At least 27 dead after tornadoes and storms tear across central US

St Louis: The call came late Friday to the Rev Derrick Perkins: Three people were trapped in the Centennial Christian Church in St Louis after a tornado had toppled part of its steeple, leaving it in dusty piles of bricks and stones.

A signal from one person's cellphone helped Perkins and emergency workers find those trapped inside. But one of the people, a beloved longtime ministry leader, was killed, Perkins said.

"I was in disbelief -- heartbroken," he said, holding back tears. "Not only for the church but for the entire community."

The grief and damage there is just a fraction of the devastation from the several tornadoes that have torn across the nation since late Friday, killing at least 27 people in Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia and injuring dozens more. Officials warned the death toll could rise as they assessed the damage Saturday.

"I would describe this as one of the worst storms" in the city's history, said Mayor Cara Spencer of St. Louis at a Saturday news conference. "The devastation is truly heartbreaking."

The spring tornado season has been especially brutal in this part of the country, coming just weeks after similar storms caused deadly destruction in the region. On Friday, these tornadoes were caused by a major storm over the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic.

By Saturday morning, government forecasters said they had confirmed 26 tornadoes in a preliminary count, with most of those occurring in Indiana and Kentucky. While that number so far is not the most recorded in a single day this year -- there were 107 during a tornado outbreak April 2 -- states like Kentucky and Missouri were still recuperating from the damage from other storms this year.

In Kentucky, at least 18 people were killed this week, with 17 in Laurel County and one in Pulaski County, according to Gov. Andy Beshear. The governor was touring the damage in Laurel County, about 90 miles south of Lexington, on Saturday.

At the London-Corbin Airport in Laurel County, hangars were left twisted and flattened. A plane was flipped upside down. Next to it was a damaged medical helicopter. Matthew Singer, the manager of the airport, said no workers were injured in the storm, but several buildings had immense damage.

In a neighborhood nearby, Jeff Cornett was seeking shelter Friday night in his bathroom when a tornado barreled through and pulled him out of the room. An object hit his head, and he was pinned down by debris next to an old suntan bed.

Cornett said his neighbors eventually dragged him out of the debris. He went to a hospital and received several stitches to close a gash across his forehead.

"I don't know how I made it," he said.

This week's storm also comes at a precarious moment for disaster relief efforts, as sweeping staffing and funding cuts have upended the usual processes for getting assistance from the federal government.

Officials in Kentucky and Missouri confirmed that they had been in touch with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"There's no daylight between the delegation, the federal delegation or the mayor or the governor in that effort" to get assistance, said Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on Saturday morning.

The tornadoes killed at least seven people in Missouri, with five of them in St. Louis. Two people were killed in Scott County, in southeastern Missouri, according to the county sheriff's office.

In St. Louis, cellphone towers were damaged and traffic lights were down, city authorities said, and there was severe damage to homes and buildings. Spencer said early estimates showed that about 5,000 buildings had sustained damage.

Holly Lammert, who lives near the destroyed church where three people were trapped, was among the residents surveying the impact Saturday morning. Pieces of her neighbor's roof were in her backyard. There were dozens of jagged tree limbs and trunks in her community garden.

"This poor neighborhood," she said. "I don't know how we will come back."

As sirens rang out Friday in nearby Forest Park, a nearly 1,300-acre public park that houses several of the city's cultural sites, workers quickly hustled visitors off the grounds and the handball court into a basement until the wind died down. By Saturday morning, light fixtures were shattered, structures had splintered into pieces, and some entrances to the park were blocked by fallen trees.

Steve Burkhardt, the facilities and security manager for Forest Park Forever, which works with the city to protect the urban park, said, "It's a whole different experience to see how beautiful the park is before and how it looks now."

When the storm swept into Virginia, two people died in separate instances after trees fell on their vehicles, according to authorities.

This week's severe weather hit at a time when the National Weather Service is facing staffing shortages, with nearly 600 people leaving the organization after the Trump administration ordered cuts.

In Kentucky, where highly organized storms known as supercells spawned tornadoes, all three local weather service offices that provide forecasting and issue warnings have several vacancies for meteorologists.

For example, the office in Jackson, serving eastern Kentucky, usually operates with a staff of 14 meteorologists but is down to nine, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents weather service employees.

The office is also one of several left without an overnight forecaster, but Friday night, it stayed open and was sufficiently staffed for the night, issuing 11 tornado warnings. It was "all hands on deck," Fahy said.

The storm system that swept the middle of the country Friday will bring a slight risk of severe thunderstorms across upstate New York and western New England on Saturday.

"Obviously, it doesn't have quite the vigor that it had yesterday," said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center.

A separate system could bring severe weather, including large hail and damaging winds, across the southern Great Plains and a slice of southern Oklahoma and northern Texas, including Dallas and Fort Worth.