Duck and Cover! Tornados and Severe Thunderstorms in STL

  Imagine you’re me, eight years old, sitting way in the back of a big yellow school bus with inadequate suspension, bouncing up off the fake leather and foam seat every time we hit a bump and singing along to “99 bottles of coke on the wall”. It’s another muggy, hot, summer afternoon in St. Louis, Missouri. Clouds have closed in since we left the pool, but they haven’t made the air any cooler. The bus is rumbling down a narrow road in a forested park. A breeze stirs that heavy humid air. All of a sudden, the temperature drops and the wind picks up, ripping leaves off trees and tossing small branches through the air. The sky turns yellow, then black storm clouds rush in. It starts to rain. Drops beat the asphalt and the sky gets darker and darker. Soon it’s difficult to see the road ahead of us.The bus slows and then stops. Red automatic lights turn on inside the bus because outside the windows it is as dark as night. Inside, each elementary schooler is quiet, holding their breath. Gusts of air rattle the window panes, tree limbs creak and snap. The bus rocks gently from side to side. For a moment I thought the wind would roll us over, but then, as quick as the storm came, it was gone. The wind died down, the clouds cleared, and we carried on driving like nothing had happened. And eventually, after a few shocked minutes, we continued “99 bottles of coke on the wall”. 

    This summer squall was not severe enough to justify a warning siren or be classified as a tornado, but it was certainly enough to scare the heck out of a bus load of eight year olds and knock down the eighty foot oak tree in my neighbors’ back yard. It fell straight down our driveway. A handful of feet in either direction would have smashed a house.

    Severe thunderstorms and the odd tornado are a fact of life in St. Louis. Every few months of school we’d file out of our classrooms, and practice for a tornado to pass over, kneeling with our heads towards the wall, hands covering our necks. We were thoroughly indoctrinated with safety procedures:"Get underground!" "Get in your bathtub and pull a mattress over you!" "never take shelter under an overpass!", and "leave your car and lie in a ditch!" Several times a year the tornado sirens really do sound and everyone files to their basements to wait until the coast is clear, and winds rip up trees, and hail smashes cars, but in my lifetime, and long before that, St. Louis has been spared significant damage and loss of life. For folks who've lived in St. Louis for many years, tornados start to seem like less of a big deal than people make them out to be. Tornados in other places kill people, sure, like that twister in Joplin in 2011, but nothing reeeeally bad ever hits us. A 2011 tornado busted out the windows in the airport, but few were hurt and none were killed.

    However, if we look a little further into the past, right on the edge of living memory, my school’s paranoia starts looking very reasonable. On Sept 29 1927, a giant tornado swept through downtown St. Louis, killing 78 and injuring 550! On top of that, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "more than 460 homes were destroyed and [...] 800 heavily damaged in the city." The storm tossed cars and leveled houses across the city! 

    In a truly tragic anecdote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "a dog named Tiddles led searchers to his master, William Farnoff, whose body was found beneath two feet of broken brick at 4222 McPherson Avenue."

    But even the catastrophe of 1927 was nowhere near as intense as the tornado of 1896, known as “The Great Cyclone”. This tornado was hugely powerful and “would most likely be rated as an EF4 today, with winds estimated between 168 and 199 mph”. The twister “killed at least 255 people and injured another thousand.” and “caused as much as $25 million in damages—approximately $700 million today”!

    The power of this tornado was terrifying! “The tornado also uprooted trees more than half a century old and hurled them several blocks. Heavy iron fences [...] were twisted and tangled until they were nearly unrecognizable. The tornado even shot a shovel six inches into the trunk of a tree.” Wow!!

This incredibly scary Harper’s Weekly Magazine illustration, from an artist who claimed to be an eyewitness, shows the cyclone tearing across the Mississippi. This Thanksgiving I'll be thankful for modern weather prediction technology and deep deep basements.

O'Neil, Tim. “Sept. 29, 1927: A Massive Tornado Rips through the Heart of St. Louis, Killing 78 in Barely 5 Minutes.” STLtoday.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 29 Sept. 2020, www.stltoday.com/news/local/history/sept-29-1927-a-massive-tornado-rips-through-the-heart-of-st-louis-killing-78/article_7d13acbe-58bf-525b-b50d-560506df7324.html. 

“On This Day: The Great St. Louis Tornado of 1896.” National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 21 Aug. 2018, www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/great-st-louis-tornado-1896. 

The Great Cyclone of 1896, St. Louis Public Library, tornados.slpl.org/index.html.