Severe storms hit the US Midwest on Wednesday evening, hours after President Joe Biden visited Kentucky, which was hit by a deadly hurricane on Friday, where he pledged federal government assistance to victims of the disaster.
• Read also: Biden, Kentucky, was hit by devastating hurricanes
The NWS warned of an “extremely violent” storm system Wednesday evening, which could “break records” and cause “a large number of dangerous weather phenomena” in several states in the center and north of the country, including “hazardous.” “Wind, snow, thunderstorms, hurricanes and fire hazards.
“These storms will have the potential to produce gusts of up to 100 mph (160 km/h), as well as one or two strong hurricanes” in Iowa and Minnesota, has the National Weather Service, whose local agencies have urging people to take cover. Through their Twitter accounts.
More than 400,000 people were without power in several states Wednesday evening, including Colorado, Kansas, Missouri and Iowa, according to Poweroutage.
The latest weather events come days after severe tornadoes hit several central and southern states, including Kentucky, which Biden visited earlier on Wednesday.
“These tornadoes have devoured everything in their path,” the US president said in a short speech in Dawson Springs, one of the worst-hit areas, “homes, businesses, places of worship, your dreams and your life.”
He promised that the federal government “will cover 100% of the cost of clearance work for a period of thirty days.” “Don’t lose hope. We’ll get there, I promise. (…) No one will let you down.”
Joe Biden, after flying over a stricken area, visited Mayfield, another small town devastated by a tornado that swept through this rural state and province on Friday, killing at least 74 people.
During these two visits, the president stopped several times, to converse with a woman sitting under the rubble of a building, to hug a disaster victim or to speak with a young girl holding an American flag.
Around him, crumbling buildings, piles of bricks, branches, sheet metal, where construction machinery and workers dressed in radioactive yellow were busy.
“What I saw was a group of wonderful people coming together, helping each other. He told reporters hopeful.
During a meeting with local officials in a shed where food and water bottles were stored, the president said, “There are no red tornadoes or blue tornadoes,” referring to the colors of both the Republican and Democratic parties, his party.
sympathy
In this extraordinary meteorological phenomenon, which also claimed at least fourteen casualties in Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, Joe Biden found a rare opportunity for national unity, the one who promised during his campaign to bring together a deeply divided America.
Politically, the US president would not occupy the ground: While Kentucky has a Democratic governor, the state handed Republican Donald Trump a very large majority in the 2020 election. During his visit on Wednesday, reporters saw a flag bearing Trump’s name on a pickup truck.
Joe Biden, before his departure, took care not to politicize the visit and also stayed on a record familiar to him: one of sympathy and comfort.
The president wore a hat from the Beau Biden Foundation in honor of his son, who died of cancer at the age of 46. A way to remember that he himself went through hardships: this mourning and the deaths of his first wife and infant daughter in 1972.
“The president sees people going through the tragedy they’re going through (the pain of losing loved ones, losing their homeland)… he sees them as human beings, not people with partisan ties,” her spokeswoman Jane said. Psaki on Tuesday.
Joe Biden spoke very cautiously about the link between these hurricanes and climate change, while in September seeing the devastation wrought by Storm Ida in New York and New Jersey, he spoke of a climate change “red alert” and took the opportunity to pay tribute to it. Major investment projects.
“We have to be very careful. We can’t say for sure that it’s related to climate change,” he said on Monday, describing only last Friday’s storms as “extraordinary.”
