By Cheney Orr

MAYFIELD (Reuters) – Mayfield Consumer Products, western Kentucky, posted pictures online of smiling workers lining up at a table to share a pre-holiday meal in their factory canteen.

On Friday evening, the candle-making factory where workers celebrated two week earlier was left in ruin. The tornado struck during an early shift and more than 100 workers labored there. 40 were saved, but many more were still missing.

Mayfield Consumer Products was a family-owned manufacturer of candles, wax, and other home fragrance products. It had been looking to increase its workforce and recently advertised job opportunities on its Facebook page (NASDAQ:).

On Saturday, search-and-rescue crews combed the wreckage of the tornado-damaged factory located on the West Side of Mayfield. This picturesque community is near the confluence between the Ohio River and the Mississippi River in the far southwest corner of Kentucky.

Mayfield was a small community with approximately 10,000 people in Graves County. The tornado left a landscape littered with debris and damaged buildings. Trees were uprooted, and trees stripped of their leaves. There are also twisted signs along the roads and old utility lines.

According to Paige Tingle, a 52-year-old employee at the factory that was destroyed was unaccounted for. She was last seen at 9:30 pm, just before the storm hit, and was reported missing by her family.

Tingle reached out through Facebook to Reuters on Saturday and said she’d driven for four hours from her home in order to find her mother. Her fate is unknown.

“We aren’t sure what to do. It is extremely nerve-wracking. We don’t know how to feel, we are just trying to find her,” Tingle said. “It’s a disaster here. “My thoughts are with everyone.”

An employee who was able to survive said that she was stuck in the rubble for around two hours before being freed by rescue workers.

Kyana Parsons Perez, NBC’s Today host said that “it was absolutely the scariest thing I have ever experienced” in an interview. “I was not sure I would make it.”

Parsons-Perez recalled seeing lights in the building flicker and then feeling the wind blow through the factory. “And my ears kinda started popping like if they were on a airplane.”

After the building started to shake, she explained that “and boom! Everything came down on us and all you could hear was screams.” She recalled that the business has a diverse and ethnically-mixed workforce.

Parsons-Perez said that among the people who ran to help the trapped workers was a group from Graves County Jail. They could have run or attempted to escape at that time, but they didn’t. She said that they were helping us, and she was not surprised.

It was impossible to verify her account that inmates assisted in rescue efforts. Also, it wasn’t clear why prisoners from the local jail were released in the aftermath of the storm.

Jeremy Creason of Mayfield Fire Chief stated Saturday that the factory site was “priority number one” for emergency personnels. He added, “That is where the majority of our assets are at the moment.”

No immediate estimates of casualties were available for either the nearby community or the factory, the worst-hit area of a tornado that caused a 200-mile-long trail of destruction across several counties Friday night. Andy Beshear, Kentucky Governor said that he believed at least 70 had died in Kentucky.

According to Beshear, around 110 people had been trapped in the candle-making factory when the tornado swept it down. As of Saturday morning, 40 people had been rescued.

CNN later heard from the Graves County coroner, that forty people were still unaccounted for at this factory.