Firefighters Recall Response to Collapsed KY Candle Factory

Dec. 13—By Monday morning, teams of rescue workers had gone 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 have been recovered. Eight people are missing, and 94 are accounted for, according to company officials on Monday.

"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.

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