Heartbreak

North St. Louis · May 2025

On Friday, May 16th, 2025, at about three in the afternoon, a mile-wide tornado cut a scratch through North St. Louis. It was given a preliminary EF3 rating two days later. Bricks flew at 150 miles an hour and went clear through cars and buildings. Over six thousand homes were destroyed or majorly damaged, with more than ten thousand structures damaged in all. Seven people were killed here. Fifty-five tornadoes touched down across the Midwest and South over those two days.

It hit the redlined neighborhoods almost exclusively. Academy-Sherman, Jeff-Vander-Lou, The Ville, Fairground, Fountain Park, Penrose, Kingsway West. Forest Park, Lindell and Dutchtown were hit as well. For weeks those blocks were living in the post-apocalypse, surrounded by relative normalcy in every direction.

Most of the houses were uninsured. That isn't because this is a community that doesn't want to insure its homes.

I wasn't there as a photographer, not really. I was there because I live here. I sat with residents in the shelters, swallowed my nerves up on sketchy roofs, racked up splinters at distribution sites, ate cold sandwiches and empanadas on tailgates, cracked a beer in a backyard with a family, and — against every instinct — sat in meetings. I kept a camera in the car and shot when I could. Many of these were made on a phone.

What I want the pictures to carry is this. Nearly all of the first clearing was done by hand, by neighbors. Within hours there were pop-up meal sites on the sidewalks — a plastic table, somebody cooking on a grill behind it. If you were out hauling debris to a curb, there was a good chance a stranger would pull over and hand you a hot meal. ActionSTL stood up a feeding and distribution hub at O'Fallon Park. 4TheVille, InvestSTL and Dream Builders for Equity ran an operation out of 4144 MLK. The Urban League, its own office damaged, kept a six-day-a-week hub going with a line of cars a mile long, three weeks after the storm.

It bears underlining that this was the people's response. I was there throughout and can say firsthand that it was as if we had no government at all — city, state or otherwise, not in any sense that mattered.

Some of the people in these frames. Kevin, one of a couple dozen carpenters who volunteered their time tarping roofs. Brandon, out of Local 42, working for Dream Builders — or for whoever; affiliations stopped mattering much once you were up there. Matt, who walked up to us in Fountain Park, said he wanted to help and asked if he could come out the next morning, and then did exactly that. Jessica of Dream Builders, smiling because she did not want her picture taken. And a man building a tiny house for a neighbor who had lost everything, out of supplies from the emergency depots, who asked me not to use his name because the structure wasn't legal.

Fifteen months on, I still don't have a tidy way to say what this did to me. I wrote at the time that it had changed my life and that I didn't know how yet. I still don't, entirely. What I'm sure of is that being let in that close was a privilege, and that I missed far more than I caught. I wish I could have given it my whole attention.

That season never really let up. Tornado alley is shifting eastward, widening, running longer each year. This is not a problem for the 2050s. It is a problem for next year, and the year after.

(The thoughts expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of any organization.)