ate of emergency — Beshear had declared an emergency for the entire state the day before — and more than 100,000 customers are without power, Beshear said.

Further west in Missouri, hundreds of miles from the destruction in Kentucky, five people were killed in severe weather in St. Louis, city officials said. Meteorologists have not yet confirmed reports of a tornado, with the National Weather Service St. Louis saying that damage reports and radar imagery suggests one had "likely occurred." At a news conference Friday, St. Louis Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson described at a path of destruction that began on a major thoroughfare during afternoon rush hour before moving east over a river into southern Illinois.