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A violent storm system ripped across Kentucky, destroying homes, businesses and at least one church. Multiple fatalities have been confirmed.
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St. Louis was the first warning.
A severe thunderstorm system, likely a tornado, ripped through an unusually urban swath of the city Friday afternoon, killing at least five people there.
“We had storms initiate in what was a very unstable environment, extremely unstable,” St. Louis National Weather Service meteorologist Lydia Jaja told the Herald-Leader. “Instability is how efficient air particles are rising, and that air rose and it pretty much went ‘boom.’
“St Louis just had the perfect storm of an environment to produce a tornado.”
That perfect storm raked through 350 miles of forest and pasture and hit the communities of Somerset and London, killing at least 18 people late Friday night into Saturday morning.
How did it persist for so long?
Jaja said a key to the system’s longevity was a cold front sweeping from West to East.
Cold fronts can be an ingredient in the creation of “supercells,” the rotating thunderstorms characterized by anvil-like clouds that can often result in tornadoes.
“The cold front that spawned all of these supercells just kept on pushing east, and more of the same kept happening. Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri — we just kept on getting more supercells with more tornado warnings,” Jaja said.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the cool, dense air moving in can cause the existing warm, less dense air to move upward. That causes wind shear.
Wind shear is defined as the difference in wind speed or direction over a short distance. It is one key element of the formation of a tornado because the differences can cause rotation within a storm.
The cold front showed in the dramatic temperature change.
Around 1:00 a.m., it was 77 degrees in Somerset. At 2:30 a.m., the temperature had dropped to 65 degrees.
Tornadoes at this scale are a rare occurrence for the London-Somerset area.
Daniel Carmack, a London realtor who’s lived there for 25 years, said significant tornadoes don’t necessarily cross most residents’ minds because damage of this kind hasn’t happened before.
“The loss of life, the absolute leveling of almost entire subdivisions, I don’t remember anything like this ever happening here in my lifetime. We always look at it like ‘that’s something that happens in Western Kentucky or in Oklahoma, but not here,’” Carmack said.
As a realtor, Carmack said he hears questions about tornadoes — whether or not a property has an adequate space to shelter — more often coming from people moving from out of state than locals.
“People moving in may have experienced it in other places, and I think part of the reason they move here is that our weather is fairly mild,” Carmack said. “But, you know, that doesn’t seem to be the case in the last little bit.”
This story was originally published May 17, 2025 at 10:23 AM.
Lexington Herald-Leader
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Austin Horn is a politics reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He previously worked for the Frankfort State Journal and National Public Radio. Horn has roots in both Woodford and Martin Counties.