Six children among those killed by 'epic' Kentucky floods
Kentucky's governor says it could take weeks to find all the victims of flash flooding across Appalachia
Children and potentially whole families are among the at least 16 people to have died in flooding in the US state of Kentucky, where rivers have burst their banks following “epic” torrential rainfall that has washed out roads and swept through homes.
It could take weeks to find all the victims of flash flooding that swamped towns across Appalachia, Kentucky’s governor, with further forecast rain complicating rescue efforts in hard-hit areas that are among the poorest parts of the United States.
"From everything we've seen, we may be updating the count of how many we lost for the next several weeks," said Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, warning that the death toll could rise further. "In some of these areas, it's hard to know exactly how many people were there."
Police and National Guard troops, including personnel from neighbouring states, used helicopters and boats to rescue dozens of people from homes and vehicles in Kentucky's Appalachian coal-mining region. Video from local media showed floodwaters reaching the roofs of houses and turning roads into rivers.
After a helicopter flyover of the hardest-hit areas with Deanne Criswell, head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr Beshear said he was stunned by the scope of the flooding.
Most of Jackson, a town of 2,200 people about 100 miles southeast of Frankfort, the state capital, was submerged, he said.
"Hundreds of homes, their ballfields, their parks, businesses, under more water than I think any of us have ever seen in that area," he told reporters. "Just devastating."
The floods marked the second major national disaster to strike Kentucky in seven months, following a swarm of tornadoes that claimed nearly 80 lives in the western part of the state in December.
Mr Beshear said the number of confirmed flood-related fatalities on Friday rose to 16 from 15, including at least six children, and that the death toll would almost certainly climb as floodwaters recede and search teams find more bodies.
"There's still a lot of people unaccounted for," he said, declining to quantify the number missing. "We may be updating the count of how many we lost for the next several weeks."
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The floods resulted from downpours of 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 cm) of rain that fell over the region in 24 hours, a deluge that may prove unprecedented in the region's record books, said William Haneberg, an environmental sciences professor and director of the Kentucky Geological Survey.
"It's a truly epic event," Mr Haneberg said.
The disaster came two weeks after rain-triggered flash floods inundated the riverfront Appalachian community of Whitewood in southwestern Virginia near the Kentucky border.