i m amara walker. i m paula reed in for boris sanchez. you re live in the cnn newsroom. this morning, more than a million people are without power in the eastern united states, as a deadly storm system continues to move north. over the last 24 hours, at least 12 people were killed in multiple states, due to the severe weather that brought tornadoes and major flooding to parts of the south. the majority of those deaths were in kentucky. where hurricane force winds toppled trees and even toppled tractor-trailer trucks. in indiana, the high winds tore the roof off of a church. and in one town, a man says god saved his life, after a tornado swept through his property but left him and his home untouched. the back door started shaking. the house started shaking. and i could see nothing but white. we didn t have time to get anywhere. it was right on top of us, the house was shaking, and we were all close together, in the middle room of the house, still, but wow, this is the
a soil monitoring program that would be overseen by the environmental protection agency. so that is still in the works. but in the meantime our colleague miguel marquez reporting all week long from the area, hearing those concerns, paula and amara, they certainly want, still, more answers, as you can imagine, and they will continue to call on that. meanwhile the cleanup process, as you just said a while ago, that continues. track replacement is a big focus right now for authorities. they basically want to remove those tracks, but that is some process that is going to take weeks, perhaps even months, likely, into april, where they have to remove the affected tracks, excavate all of the soil, and then obviously remove that soil, and then replace it with fresh soil. so that is the process against that could potentially go into april if not beyond. thank you. and still ahead, republican congressman jim jordan s crusade to expose the department of justice of playing politics, it
samantha joy who is a researcher from the university of georgia says they have found in the area around the well and to some degree an area extending out from the well that there is oil that has settled into the sea floor. it s buried itself 2 inches into the sediments. they re saying hey, there s lots of oil around the gulf of mexico, it might be that, no indication it s from the well. what do you say to the claims that there s so much oil in the gulf that it has actually settled into the sediments on the sea floor and could be affecting the eco system there? well, john, i don t think we can know too much about the gulf of mexico and the presence of hydrocarbons in the water column. the administrator and i have been working closely together over the last several months to develop a subsea oil monitoring program that we cannot only use for the recovery and response but also long-term restoration. what we really need to do is harness all the resources that the federal government and t