- I'm Brooke Butler.

Disasters often happen in phases.

First, the storm, taking cover, hunkering down, then the aftermath, assessing the damage, checking on loved ones.

Then comes the recovery, rebuilding, and figuring out what's next, which is what St. Louis is facing now after the May 16th tornado.

Tonight, we'll bring you stories from the early moments to what's happening now, and how our city is working to heal together.

(soft music) We've all seen the devastating images of the vast amounts of damage across our city from the May 16th tornado.

To see streets, neighborhoods, whole communities in shambles, it can be hard to grasp just how many lives have been uprooted, and as much sympathy and concern we may feel for those most directly impacted, outsiders often don't see the daily struggle these communities will continue to face.

- The house essentially collapsed in one half.

- [Brooke] Paula has lived in North City the majority of her life, and although her home is within means of repair, and she was fortunate not to be home with her two young boys at the time of the storm, she shares with us the many challenges her family now faces.

- You lose a lot of the power and things you've worked really hard for in a moment.

So like, I (laughs) I joked, and it's just one of the, like laugh to keep from crying, but last week, I was in Italy, and this week I'm homeless.

And the enormity of that is just a very unreal thing to process.

So yeah, this is my house, still standing, with roof damage in the back.

My house is absolutely in a space of repair.

The other side of that is, what does it look like to return to a home in a neighborhood that's still destroyed?

Especially with children.

And people have always had perceptions or thoughts about North City, St. Louis, but this neighborhood was like, it was everything to me.

I loved living here.

I chose to stay here.

The neighbors looked out for each other, so like, what we didn't have in the sights or the aesthetic, we had in the feels, of like we are loved here, we can call on each other here.

In recent years, more people have started moving back in, 'cause it was an empty area for a while.

And so as people move back in, it felt good to have neighbors again.

Like I don't know how you repair this, or cover this up, without demolishing.

And everyone's timeline just feels and seems different, especially because the resources are different.

We need to start having conversations around how we're gonna house blocks of people for short and long term.

So what does that look like for families that were surviving, or barely surviving over here, to now have to stretch resources to go somewhere else?

What does it look like for that person to be owning a home, but still needing to live somewhere else?

And then as we're all actively searching for houses, and the demand goes up, what does it look like for there to be some type of protection around not abusing that as a landlord, or as someone that is renting out a space, because we are vulnerable.

I'm vulnerable, and I would say I have a little more resources, but I'm extremely vulnerable, in that if someone raises their prices, and I have nowhere to go, I have to pay it.

- [Brooke] Some help has started to take shape.

The city of St. Louis, along with numerous nonprofits, are working to provide short term housing solutions, including hotel stays and emergency funds.

FEMA assistance could offer rental support, home repairs, and even transportation help.

But for now, many families, like Paula's, are left navigating a complicated system, waiting on delayed city programs, legal processes, federal approvals, while trying to rebuild some sense of stability day to day.

- So talking to my son, the houses have been blown down by wind, and because of that, right now, we can't return home, and the innocence of a five-year-old to say, "Wind can't blow down houses," like, that's not a real thing.

We're supposed to be safe in our brick houses.

All the houses on our street are brick.

- [Brooke] How do you keep it together for them?

- Um.

You, you get good at pretending, because in the reality of raising two black boys in a city like St. Louis, this isn't the first time that I have had to imagine having difficult conversations.

And that also speaks to the trauma that our children and the children over here have experienced.

- [Brooke] In a time of so much uncertainty, Paula reminds us that one thing remains consistent.

Community showing up for community.

- I do think we will survive it and overcome it, and it'll be because of us, and not because of, uh- - We will always self-deploy.

(Paula laughing) I want to look in the camera and say that.

We will always self-deploy.

No one else will manage how we engage in compassion, how we engage with one another, how we love one another, how we support one another, how we search for our own dignity.

We will always survive.

We don't need nobody else to tell us when, or how we should show up for one another.

- The cleanup from the tornado, of course, will take weeks, if not months, but stuff will be carted away, and will be out of sight, but not really out of mind.

Not for the people who lived through this, because they'll be carrying all kinds of things with them for a long time.

Years ago in 1997, we talked to some people who were kids at the time, when they lived through previous St. Louis tornadoes, and they could recall what they heard, what they saw, what they felt, in great detail.

And this was 70, even 100 years later.

(soft music) We have learned again what other generations of St. Louisans learned the hard way.

Yes, tornadoes can and do hit big cities.

There was the 1896 cyclone, they called it.

The tornado of 1927.

The overnight winter tornado of 1959, following nearly the same path.

And now the tornado of May of this year.

All of them took lives, all left survivors with challenges, deeply embedded memories, and perhaps physical and mental scars.

Take September 29th of 1927.

It was a Friday afternoon when schools were still in session.

70 years later, we heard the stories.

- You could see the funnel cloud.

- [Jim] The late US Appeals Court judge, Theodore McMillian, was in class at Wayman Crow, later Carver Elementary School.

Jack Williams was just seven years old.

He and his classmates had come in from the playground at Columbia School.

- And suddenly we began to hear this low rumbling noise, and the teacher evidently feared something was wrong, and she told all of us to put our heads down on the desk.

- You know how teachers are, the first thing that they believe in solving any problem is to put your head on the desk.

- And I looked out the window, and across the street, I saw the roof of the house across the street fly up into the air, just like that.

- [Theodore] A big wooden telephone post, and it's a telephone post, came through the window.

When that post crashed through the window, it was time to get out of there.

- And we came out of the room, which was right close to the stairwell, but the stairwell had collapsed.

And I want to say at this time, this roar of the bricks and the building falling, and everything, the stairwell had collapsed, and we looked down at a gaping hole, no place to go.

The children were screaming, and some of them had blood on them, from cut glasses, and everything.

- [Jim] Columbia School was one of the hardest hit.

Miraculously, no one was killed there.

But five girls died at nearby Central High School.

People remember the stillness in the aftermath of the tornado, just as they did in 1896.

Things had stopped running, and that night, all the lights on the street and in the houses were off, and families huddled together in the darkness of their homes.

- All of the power was out for a long time, because we didn't have any electricity that night, and we didn't have gas at that time.

We had a coal stove, so.

We were still able to prepare some kind of food, but I remember that night, we had pancakes.

(soft music) - [Jim] In 1997, we interviewed Isa Lee Bishop.

She was 105 years old at the time, and there were things she couldn't remember about her life, but she could tell you about the 1896 tornado that went through her south side neighborhood.

- This was at 2706 Allen Avenue.

This is I, four years old.

I walked over bricks, and that impressed me.

The idea of walking on bricks!

- [Jim] We've all seen pictures and video of tornado damage.

Seeing it in person really brings it home, but surviving it, being there as it passes through, that's something that people can't adequately describe, and it's something they never forget.

- Now that was 70 years ago, and the sounds of the building collapsing and the roar has stayed with me just as vivid as it happened yesterday.

- [Jim] These were the memories of children at the time, remembering the sights and sounds, the bricks, even the pancakes.

But those who worried about whether their children were alive, and were in charge of holding families together, and rebuilding lives, those memories would be very different.

- The recovery from those tornadoes were focused on the physical recovery of buildings and neighborhoods and homes.

Those disasters took place long before the terms "PTSD" and "mental wellbeing" were defined.

But today, addressing trauma and its effects on our mental health is a first response.

(soft music) The EF3 tornado that swept through the St. Louis metropolitan area May 16th traveled over 20 miles with peak winds reaching 152 miles per hour.

At that speed, people had little time to seek shelter, and it only took a few minutes to leave a devastating impact.

The physical damage is undeniable.

3,000 trees in Forest Park were ripped from the ground or damaged.

Entire neighborhoods on the north side are unlivable, leaving families with little or no means to rebuild.

These are the effects of the tornado we can see.

But living through a disaster like this can leave an impact on one's mental health that can last long after the event is over.

- You wanna make sure people are physically safe, but mentally, it does something to you also, especially when next door, or a street over, you're seeing houses flattened, like even every time we've walked through the neighborhood, we see something we didn't see the night before.

- [Anne-Marie] And that's why in the days following the tornado, the Missouri Behavioral Health Strike Team was deployed.

- You know first aid if you get hurt, right?

- Right, right.

- So this- - [Anne-Marie] Providing first aid for emotional health.

- We're really looking for those signs of distress in people, and then just gently approaching if they're ready to talk, we're here to listen, and if they're not ready, we just let them know, look for us with the vests.

We're out here in the community, and any of us are here to talk if they're ready and willing.

- [Anne-Marie] Members of the Strike Team are mental health professionals with specialized disaster response training who work for providers from around the state.

Polly works for the St. Louis Mental Health Board, and Kirsten works at Mercy.

They walk the affected neighborhoods, lending an ear to residents like Delisha George, and her daughter, Brooklyn Morris.

- You cannot mistake that sound of a freight train.

It's like it's coming at you.

And that was, for me, I was like, oh.

Okay.

That was- - [Anne-Marie] You'll carry that sound with you for- - Oh, you never forget that sound.

- The wind blowing too hard, being too much rain, that's probably, probably been something that's been spiking my anxiety for the past few days.

- [Anne-Marie] According to studies, natural disasters can have a direct or indirect pathway to impacting one's mental health.

But despite the varying risk factors, the possible outcomes, anxiety, depression, PTSD, they're the same.

While delivering psychological support to survivors and first responders in St. Louis, the Behavioral Health Strike Team has set up a command center at the Delmar Divide.

Would you say, increase that resiliency, is that the goal?

- That is the goal.

The goal is to increase resiliency, and decrease stress.

- [Anne-Marie] Beckie Gierer is the director for the Office of Disaster Services with the Missouri Department of Mental Health.

According to Gierer, early mental health interventions by frontline healthcare workers is essential to support those impacted by the tornado navigate stress and anxiety, something that's especially important for parents and caregivers.

- And it's that same thing we hear when we get on an airplane.

They tell us at the beginning of the airplane, when the stewardess does the announcement, and they talk about putting on the oxygen mask.

You have to put yours on before you put the kids' on.

And that's because we have to take care of ourselves if we wanna continue to take care of others.

- [Anne-Marie] You lose yourself.

You do that everyday anyway, I mean, it happens in everyday life, much less in a crisis.

- Absolutely.

Everything is harder in a crisis.

- [Anne-Marie] Cognitively, it can be harder to remember things, and make decisions.

Physically, one may experience headaches, body tension, trouble sleeping, emotional crying.

Behaviorally, there can be an increase in stress driven reactions that didn't exist before.

- You know, we wanna help mitigate some of that, too, and so by giving those connections, and going out and giving basic coping skills, or just providing factual information about what we know, or how to get help, that can help lessen those reactions that people have, and help mitigate that.

(soft music) - [Anne-Marie] And for those who want to help a neighbor, or even a stranger, cope with the trauma and stress from this recent disaster, a little can go a long way.

- Just ask questions, and remember kind of the we have two ears and one mouth.

We should spend 80% of our time listening to that person, and 20% of that time talking.

Anybody can do that.

- If you are struggling with your mental health for any reason, you can call the 988 Hotline.

They have trained crisis specialists who are available 24/7, and it's free, and confidential.

The May 16th tornado is just one of 117 reported in Missouri this year, the second-highest of any state in the US.

To learn more about this, I spoke with Warning Coordination meteorologist, Kevin Deitsch, at the National Weather Service.

- We're well above average for tornadoes so far this year.

Typically in a year, Missouri sees about 35 or so tornadoes, and in our area alone, so 28 counties in Missouri, 18 in Illinois.

We've seen 38 tornadoes.

So it kind of shows just, in our area, we've already exceeded what we see for typically the whole state of Missouri, and so in recent history, it's pretty unusual to see us kinda leading the country in tornado and warnings issued.

- Are there any reasons or causes why we might be having so many tornadoes this year, or is it just a fluke?

- You know, a lot of times, when we get severe weather here, what we end up getting is what we call a western shroff, which is basically a low pressure system out of the western United States, and then kind of a high pressure system on the southeast United States.

And so we kind of sit in the middle of those, and that allows these disturbances kind of to kick out from the western United States across the central part of the country and up into Missouri, so we've just seen that, and that pattern really has persisted for months now since really early March.

And so that's allowed these storm systems to track over the same areas, unfortunately, and we've been in the crosshairs of those.

- Let's talk about the May 16th tornado.

Why was this one so particularly devastating?

- I think a big part of it was just where it hit, you know, right through the heart of St. Louis, where there's just a ton of population.

It was a Friday afternoon, which to us as meteorologists, that's like a worst case scenario.

You've got a lot of cars on the roads, some schools were still in session at that time, so that's really what made this so impactful, just where it hit, and the time that it hit on the Friday afternoon commute.

- And it also was an EF3 rating tornado.

What were some other details about the storm?

- Yeah, so we rated it an EF3, which is winds of about 150 miles per hour, so just devastating winds, to any structure, really.

And it was about 22 miles long, starting somewhere near the Clayton Richmond Heights area and working its way through Forest Park, through North City, and actually across the river, and went well into Illinois up to just south of the east of SIUE, as well.

So about a mile wide, too.

That was another thing that was really particularly devastating about this tornado, was just how wide it was.

So it affected so many more people than, you know, say 100 yard wide tornado would have.

- [Veronica] Evaluating the damage from the May 16th tornado could take weeks.

- I can tell that that tree has been uprooted.

- [Veronica] Alex Elmore is a senior meteorologist.

He gave us a closer look at how the National Weather Service is assessing the tornado's path and destruction.

- There's a lot of damage that occurred in general, but there's a lot of it that we were not able to see from on the ground, just due to time restraints, road closures due to damage, and so on.

And so to get a better idea of what happened, we're going through this high resolution satellite imagery, and just looking at the scope of the damage from the air.

- We've actually gotten some drone footage, we've also got some helicopter footage.

So it just takes some time to kind of go through all of that, and we're gonna try each house, everything that was damaged, we're gonna try to assess the damage, assign it a rating, EF0 through EF3, and really kind of do a very detailed analysis of what actually happened.

- [Veronica] And in the case that sirens fail, as they did in St. Louis City on May 16th, Deitsch says there are other warning systems we can use.

- Sirens is one, weather radio here, NOAA weather service that we provide, that's a great system as well, because that doesn't rely on cell service.

It's kind of old school phone lines, and it has battery backups in case you lose power.

And then apps.

We actually have a wireless emergency alert system, so that is something that everyone's cellphones, if you're in a polygon of a tornado warning, your cellphone will go off, unless you've opted out of it, so just having those multiple ways.

So if one way fails, whether it's weather radio, whether it's sirens, or the cellphone tower didn't work, you have those other ways to back up that.

- Is there anything that we can learn from the May 16th tornado?

- I think it's just always be prepared for severe weather.

This part of the country, we see severe weather all the time, all year round, and so have those multiple ways to get warning information, and have a plan of where you're gonna go, and whether that's, a lot of people have plans for at home, but in this case, it was a Friday afternoon.

Do you have a plan at work?

Do you have a plan at school?

A lot of people were on the roads.

Have you thought about what you would do if that tornado struck you, or got in your location when you're on the road?

So just having that kind of, those things in the back of your mind as we enter these different periods of severe weather are really important.

- While the National Weather Service continued its daily operations of monitoring conditions, many in the region shifted focus to recovery.

One of those was the City Foundry's relief event, where they collected donations in support.

Kara Vaninger was there, and shows us how those donations go to those working hardest to rebuild.

- [Kara] The City Foundry's Live Art Market series kicked off on May 21st, 2025, but in response to the devastating tornado that had swept through St. Louis City just days before, it added a subtitle to its first event.

- We haven't seen this kind of impact of a tornado in the city for a long time, and normally we see it in outskirts, that kinda thing.

It's traumatic wherever it happens.

But this happened in very underserved areas.

It's gonna be really hard for them to rebuild.

We wanna make sure that we're supporting that.

This is just our first space, right?

- [Kara] 100% of net proceeds raised that evening were shared equally among five not-for-profits, and a drive-thru donation station was set up to aid the efforts of the St. Louis Early Childhood Tornado Response Team.

- So overwhelming to see in just a couple hours this space fill up like that, just, it warms my heart.

The childcare community a lot of times feels forgotten.

To see the community understand the impact that they make every day in children's lives, and to show up for them, it means the world.

- [Kara] Later that week, we followed up with two organizations that received donations from the event at City Foundry.

First, we visited one of the Early Childhood Tornado Relief hubs in Baden, where childcare providers affected by the storm can take the resources they need for their centers and their kids.

- Before this happened, we were looking at over 20,000 seats that we needed to fill the gap for families.

How do we prevent this from making it even harder to access childcare in the community?

- [Kara] Adding to the already daunting gap between need and services, some childcare centers are so damaged, the teachers and their students need to be relocated for the foreseeable future, and so we're looking at this strategically.

We can move providers into a space quickly, where they can accept children, where they feel safe.

How do we get their centers back up and running?

How do we get them the mental health resources and trauma support for them and the families that they serve?

Because this was a traumatic experience.

- These are the people who take care of everyone's children, right?

So without childcare providers, Missouri is not able to work, and so that's why we're wanting to support them, so children are in care, and families can work.

- [Kara] Our next stop was in the Greater Ville neighborhood, where we visited Love the Lou.

Executive director, Lucas Rouggly, and key leader, Jaylan Conway, showed us around the organization that sits in the neighborhood that they have both called home.

Love the Lou has been providing youth mentorship, practical resources, and more in North City since 2009.

Three years ago, they moved to their current building on North Taylor, and into the path of May 16th's tornado.

- Ripped our roof off, like completely off.

Ripped our neighbor's roof off.

- [Kara] And just a few blocks down, the devastation was even worse.

- When a tornado hit, one of the first things we were able to do was to call all of our persons of peace, which are just anchors here in North City, ask what they need, and then they immediately told us what their neighbors needed.

- [Kara] Love the Lou and the rest of the neighborhood immediately sprang into action, helping to clear streets of debris, checking in on the elderly, and delivering food and water to their neighbors, but the obstacles this community will have to face go far beyond fallen trees and downed power lines.

- I know that there's gonna be a narrative where people say, "Well, MLK and this area was already really rough," and that, yes.

Yes.

But you don't understand the blood, sweat, and tears.

These are family houses.

These are, like there's stories attached, not just for a year or two.

This is decades and decades' worth of devastation.

- My great-grandfather, I remember walking down Martin Luther King as a kid, being able to go in some of these furniture stores, pharmacies, you know, candy stores, and just to see all of it just collapsed in an hour.

- Any rebuilding effort is gonna be bittersweet.

For as much as we want to celebrate unity, and people coming together, and the goodwill, we're also just recognizing that, and just kinda mourning, what has been lost.

- [Kara] Love the Lou put a tarp on its roof and became a volunteer and resource hub, coordinating donations, deliveries, and cleanup efforts.

- Canned goods, snacks, food, diapers, hygiene stuff, you know, so it's just a little bit, show you an example of this is what we do.

- [Kara] They also continue to operate as a community center, providing a safe place and enrichment activities for young people in the neighborhood.

Students who had signed up for a new course in geospatial mapping decided to create something to help with the relief efforts.

- The idea that we had planned was for students to fly drones this week, and just kinda dip their toe in it, but they were actually able to create their own map, using this as a major issue.

- [Kara] The students created the app to track not only which houses still needed care packages, but also to store data for future restoration projects.

- This very much was, has become a cause and a purpose for our students.

I think it's really important that with the restoration efforts, that the neighbors who are here get to be the ones driving forward.

- We are going to be contesting with with building our community up, helping our community, and just restoring the great things that are here in North St. Louis, so you know, it's a little rough right now, but things will get better.

(bright upbeat music) - The recovery is far from over, and in some cases, just beginning.

We'll continue covering the community's response and the people's efforts to rebuild together.

For more information, visit NinePBS.org/resources.

I'm Brooke Butler.

Thanks for joining us.

(soft music) (soft music continues) (wind rustling) (soft music continues) - [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, and the members of Nine PBS.