Crews search St. Louis rubble, clear streets after tornado

ST. LOUIS — Rescue crews, city officials and residents on Saturday continued to sort through the wreckage of a tornado that tore trees out of the ground, ripped off roofs, and pulled entire rooms off home after home here.

Dozens of firefighters and rescue workers, who went door to door late into the night on Friday, returned Saturday for a more methodical sweep, with the help of the state’s urban rescue team.

Building inspectors deployed to determine whether structures needed demolition. Ameren workers and city staff continued restoring power and clearing streets.

By day’s end, the casualty count hadn’t changed significantly from the morning: There were five dead and about three dozen injured, officials said.

Authorities did not identify the dead on Saturday. But friends and family named two:

Juan Baltazar, 48, a father of seven, ran a Mexican street corn food truck. He was killed by a tree that fell in Carondelet Park.

Patricia Penelton, 74, was killed at Centennial Christian Church, at Fountain Avenue and North Kingshighway. She was preparing bagged lunches to hand out to those in need when the church bell tower and roof collapsed.

“The devastation is truly tremendous,” Mayor Cara Spencer told reporters at a press conference with Gov. Mike Kehoe and U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt on Saturday morning. “We are a city that is grieving.”

“This is our Katrina,” said Alderwoman Laura Keys, of the O’Fallon neighborhood. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

The storm hit the region Friday afternoon. The tornado touched down in Clayton, skipping down tree-lined streets of old stately homes west of Forest Park. It jumped across Skinker Boulevard, hit the St. Louis Zoo, The Muny theater and the stage for Shakespeare Festival St. Louis’ upcoming show “Hamlet.”

Then it turned north, boring through St. Louis communities like Fountain Park, Kingsway East and the Ville, where it devastated entire streets, shearing off second floors, shattering windows and sending trees smashing into cars below.

Officials said about 5,000 buildings had sustained damage. By Saturday evening, there were still about 66,000 residents across the region without power.

A preliminary report out of the National Weather Service rated the storm as an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale, with winds between 136 and 165 miles per hour — fast enough to severely damage even well-built structures.

Across the city’s north side, especially, resident after resident wrestled to make sense of the chaos.

In the 4500 block of St. Louis Avenue, in the city’s Greater Ville neighborhood, Stella Hunt, 70, rifled through a living room cabinet in the house she had called home her entire life.

Breezes floated through windows no longer covered by glass. Daylight streamed through a hole in the wall. Dust and broken plaster covered the couches and chairs and shelves that managed to stay upright.

Her home was the family’s — the place folks stayed when they needed a place to go. And on Saturday, some of those people showed up to help sift through the rubble, pulling out purses and clothes, boxes and photos.

“I’m doing better than I thought,” Hunt said. “I’m blessed that we didn’t get hurt.”

Meanwhile, officials gave their readouts of the disaster:

Sarah Russell, commissioner of the city’s emergency management agency, said at a press conference Saturday that the city put out a tornado watch alert hours before the storm to the 200,000 or so subscribers to its NotifySTL platform. The tornado warning, an upgraded alert, went out at 2:38 p.m. Friday, which triggered the general alerts to cellphones in the area.

Russell said the city was also looking into complaints that some residents did not hear the outdoor sirens. But she noted that the sirens are generally meant for people outside, not inside.

St. Louis Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson said that within two hours of the storm, teams of firefighters from the city and across the region had begun searches that would eventually cover 4,000 homes by 2:30 a.m. Saturday.

He said another, more technical sweep with boom microphones and cameras in the hardest-hit areas took all day Saturday.

“We’ve got a lot left to do,” Jenkerson said in the morning. He said the search “won’t leave any stone unturned.”

Spencer said city forestry crews that began clearing fallen trees Friday would continue Saturday, paving the way for traffic signal repair.

Still, parts of the street grid remained in disarray through at least midday. Traffic lights, including many twisted by the storm, were still out across the city, from McCausland Avenue in the south to Fairground Park in the north, creating some rare bumper-to-bumper traffic on the north side’s main thoroughfares. Side streets throughout the storm’s path remained blocked by broken trees.

And it wasn’t the only system hit. Blue line MetroLink trains were not operating between Brentwood I-64 and Forest Park-DeBaliviere stations, the train system said Saturday morning; Metro shuttled passengers with buses between the stops. Two bus lines, No. 41 Lee and No. 42 Sarah, weren’t running due to power lines on the roads.

Kehoe said that after the initial cleanup, the state emergency management agency would work with the city to assess the cost of the damage and come up with a number to present to the federal government for aid. Schmitt said the region’s congressional delegation would push to make sure residents get the help they need.

“We’re all very united: federal, state and local,” Schmitt said.

Aldermen were also thinking about what they could do themselves. Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, whose ward includes a swath of the near north side, said the city may need to free up some Rams settlement money to help people whose homes disappeared.

He wondered aloud how neighborhoods already suffering so much could come back.

“You couldn’t make a more compelling case for help,” he said, choking up.

Perhaps no neighborhood was harder hit than the streets around Enright Avenue, between Union Boulevard and Kingshighway.

More than 40 homes line the 5200 block of Enright. And almost all had some kind of damage. A huge tree, torn out of the ground at its roots, stretched across the street, sidewalk to sidewalk. Roofing, wooden beams and bricks piled up between cars with smashed windows and crushed hoods. The storm damaged one strip of houses so badly, it tore the roofs off five in a row, crumbled porches, and, in one, flattened a second floor entirely.

Verleen Najwa Taylor, 71, stood there on Saturday morning with her mouth open. Her home of 20 years had been destroyed.

The block, she said, was the pride of the neighborhood. They kept up their homes and cared for each other.

The family across the way had moved to St. Louis from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She rented half of her two-family flat to a Syrian family that just lost everything they owned.

“This is a nightmare,” she said.

Just down the street, Eric McAllister turned down going into work for overtime pay on Saturday to rent a chainsaw and help his old neighborhood.

The 45-year-old worked with friends to chop up a fallen tree on the block.

McAllister said the neighborhood was close-knit, like a family.

The elders had kept it up, he said, and he wanted to help them out.

“This is who we are,” he said. “We’re one big community.”

Nassim Benchaabane of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.