In the evening of Apr 22 a pretty good tornado came through the St. Louis area. Something above 100 houses were destroyed and the main airport has a bunch of terminal damage and will be out of commission for a day or more. As of now it appears nobody in the area was killed but a bunch of people had serious injuries.
Anybody around here have any personal stories?? Here’s mine:
I live about 25 miles west of the airport. As a pilot I’m an honorary amateur weather geek.
The hook echo of the storm passed directly over my house shortly before dusk. I was monitoring it for about 30 minutes before it got to us & we were actively in tornado lookout mode as it passed. Our local warning sirens went off twice, but there was no radar or visual data to support that decision. We had heavy rain, no big blast of wind, no rotation and intermittent hail of walnut-in-shell to golf ball+ size. No great volume of hail thankfully, and no obvious damage in our neighborhood. Winds never topped 20-ish knots, but were blowing the wrong direction, which was attention-getting.
After the storm passed the light was really weird, sort of a yellow color which greatly enhanced the green of the trees & grass lit by the setting sun. Got a good look at the back side of the cell as it departed the area. We knew it was gonna kick somebody’s butt in the next few minutes.
About 20 minutes later it spawned the EF3+ tornado which made the news.
The tornado passed three or four miles north of where I live. Sirens went off two or three times for me. I don’t know if they’re set up for local activation or if it is a county-wide system. Lots of fire station activity afterwards, presumably going to help out Maryland Heights. Creve Coeur skated between the two major storm centers; all I know of was a metric boatload of rain–didn’t even hear any hail.
This wasn’t *that *color. I’ve seen that color. And this was after the storm was past & the sun was shining.
Funny the national media are all reporting about the airport damage & nothing on the destroyed subdivisions. Meanwhile the local news is all over the wrecked houses.
It’s funny to watch 3 news channels struggle to keep up a constant patter for 12 hours now when there’s not that much to say. “See the flattened pile-o-2x4s Jane?” “Yes Bob. Oh, it’s just awful!!” Lather rinse repeat ad nauseum.
We live in Overland, about four miles from the airport. We missed all the drama, being in a church service in Clayton during the storm. The sirens went off three times during the service (and once during rehearsal) but nobody blinked an eye (other than the music director dropping one of our pieces from E to E-flat because the sirens blow on a B-flat). Apparently Good Friday is more important than not dying.
It wasn’t until we got home and went online and turned on the TV that we knew what was going on. No damage in our neighborhood.
Plenty of damage all around me… A relative lives directly across from the bridgeton police station next to the airport but she was lucky… Friends businesses were destroyed, another relative’s job got hit but I don’t think he is complaining… I’m in Florissant so I didn’t have any problems but I’m very close to the damage… Here comes another storm tonight and tomorrow, lets get prepared
I’ve seen that weird post-storm light once in my life. I’d left my college apartment to get food and everyone was standing outside the storefronts (and Larry’s Bar) staring and pointing at the vivid green traffic lights and grass. The other crazy thing is that it muted red, so the red traffic lights and red cars looked brown. Crazy stuff.
