At least six people were killed at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois after a direct hit from a tornado caused a major portion of the building to collapse on Friday night, officials said.
Forty-five people were confirmed to have made it out the building, James Whiteford, the fire chief in Edwardsville, Ill., said at a news conference on Saturday.
Edwardsville sits about 25 miles east of St. Louis, and the Amazon building is in a distribution hub on the west side of town with about 20 warehouses ranging from about 100,000 to 1.4 million square feet, said Mark Mayfield, a captain with the Edwardsville Fire Department. The tornado caused the collapse of a wall the size of a football field at the warehouse, along with the roof above it, according to The Associated Press.
“About half of it’s missing, it’s gone,” Captain Mayfield said of the building, which is about 400,000 square feet. The other half of the building remained standing on Saturday morning, he said. A bus carried several workers to reunite with families in nearby Pontoon Beach, said Michael Fillback, the Edwardsville police chief.
“There’s a lot of debris from the concrete; that is predominately a concrete and steel structure,” Chief Fillback said on Saturday morning, adding, “It’s windy outside, so things are unstable.”
Emergency responders received the initial call at 8:38 p.m. and arrived several minutes later, Captain Mayfield said, with about 100 responders on the scene shortly after the building collapsed....
Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/11/us/amazon-warehouse-deaths-tornado.html
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