US President Joe Biden visited a tornado-ravaged Kentucky town on Wednesday, surveying the colossal damage and consoling survivors of the twisters that took scores of lives.
The 79-year-old president, wearing a dark blue suit with no tie and a baseball cap, strolled slowly down a ruined street of the town of Mayfield, stopping to shake the hand of a woman who was seated in the rubble of a collapsed building.
Biden, who has made empathy one of his trademarks, paused briefly in the street at one point and bowed his head in prayer with the town’s mayor and several other people.
He talked briefly to reporters and said the federal government would continue to provide help for weeks and months to come.
“I’m impresssed how everyone’s working together,” Biden said.
Before touring Mayfield, a town of some 10,000 people which saw entire neighborhoods destroyed, Biden received a briefing on the damage from the tornadoes, which killed at least 74 people in Kentucky and 14 in surrounding states.
“There’s no red tornadoes, there’s no blue tornadoes,” the Democratic president said in a reference to the colors of the nation’s two largest political parties — the red of Republicans and the blue of Democrats.
Andy Beshear, the Kentucky governor, is a Democrat but Kentuckians voted overwhelmingly for Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
– ‘It does mean a lot’ –
“We appreciate the president coming down, coming to Mayfield,” Bryan Wilson, a lawyer, told AFP as he sifted through the rubble of his firm’s decimated downtown building. “It does mean a lot.”
Wilson, speaking over the sounds of construction equipment removing debris, said he was trying to salvage legal files, client records, computers — anything that would preserve the integrity of the business.
He said Biden’s visit signals that people in Washington “do care about rural America.”
“And hopefully that gives the incentive for people to stay, to build back,” he said.
Wilson said he hopes Biden’s trip heals some of the bitter political and cultural rifts in the country.
“America has been divided for too long,” he said. “This is not Republican, this is not Democrat, this is not independent. This is America.”
Brad Mills, a 63-year-old orthodontist in Mayfield, said his message to Biden was to expedite federal disaster assistance.
“Let’s get the federal aid in here that we need,” Mills said. “As divided as we are on so many issues, we’ve got common ground here.”
Mills spoke to AFP outside his office in downtown Mayfield that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before him. His son Stuart, who is in dental school, was on the roof putting on a tarp.
Asked if he was going to rebuild his practice, Mills said “that’s going to be the big question.”
“It’s so emotional right now, you can’t make a rational decision.”
– ‘Historical weather day’ –
Biden is to visit the town of Dawson Springs — 75 percent of which was destroyed by the tornadoes — after touring Mayfield.
Biden declared a major disaster in Kentucky, allowing additional federal aid to be channeled into recovery efforts.
More than 500 National Guard troops have been deployed to help with law enforcement, traffic control and recovery, along with volunteers and associations on the ground to support victims.
“We’re going to be there as long as it takes to help,” the president said at the White House on Monday after a meeting dedicated to what he said was one of the country’s worst tornado disasters.
While Biden said it was certain the tornadoes were “unusual,” due in part to the length of their path and the number of places they touched down, he was careful to note that the link between the phenomenon and climate change still needed more investigation.
“We have to be very careful. We can’t say with absolute certainty that it was because of climate change,” Biden said of the tornadoes.
As Biden toured Kentucky, weather forecasters warned that parts of the midwestern United States were facing a potentially “historical weather day” with wind gusts up to 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers) and the possibility of tornadoes.
