Tornadoes gashed through western and central Tennessee early Tuesday, with the worst damage concentrated in and around Nashville. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency says at least 19 were killed across four counties, and there are fears the death toll could climb as first responders continue to search for victims.

At a Tuesday morning press conference, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said the deaths were “heartbreaking.”

“We have had loss of life all across the state,” he said. “Four different counties, as of this morning, had confirmed fatalities — in Benton County, Putnam County, Wilson County, Davidson County.”

A line of severe storms caused significant damage to buildings, roads and bridges across multiple counties, according to a 7:40 a.m. bulletin from TEMA. Emergency officials were still trying to assess the scope of the damage. The number of businesses and residents without power remains unknown.

The storms ripped through middle and western Tennessee hours before residents were to take part in Super Tuesday voting in presidential nominating contests.

Davidson County, which includes Nashville, pushed back the opening of its polling centers by an hour to 8 a.m., citing storm damage. The polls are still scheduled to close at 7 p.m. as originally planned.

“The State of Tennessee has activated a strong coordinated response effort to last night’s devastating storms,” Lee tweeted Tuesday morning. “In the hours ahead, we will continue deploying search and rescue teams, opening shelters across the state, and sending emergency personnel to our communities hit hardest.”

Reporter Blake Farmer of NPR member station WPLN, reporting for Morning Edition, described debris strewn across one section of East Nashville.

“Just debris everywhere, roofs that are gone, windows that have been blown out a good part of an old historic church that’s laying in the street as rubble, a few buildings that have basically collapsed,” Farmer said. “I’m looking down an alley, they’re power lines just all netted over the alley and pieces of metal roofing and all sort of debris hanging everywhere.”

Officials are cautioning residents to keep roads free for emergency personnel and to stay away from damaged buildings or hazardous locations. Emergency officials are also urging residents to refrain from calling 911 unless it is a life-threatening emergency.

Nashville Mayor John Cooper sought to project a message of unity, tweeting that “together, we will get through this and come out stronger.”

“Nashville is hurting and our community has been devastated,” he tweeted. “My heart goes out to those who have lost loved ones. Be sure to lend a helping hand to a neighbor in need, and let’s come together as a community once more. Together, we will get through this and come out stronger.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

No matter what happens on Super Tuesday, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has already made history.

The billionaire philanthropist and businessman has run the most expensive self-funded campaign ever, crossing the $500 million mark in ad spending alone in the days before Tuesday’s contests. “You’ve all heard the slogans, ‘Mike will do it,’ ‘Mike will get it done.’ And if you haven’t, I’ve wasted an awful lot of money,” he quipped at a campaign stop in Tennessee over the weekend.

But he also signaled in an interview on FOX News on Monday, that even if he doesn’t win in upcoming primaries he has another path to the nomination – a contested convention.

“The most likely scenario for the Democratic Party is that nobody has a majority — it goes to a convention where there’s horse trading and everybody decides to compromise,” Bloomberg said. He added “it doesn’t even have to be the leading candidate; it could be the one with a smaller number of delegates.” He said the rules say you can “swap votes and make deals.”

Bloomberg entered the race — exactly 100 days before Super Tuesday — at a moment of Democratic anxiety about the field and former Vice President Joe Biden’s performance. Bloomberg announced his bid as “a new choice for Democrats,” with a focus on competing within the moderate wing of the party. However, on the eve of Tuesday’s primaries, Biden is in a radically different position coming out of South Carolina, with a decisive victory over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and with more enthusiasm and endorsements going into Tuesday.

Bloomberg’s decision to forgo the early states and run a national campaign to win the nomination has never worked before, but no one has ever tried to do it with Bloomberg’s resources, either.

“Mike Bloomberg has not been on the ballot yet,” campaign manager Kevin Sheekey said in a statement, noting that Bloomberg is the only candidate to campaign in all 14 Super Tuesday states. “Mike’s record of successfully leading and managing through crises and challenges is exactly what Americans are looking for in a new president.”

What scant polling exists in Super Tuesday states suggests otherwise. The latest NBC poll, out Sunday, had Bloomberg lagging in third place behind Sanders and Biden in Texas and North Carolina. Biden’s nearly 30-point win over Sanders in South Carolina, however, proved that polling can be wildly off in a race where so many voters are making up their minds at the last minute.

While Bloomberg has campaigned in all 14 Super Tuesday states, he’s particularly focused on states rarely visited by Democrats in primary fights: Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, as well as Texas and North Carolina because of their more centrist lean. Bloomberg made stops in all of those states in the days before Tuesday’s contests.

He has promised to build a broad coalition of Democrats, Republicans and independents — all political affiliations he has shared at some point in his life. Christy Dunbar, a chief financial officer for a small business and a lifelong Republican who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, attended Bloomberg’s rally in Blountville, Tenn., last Friday. “I’ve crossed party lines to vote for my first Democrat for president,” she told NPR. Dunbar said Bloomberg was the only Democrat she would vote for in November. “I do not want to vote for Bernie, sorry. I’m not socialistic.”

Bloomberg victories in any number of Super Tuesday states would almost certainly keep him in the race and scramble the math for clinching the Democratic nomination. One sign of confidence: He plans to spend Tuesday campaigning in Florida ahead of the state’s March 17 contest. However, failure to win a single state — for a campaign that staked it all on Super Tuesday — would likely leave Bloomberg with no viable path to the nomination and calls for him to drop out of the race.

“I’m in it to win it,” Bloomberg said Monday at a campaign stop in Northern Virginia.

He also tweeted that he plans to campaign this week in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — key swing states holding primaries in March and April.

Regardless, Bloomberg’s role in 2020 is expected to continue. He has pledged to continue to spend money to elect whoever is the nominee — even if it is Sanders. That promise has engendered a lot of goodwill from the Democratic voters who have shown up at his rallies. “The last election, that wasn’t done. Hillary was out there by herself,” said Dominique Frost, a business consultant who is a first time candidate for local office from Memphis, Tenn. “So for him to say that — that he would keep all of his headquarters operating and he would support whatever Democrat wins in the primary — I think that says a lot about him.”

After decades of pressure from historians and Jewish groups, the Vatican on Monday began allowing scholars access to the archives of Pope Pius XII, the controversial World War II-era pontiff.

Roman Catholic Church officials have always insisted that Pius did everything possible to save Jewish lives. But he remained publicly silent while some 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

More than 150 scholars have applied to study documents covering his papacy, which lasted from 1939 to 1958. Typically, the Vatican waits 70 years after the end of a pontificate to open its archives to scholars.

Speaking to reporters on Feb. 20, the Vatican’s chief librarian, Cardinal José Tolentino Calaça de Mendonça, said all researchers, regardless of nationality, faith and ideology, are welcome.

“The church is not afraid of history,” he said, echoing Pope Francis’ words when he announced his intention to open the Pius XII archives a year ago.

Jewish groups welcomed the opening of the archive. “In inviting historians and scholars in to publicly access the Vatican’s World War II archives, Pope Francis is demonstrating a commitment to learning and airing the truth, as well as to the significance of Holocaust memory,” World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder said in a statement.

Johan Ickx, a Vatican archivist, says scholars will have easy access to the files.

“We have now passed 1 million and 300,000 documents that are digitalized and interfaced with an inventory for it, to help the researchers to go quickly,” he says.

Those researchers have been waiting a long time. A 1963 German play, The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, sparked questions about Pius’ wartime role and accused him of complicit silence in the Holocaust. The Vatican’s attempts to beatify him are stymied by still-vivid memories in Rome of his behavior toward the city’s Jews during the Nazi occupation.

A plaque on the wall outside a military college in Rome recalls the roundup of 1,259 Jews. It reads: “On 16 October 1943 entire Jewish Roman families ripped from their homes by the Nazis were brought here and then deported to extermination camps. Of more than 1,000 persons, only 16 survived.”

The location is just 800 yards from St. Peter’s Square — “under the pope’s very windows,” as Ernst von Weizsacker, then serving as Germany’s ambassador to the Vatican, reported back to Hitler.

Brown University’s David Kertzer has written extensively about popes and Jews. He won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, about Pius XII’s predecessor, and has reserved a desk in the Vatican archives for the next four months.

Kertzer says a lot is known about what Pius XII did. Much less is known about internal deliberations during the war years in the Vatican.

“We know [Pius XII] didn’t take any public action,” he says. “He didn’t protest to Hitler. But who within the Vatican might have been urging him to do so? Who might have been advising him caution? That’s the kind of thing I think we’ll find out, or hope to find out about.”

Like many church historians, Massimo Faggioli, who teaches theology at Villanova University, is also curious about Pius’ role after World War II, during the Cold War. In particular, he wonders, did Vatican officials intervene in Italian elections in 1948, when there was a real possibility of a Communist Party victory?

“I would be curious to know so what kind of communication there was between the [Vatican] Secretariat of State and the CIA,” he says. “Pope Pius was certainly convinced that he had to defend a certain idea of the Christian civilization in Europe against communism.”

Kertzer is certain the Catholic Church was horrified by the Holocaust. In fact, several thousand Jews found refuge in Catholic convents in Italy. But what he hopes to understand better from the Pius files is the role played by the church in demonizing Jews.

“The main purveyors of vilification of Jews for many decades was not the state, it was the church,” he says. “And it was vilifying Jews right up through the ’30s and right up to the beginning of the Holocaust, if not into it, including Vatican-related publications.”

This, Kertzer says, is what the Vatican needs to come to terms with.