In St. Louis, a Tornado Rips Across an Economic Disaster Area

St. Louis—On May 15, St. Louis officials conducted extensive tornado siren tests. At noon precisely, alarms blared under clear skies.

The next day, the National Weather Service texted an alert at 2:34 pm, but no sirens went off as a tornado touched down at 2:41 pm inside the affluent St. Louis suburb of Clayton. Initial winds picked up to 85 miles per hour—powerful enough to uproot trees, hurl large branches into houses, and bludgeon the exterior of cars with debris. In a matter of 15 minutes, downed power lines, broken glass, and tree limbs blockaded the streets. The tornado moved northeast across Wydown into Forest Park, turning the tree canopy into buckshot bursting out in all directions. The storm system rapidly gained strength, with winds reaching 107 miles an hour—a speed strong enough to peel metal roofing off buildings.

Without regard for the private mansion gates with “No Trespassing” signs, the twister (at some places one mile wide) crossed over the walls of DeBaliviere Place, where wind speed increased to 120 miles per hour, knocking chimneys off gigantic brick homes, tearing copper gutters off roofs, and stripping three-story-tall oak trees of their branches. Blasts of wind, water, and hail knocked over century-old sycamores, red oaks, sweetgum—many of which fell on cars, flattened fences, smashed into buildings, and downed yet more power lines. Five people were killed during the storm, including Juan Baltazar, a street-corn food-truck owner and father of seven whose vehicle was crushed by a fallen tree in Carondelet Park. Families say the warning sirens could have saved lives.

Continuing north, the tornado crossed Delmar Boulevard, which a BBC documentary described as one of the largest “economic cliffs” in the United States. The Delmar Divide is now a well-studied injustice. On the south side, St. Louis residents are mostly white, with high median incomes, university pedigrees, and homeowner’s insurance. On the north side, most residents are working-class African Americans with dramatically reduced home values—many of whom live on subsistence incomes that can’t cover insurance. Trucking, childcare, working at Busch Stadium are some of the professions of interviewees who now live in a tornado disaster area set on top of a century-long economic catastrophe. Many have been sleeping in their cars outside of half-destroyed homes.

Once the tornado crossed to the working-class side, winds increased to upward of 152 miles per hour—enough to collapse exterior walls of buildings. Rows of houses had their roofs blown off, and in the historic Black district of The Ville, home of Chuck Berry, Dick Gregory, and Josephine Baker, whole buildings were rubbled. The tornado killed 60-year-old St. Louis native Rena Scott-Lyles when it hit her family home in Fountain Park. North of Delmar, St. Louis’s signature red bricks lay scattered in heaping piles mixed with lumber, wire, and glass. Cars were totaled, windows were shattered, and more of St. Louis’s urban canopy was felled, making roads impassable. When the roof and bell tower of Centennial Christian Church collapsed, also in Fountain Park, it killed 70-year-old Patricia “Ms. Pat” Penelton—a beloved community servant.

Rated a 3 out of 5 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, May 16’s tornado topped out at 156 miles per hour—a 5 is 200 miles per hour. The path ran for 23 miles, exiting North St. Louis through Compton Park and O’Fallon to rage across the Mississippi River, continuing into Granite City, Illinois, up to Edwardsville where it finally unwound.

Debris maps indicate that most of the destruction took place north of Delmar, around The Ville and northeast in O’Fallon before crossing the Mississippi. About 5,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged with 70,000 left without power for days. In minutes, the storm system altered St. Louis forever, eviscerating histories and habitat. It has also produced opportunities for community growth as well as avenues that lead to continued injustice and neglect.

Tornado Lung

The St. Louis tornado sirens didn’t go off, because no one pushed the button. St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer has taken responsibility, calling the mistake, “a human failure.”

To the press on Monday, May 19, Mayor Spencer said the lack of warning was a failure in protocol, but Republican cuts to the National Weather Service have also made predicting disaster more unreliable. “Weather service veterans expressed concern about the agency’s ability to keep up in the face of the cuts,” reported Fox 2 Now. Friday’s surprise tornado is a “scenario likely to be repeated as the U.S. is on track to see more tornadoes this year than in 2024, which was the second-busiest tornado year on record.”

Spencer also caught flak for a lack of response from city officials, as well as initial statements in which she advised that St. Louis citizens not “self-deploy” to help in cleanup and rescue efforts. The St. Louis Police Department issued an immediate curfew for the northside wards and set up a command center in an Aldi grocery store parking lot—big enough for a police helicopter to ferry in Republican Senator Josh Hawley for a photo shoot where he promised to request expedited FEMA funds.

The mayor’s warning against “self-deployment” was meant to prevent further injuries and reduce complicating factors that might compound the emergency, but St. Louis activists and organizers saw the problems outside their doors as requiring immediate action. Without aid, organizers in Fountain Park pointed out, people will go hungry and risk sickness and injury.

Thousands have so far responded to the call for volunteers, and more are needed for the weeks ahead. Supplies will be crucial, and much has been pouring into organization points like O’Fallon Park, as well as Fountain Park, where the Party for Socialism and Liberation St. Louis set up a tent not far from Centennial Christian Church. Four days after the event, organizers there reported no sign of city officials

While St. Louis waits to be declared an official disaster zone, local organizations like Action St. Louis and For the Culture STL have mobilized to meet immediate needs—food, water, tools, gloves, baby wipes. Tarps and ropes were in demand so that roofs could be covered up as more storms roll across the St. Louis region, but needs will shift as clean-up gives way to rebuilding.

Many of these mobilized organizations like Forward Through Ferguson have their roots in the 2014 response to Micheal Brown’s murder in a county just to the west of the tornado’s path. The storm cutting across the Delmar Divide threatens to create a racially uneven rehabilitation effort—especially on top of the massive cuts in federal funding St. Louis was already dealing with thanks to the Trump administration. A coalition including the Eco-Socialist Green Party, St. Louis Palestinian Solidarity, and STL Anti-Imperialist Collective has issued a set of demands for disaster relief:

Adopt a Housing First strategy for disaster relief by releasing funds and developing partnerships for free and/or subsidized short-term housing and home repair.

Fully fund and resource volunteer efforts to offer shelter for unhoused people, including those displaced by the storm.

Conduct an air-quality and soil-quality assessment of tornado-affected areas, and follow the guide of experts in remediating the impact of debris. In the meantime, make a public service announcement regarding the effects of tornado lung so that people are aware of the impacts.

According to the American Lung Association, tornado lung is a catchall for the chronic illnesses that can result from exposure to “chemicals, oils, sewage, gases, and other substances.” Dampness and mold in the aftermath of destruction can be extremely hazardous, resulting in asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or lung cancer. In cleanup, debris should not be burned, and doctors recommend respiratory protection as well as regular washing with soap and water after handling any wreckage.

Money and Bricks

On the ground, the storm seemed to pass quickly with the sun coming out almost immediately. It was humid, but the air was also thick with dangerous particulate from fiberglass roofing insulation. Chain saws revved up. For neighborhoods in the path, cell phone coverage went out, as did power, which made it difficult to tell how much of the city had been hit. In the middle of Waterman Boulevard, which looked like it had been shelled by artillery, I watched a courier deliver an Amazon package to a couple who appeared to be leaving as they dragged suitcases behind them.

With upward of $1.6 billion in damages, thousands of St. Louis neighbors have been made homeless, and thousands of buildings will need to be inspected for structural damage. This is a full-scale catastrophe, with many residents in need of food, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, etc., but many more will need places to live as buildings are condemned.

Luckily, St. Louis has many wealthy institutions, and a big chunk of money on hand. In 2021, the city won a lawsuit against the National Football League for damages when the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke, moved the team to Los Angeles in 2016. The lawsuit awarded $290 million to the city and another $169 million to St. Louis County. St. Louis City leadership spent the last year debating where this Rams settlement money should go, with Mayor Spencer pushing Republican Governor Mike Kehoe to give the funds to business leaders for property development downtown. The downtown investment push is in tension with alternative proposals for a revolving loan fund (a self-replenishing pool of money for development and small businesses), water infrastructure, childcare, and education subsidies. No official plan for the funds is yet in place.

Because of tax credits and government investment funds, developers in St. Louis enjoy a great deal of political influence, with Lux Living being one of the largest in the region. At the corner of Waterman and DeBaliviere, Lux recently completed a cluster of premium apartment buildings with pools on the roof and retail on the ground floor. The developer has been accused of cutting corners and a lack of due diligence, and was recently federally indicted for fraud. In wandering the wreckage on Friday afternoon, I passed a Lux building that was hemorrhaging water from the top floor, fire alarm blaring. The roof was torn clean off—a moment captured on video.

Storefront windows were shattered, glass littering the sidewalks. The luxury apartments were constructed of lumber and drywall and could not stand up to the wind as well as the solid, historic, red-brick structures that most of St. Louis enjoys.

Neighborhoods north of Delmar were hit with harder winds, and whole blocks have been flattened, with many northside buildings in latter-decades of neglect. North St. Louis has been strategically under-resourced by city planners since the 1920s, starting with Jim Crow restrictive housing covenants. In the mid-century, The Ville became the central hub of a thriving Black middle class in St. Louis, which was subsequently undermined by deindustrialization, failed urban renewal strategies conducted by white St. Louis leadership, and catastrophic betrayals like the nearby Pruitt-Igoe housing project—a complex of 33 11-story high rise buildings meant to alleviate poverty in St. Louis, which were used for atomic chemical experiments, systematically underfunded, and famously dynamited on television in 1972.

More recently, on top of these civic failures, a different kind of property developer is at fault for making northside neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to catastrophic weather.

Paul McKee is a controversial figure in St. Louis politics—a mega-developer who bought up blocks of historically redlined neighborhoods promising revitalization and historic preservation while delivering nothing for decades. McKee’s hundreds of northside properties have sat vacant without occupancy permits, unrepaired for decades until they burn or fall down, including many historically important structures. Meanwhile, the property developer has reaped loans and tax credits for redevelopment that never take place, and gets bogged down in failed projects meant to alleviate food deserts or provide health services to the St. Louis Black community. McKee’s $8 billion Northside Regeneration project has been successfully sued as of 2024, but, as Kae Petrin documented for St. Louis Public Radio in 2018, the whole initiative drained both patience and hope. “Neighbors have reported vandalism, fires, drug use, squatters and shootings in and around the properties,” Petrin writes. “Homeowners next door have had issues with loitering strangers, overgrown yards and pests.”

Many blocks on the northside are home to close-knit communities, and other sections have been plagued by “dollhouses”—brick homes whose façade has fallen away as if they are the playthings of a gigantic toddler. In reality, dollhouses come from either neglect or sabotage—St. Louis’s bricks are world-famous for their quality, largely due to the Mississippi River’s depositing rich clay in the region. For decades, bricks have been “harvested” from dilapidated northside structures.

Exterior and interior bricks are baked differently, with exteriors glazed and left in the kiln longer to harden them for insulation against cold winters. When St. Louis’s buildings collapse, as many did on May 16, the interior and exterior bricks are mixed, which becomes a major problem for restoration. Many pallets of St. Louis red brick are literally sold down the river to architects in the American South, with no winters to worry about. As if to underscore the injustice at work north of Delmar, St. Louis bricks are often used to restore antebellum Southern planation homes.

HELP WITH URLOOKINASS

The risk of emphasizing destruction in St. Louis is that it may be used as yet another reason to write the city off. The wards north of Delmar, especially, have experienced continued population loss, which has given some license to dismiss the area as “empty” or beyond repair. This elides the fact that the northside is what makes St. Louis itself—it is not a separate, disposable sacrifice zone. These neighborhoods are working class and have been kept impoverished by dozens of overlapping civic and economic crises, which happens to provide exploitable labor for service jobs in the more affluent parts of St. Louis. “North St. Louis has long been on the wrong side of the American promise,” Antonio French wrote in the Post-Dispatch. “If we let these neighborhoods fade into history, we aren’t just losing homes. We’re losing people, culture, community and a vital part of this city’s soul.”

These neighborhoods were waiting for reinvestment before the storm, and now the situation is far worse. As St. Louis civil rights leader Jamala Rogers noted in a press release, last Friday’s tornado threatens to repeat urban-ecological history:

This year is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The Lower Ninth Ward has never been completely rebuilt and many New Orleanians are still displaced. If St. Louis leaders and residents don’t fight right now for the attention we deserve, North St. Louis will look like other abandoned cities plagued by natural disasters and urban uprisings.

In the wealthier parts of St. Louis, where the tornado began, there is pain, but there is also cash to battle insurance companies, bid on fast repair, and re-beautify streets. Elsewhere, windows are boarded up; metal, wood, and asphalt roof tiles are hauled away at a slower clip. The fight to save historic architecture is already underway, and two days after the storm, a sign was put out at Newstead and Ashland: “AT THE LEAST WAVE + SAY HI or HELP WITH URLOOKINASS.”

The sign was meant to shame and deter rubber-necking. People want to understand, but it’s going to take time.

Most of the city looks exactly as it did two weeks ago, but climatological catastrophe will only become more common as we continue to burn fossil fuels. While the Peabody Coal headquarters in downtown St. Louis was unaffected by the storm, Friday’s tornado created a chance for St. Louis to distinguish itself from other cities: It can either use the disaster as an opportunity for long-overdue justice and a commitment to long-term thinking for the safety of all residents, or it can solve the problems of just one side and continue a barbaric cycle of neglect. It is police and drywall, or aid and brick.

Chain saws, woodchippers, and work trucks backing up are now the city soundtrack, along with cherry pickers extending and cranes hauling roof materials up and down. A staggering raw tonnage of lumber fell from the sky, which, missing many trees, seems wider, bigger, and more dramatic. Shade is scarce. That means a very hot St. Louis summer is ahead. The limbs and trunks of the urban canopy, formerly the habitat of so much St. Louis wildlife, are being pulped, creating vast mounds of wood chips that make whole streets smell like fresh pine sap. The displaced birds, owls, grey squirrels, hawks, and racoons will have to find new homes, but the good news is that the many stripped trees of Forest Park will grow back bushier and stronger than before, as will so much of St. Louis’s forested greenery. The city can do the same: What makes St. Louis great is its history, its architecture, and its people, who have so much stacked against them, yet remain undefeated.