MAYFIELD, Ky. — Ivy Williams’s wife, Janine, had called him Friday night to tell him that a bad storm was coming when the call abruptly cut out. He hasn’t heard from her since.

The 50-year-old quality assurance worker was several hours into her night shift at Mayfield Consumer Products with more than 100 other employees when a tornado swept through and flattened the metal building on top of them.

About 40 people were rescued; just as many remain unaccounted for and are feared dead. Williams spent Friday night and Saturday trying to learn to which group his wife of seven years belonged.

“I won’t go home without her,” Williams said Saturday, crying as he spoke while sitting on a bench outside His House Ministries counseling center where families were being interviewed and seeking information.

Williams, who calls Janine his soul mate, said he drove immediately to the factory from their home in Paducah, Ky., Friday night to help with rescue efforts, but as of late Saturday had heard no news. “I need people to help me find my wife, and be honest with me, and let me know as soon as possible,” he said.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) offered a grim assessment of the candle factory, where authorities believe dozens of people may have died. The governor flew to Mayfield on Saturday morning and the candle factory was his first stop.

“There’s at least 15 feet of metal with cars on top of it, barrels of corrosive chemicals that are there,” Beshear told reporters at a news conference late Saturday afternoon, after touring other severely damaged areas of the state.

“It’ll be a miracle if anyone else is found alive in it,” he said.

Workers at the factory on the south side of the small city were inside the building when warnings about a coming tornado were broadcast early that evening on local news. Charley Mcgregor, a training manager at the candle factory since August, said for a major storm their emergency plan was to shelter in place in a bathroom hallway in the back of their production floor. Mcgregor said everyone was evacuated to that hallway when the sirens went off on Friday night, and she said all employees were accounted for in the hall. Mcgregor, who was not on the night shift, said several employees clocked out early Friday night, but she’s wasn’t sure if employees were given the option to go home early once the tornado warning was announced.

“This is the worst, most devastating tornado event in Kentucky’s history,” Beshear said, adding that at least 70 had been killed and that the state’s death toll could reach more than 100.

Day-shift supervisor Linetta Burney said the candle factory was understaffed from its usual 130-140 employees because of staffing issues she attributed to the pandemic. The factory was operating with about 118 workers when the tornado hit. Burney, 39, said she lost one friend in the tornado, and several others were hospitalized.

“They [management] don’t make nobody stay against their will,” said Burney over the phone on Saturday night. “When the tornado sirens go off, we move to the back hallways and line people up in a safe spot.”

More than 30 tornadoes swept across six states leaving a path of destruction, with Kentucky being among the worst hit.

“We’re ground zero,” Beshear said.

Andrea Dowdy was hunkered down with her husband, son and two daughters in a back room of their home in rural Wingo, Ky., as the massive tornado passed by Friday night. The family had their TV on, tuned to local news, tracking the tornado’s progress, when Dowdy’s daughter, Logan Miller, began to panic. The tornado was headed straight for the candle factory, she said. Her fiance, Alec Clark, was midway through his shift there.

Miller tried calling him, but couldn’t get through. She could track the location of his phone on her phone screen, and it wasn’t moving.

“I just told my husband: ‘Get there now, cause Alec, he’s there, he’s not responding,’” Dowdy said. Miller, her dad and brother immediately jumped in a car to head to the factory.

“My husband, my son and my daughter were the first ones on site,” Dowdy said. An hour or so later, she and her other daughter joined them, bringing along warm clothes. “And the only thing that you can really describe of the whole thing was: It was a big debris field. There was no building. Nothing that resembled that plant,” she said.

The family made a decision: They were not leaving without Alec.

First responders and relatives of other trapped workers soon joined them, struggling in the darkness, and against driving rain, to remove debris and rescue people whose voices they could hear crying out from beneath the rubble.

One by one, rescue workers pulled people from the wreckage — men and women with horrific crush injuries from concrete walls, beams and cylinder blocks that had fallen across them. She saw workers with severe chemical burns from the chemicals that Dowdy said are used to create the candle fragrances. There were people with severe, multiple fractures. There were people in shock, and people with concussions who couldn’t seem to remember their own names, she said.

“There are things that everyone saw last night and we saw today that will be with us the rest of our lives,” Dowdy said, her voice breaking.

Dowdy’s husband and others forged a tunnel through the debris to reach some people, at times with the help of tractors collected from a nearby tractor business, she said. Dowdy recalled seeing one man who approached each survivor pulled from the wreckage to ask, with desperation, if they had seen his daughter, whom he said had last been in the bathroom at the facility. Finally, Dowdy said, the woman was removed, with a broken foot, carried out on a stretcher. “That’s my daughter!” the man cried.

Dowdy said the candle factory was one of the largest employers in Mayfield, and that the nearly 120 people at work at the time the tornado struck was typical. Those workers — the afternoon shift — would have arrived in the late afternoon that day. Her husband used to work at the factory. His cousin currently works there, and they know many others there. It’s a small town, she said.

Finally, after 2 a.m., Dowdy said, several people were freed from a section of the rubble, and with them came Dowdy’s son-in-law, Alec Clark. He was able to walk. He had been trapped for nearly five hours at that point. He immediately turned to helping rescue his co-workers, she said, frantic to find two particular colleagues who had been nearby when the concrete walls began to shake and then everything collapsed.

An hour later, the men were found, both severely injured.

Rescue workers pulled the last live person they could find from the wreckage at 3:30 a.m., local authorities said. That was around the time they also told the Dowdys and others to go home.

“This is just something you see happen other places,” said Graves County Coroner Brad Jones, who cried Saturday while speaking to media in the torn-apart parking lot of a John Deere store that borders the factory. He choked up as he spoke against a background of shattered windows, downed power lines and uprooted trees. “You don’t expect it to be here.”

The family-owned company operates two factories within city limits, offering employment to scores of Graves County residents since 1988. About 250 people currently work at MCP, as it’s known, factories where they manufacture scented and decorative candles. Employees were working a night shift at the south-side facility when the tornado came through the factory at about 9 p.m., witnesses said.

Jones did not have an official death toll and encouraged family to provide any identifying details that could help first responders with the search. Crews had worked without rest since Friday night and are expected to continue into Sunday.

Family members posted pictures on social media of missing loved ones who were inside the factory at the time of the tornado’s passing, looking for answers throughout the day.

Jones did not know whether Mayfield Consumer Products told workers to leave or seek shelter inside. Calls to MCP directors and headquarters were not returned Saturday. It is unclear if the state of Kentucky requires any specific protocols from manufacturers beyond what the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration recommends in a standard tornado preparedness plan. Such plans suggest companies move workers into a hallway, which according to several witnesses, is what happened in Mayfield.

“I can’t imagine what [the families] are going through. They’re wanting answers right now, and I don’t blame them, and we’re doing everything we can to make it easier on them. Hopefully we can get people through this,” Jones said.

Factory worker Kyanna Parsons-Perez live-streamed the cries of her colleagues awaiting rescue. She said she was attempting to distract herself and others from panicking as they felt footsteps pressing down on them from above. She told national news outlets that she and her co-workers were huddled in the factory when a gust of wind blew inside, rattling the building before it buckled. She was buried beneath about five feet of rubble and could not feel her legs for several minutes.

“It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Parsons-Perez told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez. “I decided to go live so more people could know what was going on.”

She also told NBC’s “Today” show that Graves County jail inmates were working in the factory when the tornado struck and helped rescue dozens of people trapped beneath debris.

“When I tell you some of those prisoners were working their tails off to get us out, they were helping. And to see inmates — because you know they could have used that moment to try to run away or anything — they did not. They were there, they were helping us,” Parsons-Perez said. “We were able to get the debris under us to move around and were able to get out.”

Graves County Executive Jesse Perry said the region’s warning systems worked, but the tornado moved fast and in the dark. Tornado sirens gave warning, cellphones blew up with automated notifications, most people were home and businesses were closed.

“It’s just terrible,” Perry said. “You see that stuff on TV. Then, it’s your hometown. It’s tough.”

He raced into Mayfield, the county’s industrial seat, after the storm had cleared through the area. The dark obscured the scale of the damage, but first light revealed near-complete annihilation. The power was out for most, and few homes and buildings were left standing.

“It looked like a bomb dropped on our town,” said Ryan Mitchum, who owns a landscaping business in the region and is a Mayfield native. He added it was hard to believe the factories, which offer quick work for local residents, were open. “It’s just a big metal building. They knew these [storms] were a threat.”

Mayfield banker Steven Elder, who ran for mayor four years earlier and is heavily involved in the community, found his home was spared, but his city was gone. Downtown took a direct hit.

The clock tower of the historic courthouse collapsed. The century-old buildings that lined the main square were reduced to matchsticks and brick piles. The water tower collapsed into a mound of mangled metal. The city mural reading “Mayfield, more than a memory” was intact, but the building bearing the slogan was roof- and windowless.

“It sounded like death was coming for us,” Elder said about the howling tempest. “It’s sad to see your community just wiped away.”

Stephen Boyken, lead pastor at His House Ministries, didn’t know what to expect when he rushed to the scene wearing tennis shoes, joggers and a rain jacket. But the 37-year-old was soon covered in mud, on his hands and knees, talking to people in the factory rubble.

“I got the opportunity to get down with some of them and just talk to them, encourage them, pray with them while they were stuck under there,” Boyken said.

The pastor said he witnessed several people die during the rescue effort, which swelled to nearly 300 first responders by Boyken’s estimate, both civilian and emergency professionals. He showed photos on his cellphone of workers looking up through metal bars, roof rubble and other debris.

“One of the places [in the candle factory] I was at had a seven-month pregnant woman, and they were able to pull her out,” Boyken said. “It took awhile. But I watched as we got her on a basket and both EMS and first responders alongside regular people picked up the basket and carried her on a platform of pallets.”

“Heat is going to be an issue tonight so we’re starting to get the winter coats,” said Boyken, pointing to a rack of tiny puffy jackets that would fit babies and toddlers. “One of the members of my church, a volunteer firefighter, found a baby in a field. Some of our Amish community lost loved ones, and it’s very tragic.”

While city residents come together to provide for immediate physical needs, the unseen wounds will need tending in the months to come.

For Ivy Williams, 62, who has had no news of his wife, recovery starts with an answer to the toughest question he has ever had to ask: Where is Janine?

An earlier version of this story said Janine Williams was Ivy Williams’s wife of 37 years. They have been together for 37 years and married for seven. This version has been corrected.

President Biden arrived in Kentucky on Wednesday to survey the swaths of damage in areas hardest hit by a string of tornadoes that killed at least 74 people there and 14 in other states.

Live updates: Biden arrives in Kentucky, hardest-hit state after devastating tornado outbreak

Victims: What we know about some of the lives lost in Kentucky

Photos and video: See the damage left by the tornadoes

The storm’s path: Satellite images show leveled buildings

The candle factory: ‘Everyone was trapped’: A candle factory survivor tells her story

Climate: Researchers ponder why Friday’s tornadoes led to so many deaths, despite ample warning