Tennessee and 37,000 in Arkansas, two of the hardest-hit states, according to data from the PowerOutage.us website, which monitors this service.
According to the National Weather Service (NWS), tornadoes were reported Friday night in seven states: Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Mississippi.
The storm is expected to move to the east on Saturday, so alerts have been issued for strong winds in Alabama and Georgia.
Tornadoes have hit the Midwest and South of the country just hours after Biden visited the town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, on Friday, which was devastated last week when a series of strong tornadoes hit the region, leaving 26 dead.
