‘The worst thing I’ve seen.’ 12-hour shifts as rescue workers search KY factory debris
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Kentucky tornadoes: Victims, searches, response
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By Monday, teams of rescue workers from around Kentucky and Indiana had sifted through “about 50 to 60 percent” of debris from the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, which was smashed by a tornado late Friday, emergency officials said.
Eight bodies of factory workers were recovered.
Late Monday, a company spokesman told the Courier Journal that as of 4:15 p.m., all 102 surviving employees from Friday night’s factory shift have been accounted for.
“We’ve had a miracle situation,” spokesman Bob Ferguson told the newspaper. “Only eight lost.”
Ferguson did not respond to requests for comment from the Herald-Leader. Previously on Monday, eight workers were believed to be missing. Gov. Andy Beshear publicly urged any surviving factory workers to check in with emergency officials at the His House Ministries church in Mayfield.
Earlier Monday, rescue workers described their long days of work on the rubble piles where the factory once stood.
“This is the worst thing I’ve seen,” Jody Meiman, director of Louisville Metro Emergency Services, told reporters at a briefing at the site while an excavator noisily shoveled a pile of scrap in the background.
Emergency workers from Louisville, Lexington, Indiana and elsewhere are running two 12-hour shifts of about 100 people at a time at the factory property, with the Kentucky National Guard securing the site, Meiman said.
Reportedly, 110 people were working inside the candle factory Friday night when the storm hit Mayfield. Meiman said nobody has been rescued from the debris since the early hours of the operation, but workers continue to look for survivors at the factory property and to the north, in case anyone was thrown by the strong winds.
There has been confusion as to how many factory workers remain “unaccounted for,” Meiman said. Some survivors turned up in area hospitals and shelters, or they reunited with relatives but could not quickly be reached because of local power and phone outages.
“I can’t say enough about the rescue operations that were going on before we got here,” Meiman said. “They rescued people, they got them to hospitals. A lot of those rescues were very difficult.”
Tom Neal, leader of search-and-rescue team Indiana Task Force 1, explained part of the slow, methodical task at hand: Using cranes and other heavy equipment, steel from what was the factory’s roof is lifted and cut. This creates “void spaces” in the piles of debris that can be accessed using trained search dogs looking for human bodies.
Debris removed from the site is going to “a temporary landfill” to get it out of the way, Meiman said.
“Local heavy equipment contractors have brought in services to assist us in removing this debris,” Meiman said. “This is a little bit different from a normal collapsed building because the tornado came in and twisted everything, so it’s a very methodical situation that we’ve got — that we’ve had to do to take that into account.”
Meiman said the owners of Mayfield Consumer Products have been in constant contact with rescue teams to provide information about the locations of potentially dangerous equipment and hazardous materials at the site.
The entire site is dangerous, he said. Although loved ones of the missing and others have wanted to come onto the site to help search, it’s too risky for anyone who isn’t trained to deal with such an unstable environment, he said.
“There is debris everywhere. We’re constantly trying to keep track of our responders, make sure that they’re safe,” Meiman said.
The Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health Program did not respond to inquires Monday as to whether it would investigate the workplace deaths and injuries at the candle factory. Meiman said he’s not aware of state workplace safety investigators at the site.
In Illinois, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has opened an investigation into the collapse of an Amazon warehouse hit by a tornado Friday in Edwardsville, the Belleville News-Democrat reported on Monday. Six workers died in that warehouse collapse.
“OSHA has six months to complete its investigation, issue citations and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and or health regulations are found,” Scott Allen, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor, told the News-Democrat.
An OSHA spokeswoman, Kimberly Darby, said Monday that workplace safety issues in Kentucky are investigated by the Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health Program under an agreement the state signed with the federal government.
This story was originally published December 13, 2021 at 3:36 PM.
