Just before a tornado descended on St. Louis with a roar — killing five people and injuring dozens during its sweep through the city on Friday — there was a silence where there should not have been.
There was no wailing warning from the city. No high-pitched alarm. Nothing to warn the city’s residents and send them scrambling to their basements or bathtubs. Only wind.
The city’s sirens to warn people of a tornado threat were never activated by the City Emergency Management Agency, and a backup to activate the mechanism that is operated by the Fire Department was broken.
Mayor Cara Spencer has placed the city’s emergency manager, Sarah Russell, on paid administrative leave while an investigation is conducted into a series of failures, Ms. Spencer’s office said in a statement issued on Tuesday. The mayor’s office also said that it had changed the protocol for activating the warning system as a result of what had happened.
The city’s emergency management agency “exists, in large part, to alert the public to dangers caused by severe weather, and the office failed to do that in the most horrific and deadly storm our city has seen in my lifetime,” Ms. Spencer said in her statement.
Ms. Russell could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.
City officials confirmed that one of five people killed in Friday’s storm was outside when the tornado ripped through St. Louis. About 40 people were injured in the storm, but city officials did not know how many of them were outdoors when they were hurt.
St. Louis was among the cities hit by raging storms that produced tornadoes late last week, tearing through the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions. At least 28 were killed.
According to the mayor’s office, Ms. Russell was not at the emergency management office — where the button to activate the tornado warning alarms sits — but blocks away at a training session when the storm hit, despite earlier forecasts that warned of severe weather.
On Friday, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for the St. Louis area at 2:34 p.m. Central time. Nine minutes later, at 2:45 p.m., a tornado was confirmed, moving east over St. Louis at 50 miles per hour.
Ms. Russell placed a call to the Fire Department, hoping to pass the baton, but the message was muddled and unclear, the mayor’s office said.
“The directive to activate the sirens was ambiguous, which cannot happen when a tornado is sweeping through our city and St. Louisans’ safety depends on being alerted immediately,” according to the statement.
Even if the message to sound the sirens had been clear, the Fire Department’s button itself was broken. That malfunction was discovered only on Tuesday, during routine testing after the tornado damage, the mayor’s office said. It was Ms. Russell’s job to make sure that the system was working properly, the city said.
On Tuesday, Ms. Spencer signed an order to change the siren activation protocol in order to avoid similar failures in the future. The plan includes giving the Fire Department sole responsibility to activate the siren from an office that is staffed at all times.
Mark Walker is an investigative reporter focused on transportation. He is based in Washington.
The post Warning Sirens Were Silent Ahead of Deadly Tornado in St. Louis, City Says appeared first on New York Times.
