Kentucky governor says 30 dead, hundreds unaccounted for after flooding

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At a news conference on Monday morning, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said at least 30 people have been killed due to flooding in the state since last week. Beshear said that there are hundreds of people who are unaccounted for.

Video Transcript

ANDY BESHEAR: So another couple of tough updates this morning. First, we can now confirm that we have lost 30 Kentuckians to this flooding. And that's going to grow. We know about additional bodies beyond these 30 confirmed.

They break down a seven in Breathitt, two in Clay, 16 in Knott, two in Letcher, and three in Perry. If things weren't hard enough on the people of this region, they're getting rain right now. Right now, though it's ending real soon, Floyd, Magoffin, Pike have been under a flash flood warning that is ending soon, but there is severe storm potential today in all of the impacted areas. That is just not right.

Most risk is on the northernmost part of the impacted area, but it is very unstable weather. And it could be even up to an inch, just as concerning, high wind. You think about how saturated the ground has been, it could knock over poles. It could knock over trees.

So people need to be careful. And it's even going to get tougher. When the rain stops, it's going to get really hot. And we need to make sure people are ultimately, stable by that point in time.

All right. As of just a few minutes ago, 12,492 people without power. This has been a Herculean effort by those working to restore power. Remember, that at one point, at the [? EOC ?] was above 24,000. I actually think we got close to 30,000. The counties with over 1,000 people without power or more, Perry, Letcher, Pike, Breathitt, and Knott. I know they are working really, really fast.

Yesterday, there was a report out in a roll up of missing persons. That is not an accurate number. If need be, I'll go into the reasons, but that was one KSP post. And that was based on calls in. There are hundreds of unaccounted for people, minimum.

And we just don't have a firm grasp on that. I wish we did. There are a lot of reasons why it's nearly impossible, but I want to make sure that we're not giving either false hope or faulty information.