“It’s not an organization or the government doing this work. It’s the
everyday community.”
Rapper and activist Antoine White
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Planning, response, and recovery is a LOCAL effort and responsibility that takes the whole community to be involved to take ACTION.
If the community don't get it, they never will due to reliance on outside entities to blame and point fingers. Times have changed, approaches and solutions with actions must change. Community engagement and participation is one possible answer.
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St.
Louis Mayor Cara Spencer suspends CEMA commissioner after tornado siren
failure Posted: May 21, 2025 / 06:13 AM CDT
Updated: May 21, 2025 / 10:32 AM CDT
Read full story here
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https://capitalbnews.org/st-louis-tornado-black-communities/ Sirens Failed. FEMA Didn’t Show Up. Now Black St. Louis Recovers from Deadly Tornadoes Alone. Just weeks before, Trump slashed nearly $1B in disaster aid meant for Black and low-income neighborhoods. 
 The sky turned an eerie green over St. Louis on May
16. Rapper and activist Antoine White, better known as
T-Dubb-O, recognized the ominous hue immediately. Having family in the heart
of Tornado Alley in Tennessee, he knew what was coming. With his wife and son
beside him after a school field day lunch in Clayton, a suburb of St. Louis,
he made the split-second decision to flee north, away from the city. Even
though a tornado hadn’t hit the city in two generations, he didn’t want to
risk it. No tornado sirens wailed and no emergency alert pinged on
his wife’s phone. But as White’s car barreled through gridlocked traffic,
behind them, an EF-3 tornado carved a 12-mile scar through the area’s Black
neighborhoods. Its 150 mph winds peeled roofs from schools and homes where
many residents lacked basements to hide. Five victims — including three
children — died in collapsed buildings that a responsive alert system might
have evacuated. Generational Black businesses like The Harlem Tap Room and thousands of buildings
were damaged or destroyed.
In total, across Missouri and Kentucky, the system of
tornadoes left at least 27 people dead over the weekend and dozens of people
trapped and injured in their homes. It comes just two months after at least
42 people lost their lives to a tornado system across eight states in March,
with the most deaths occurring in Missouri and Mississippi.
In these storms’ wake, a brutal truth is emerging for
Black residents: The nation’s emergency systems — from crumbling siren alerts
to gutted federal programs — have left its most vulnerable residents
dangerously exposed. From last year’s Hurricane Helene to this year’s wildfires, America’s emergency
alert and disaster preparedness system isn’t keeping up. “We’re sweeping up the ashes again,” White said two days
after he witnessed tornadoes scar his hometown. “We’re dealing with disasters
every day, in the aftermath of Ferguson. We’re dealing with poverty on an
everyday basis, lead-tainted water, and violence.” “That all plays a role in people’s ability to navigate
this disaster,” he added. Climate change is altering the atmospheric conditions that produce tornadoes — such as increasing heat and humidity, shifting storm seasons, and moving tornado-prone regions eastward — though scientists have not found a direct, consistent link between rising global temperatures and either the overall frequency or intensity of tornadoes, due to complex factors including limited long-term data. As of four days after the tornadoes touched down, the
federal government had failed to offer any recovery assistance, said St.
Louis Mayor Cara Spencer. The agency said they will touch down in St. Louis
on Wednesday, five days after the disaster struck.
Just weeks before, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, designed to fund disaster-resistant housing and proactive infrastructure, had been axed by the Trump administration. Nearly $1 billion meant for Black and low-income neighborhoods is gone. At the same time, the administration is actively working to shutter FEMA as it currently operates. For communities already navigating the everyday
disasters related to poverty, history lays bare a lethal equation: Climate
change plus systemic neglect equal catastrophe. A St. Louis resident
documents the damage caused by tornadoes that hit the community May
16. (Antoine White) “The system is continuing to fail people,” said White,
adding that the deadly weather is far from over. More severe storms were
expected to roll across the central U.S. this week: thunderstorms and
potentially baseball-sized hail across the Midwest, heavy mountain snow in
the West, and triple-digit heat across the South. “We’re asking people to prepare for this weather. Please
find a safe place to go while the weather is coming in,” said St. Louis Fire
Chief Dennis Jenkerson about the approaching weather, calling on residents to
take in their neighbors who lost their homes to the first set of storms.
“It’s going to take your help to get through this next wave of storms.” Ultimately, White said, it is the resilience of the
community that will keep Black St. Louis whole. “We’ve seen some of the most treacherous neighborhoods in
the city come together. It’s a lot of gang treaties that’s happening under
the scenes that people aren’t talking about. A lot of unification,” he said. “It’s not an organization or the government doing this work. It’s the
everyday community.” Research shows the pattern in St. Louis is repeated across America:
Tornadoes strike communities with larger Black populations harder, then
exacerbate racial segregation through displacement or abandonment in the
aftermath. In North St. Louis, where residents were already “sweeping up the
ashes,” residents said the storm brought another layer of institutional
neglect: While neighbors rushed to help neighbors, pulling each other from
rubble and sharing what little remained, federal assistance was absent. St. Louis’ emergency management agency had known about
gaps in its siren coverage since at least 2020, when residents began
reporting dead zones through the city’s 311 system. Yet when the tornado
struck, half of the city’s North City neighborhood reported hearing no
alerts, a failure Mayor Spencer called “unacceptable” during a May 18 press
conference. The city’s NotifySTL system, which is touted as a modern backup
to aging sirens, relies on smartphone access, yet half of Black St. Louis
households lack reliable internet and more than 10% of the
city doesn’t have access to smartphones. It is a
national issue. Earlier this year when the Eaton Fire rolled through the
Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, the area’s lone Black neighborhood
also failed to receive emergency alerts. More than two-thirds of the lives
lost to the flames were in that single neighborhood. Last year, a Harvard study found predominantly Black
counties receive 23% less per capita in FEMA funding for warning systems than
their majority-white counterparts. In St. Louis, as volunteers distributed bottled water and
food in neighborhoods demolished by nature, the grim irony of the situation
deepened for White. Many residents hadn’t needed disasters to experience
scarcity. “We were giving people water not because they didn’t have
pipes, but because they couldn’t afford it before the tornado,” said White,
who organizes efforts through HandsUp United. His observation aligns with
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that shows that only 37% of Black households possess emergency
supply kits. The gap stems partly from cost because a FEMA-recommended kit
averages $300, researchers concluded. The tornado exposed how decades of redlining and
disinvestment compounded weather risks, residents have said. In St. Louis’
Central West End — where median incomes top $90,000 — less than 15% of
buildings sustained major damage. In Jeff-Vander-Lou, a Black neighborhood
with 45% poverty rates, 9 out of 10 structures were destroyed. Nationally, tornadoes cause 40% more property damage in
majority-Black counties despite similar wind speeds, a 2023 Journal of Economic Studies analysis found. As J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of
Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, told Capital B in 2023, “Tornadic
storms will continue to become more frequent in the South and the Southeast.
We’ve created a big problem for ourselves because of our poverty and income
gaps, which have decided how sensitive a community is to destruction
and how able they are to bounce back.” Federal policy amplifies these divides, advocates have explained. The Trump
administration’s March 2025 cuts eliminated 2,000 FEMA positions, including
30% of community preparedness staff. As St. Louis scrambled to recover, Congress remained
deadlocked over the Weather Act, a bill that would fund new radar systems
capable of detecting tornadoes 10 minutes faster than current technology.
Reauthorizing the Weather Act will allow the National Weather Service to
contract for more sites and expand coverage to additional Midwestern and
Southern cities. Local residents hope the storm doesn’t level a final blow
to Black homeownership. Already in St. Louis, white residents are roughly twice as likely to own their homes compared to
Black households, even though the city is roughly half Black and half
white. Marshell Smith’s aunt, Stella Hunt, lost her house to the
tornadoes. “I pray the insurance company do her right. You pay and pay, and
they make these rules,” said Smith about the ways that insurance payouts
historically carve out Black neighborhoods. Her family’s story was featured
by Humans of St. Louis, a community documentarian page about local
residents. Predominantly Black ZIP codes face 23% higher insurance premiums due to
discriminatory risk assessments.
“I had my wedding reception here at this house. There were flowers, peach trees, grape vines. It was beautiful, just beautiful,” Hunt said in the interview. “I would love to see all the damage in St. Louis rebuilt. I know this won’t be able to be repaired. I don’t think my house will ever be recovered.” |
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