When a high-speed tornado struck St. Louis, Missouri, mid-afternoon on May 16, Mary Crawford was caring for toddlers and babies at an early childhood center in North St. Louis. The staff and children, who had prepared for the event with routine tornado drills beforehand, made an orderly line in the windowless hall. What no one could prepare for was the extensive, unprecedented damage to solid brick homes and trees, structures that had held for over 100 years.
While Crawford sheltered with the children, her neighbor called to tell her the tornado had hit her home. When she arrived home an hour later, she found her roofline crumbling and fallen trees blocking the front and back doors. Despite the imminent danger posed by the massive trees that had fallen on power lines and homes on her block, she did not see police, fire, or other emergency personnel at the scene. Crawford’s son and brother cleared what they could, and her friend bought a tarp at a hardware store to lay on her damaged roof. Members of her church sawed the fallen trees. Without electricity or a stable roof, Crawford’s house was uninhabitable, and she moved into her daughter’s house for what she hoped was a few days.
“My family has owned this house for sixty years,” says Crawford, who grew up in this home and moved back fifteen years ago to take care of her ailing mother. She inherited the house and lived there with her son and brother at the time of the tornado.
“Everyone on my mother’s side came to this house when they moved up from Mississippi,” she says. “They would live here until they found their own place. It was our safe haven. Anyone who was going through something knew they could come to the house.”
A few days after the tornado, the tarp blew off Crawford’s roof during a rain storm. “Water was pouring into my front hall like a waterfall,” she says. “There was standing water in my kitchen, and my walls and floors were puckering.” The water soaked into the foundation and created mold, and eventually, one week later the second story collapsed.
Mary Crawford
Mary Crawford’s brother and son clear debris from the front of their home immediately after the tornado, May 2025.
But as of June 30, six weeks after the tornado and four weeks after the house collapsed, no one from the city of St. Louis had contacted Crawford directly.
City safety personnel remained focused on crime. “Our focus was on controlling the looting,” explained a seasoned St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department officer assigned to North St. Louis, who was not authorized to speak on the matter. “People were stealing copper wire and bricks in the places north hit by the tornado. Wire and old, solid bricks are valuable.”
During the first few days after the tornado, the St. Louis Urban League, a social equality and civil rights organization, along with other mutual aid organizations drove down Crawford’s street with hot meals and cleaning supplies. Samaritan’s Purse, a private aid organization founded by evangelist Billy Graham’s son, contacted Crawford a week after the tornado and put her on a waiting list for help with repairs and restoration. Months after the tornado, she was still waiting. The Red Cross donated $350 to her after she applied online for assistance.
Crawford says she does not want to lose her home, but the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs could be prohibitive. After the tornado, she discovered that her homeowners insurance policy covers damage from fire and flooding, but not from wind, meaning her insurance will not cover the repair costs. “I hope financially that I am able to get the work done on my house so that I can keep it in my family,” she says.
Before reaching Crawford’s house in North St. Louis, the tornado spun through the western part of the city. While Washington University in St. Louis business professor Bart Hamilton sheltered in a campus parking garage, a black swirl of 155-mile-per-hour wind hit his historic home in the the Central West End neighborhood.
After the tornado subsided, he went home, where his wife and daughter had sheltered in their basement, and saw his neighborhood upended by the damage. “All the 100-year-old trees [were] uprooted by the wind and debris [was] everywhere,” he says. “My neighbor’s roof blew off. Someone’s HVAC landed in my front yard.”
In Hamilton’s neighborhood—where the median income is nearly double that of Crawford’s neighborhood—public and private emergency crews arrived immediately. “The fire department came right after to make sure no one was trapped in the house,” Hamilton says. “They went house by house within two hours of the tornado. Private company workers that were on the street working at the time of the tornado started to help clean debris. One of them climbed on my roof right away to help secure it.”
Hamilton, whose home was built around the time of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, has had a positive experience with city officials. His homeowner association representative talked to their alderperson, Shameem Clark Hubbard. “I am happy with the Mayor of St. Louis’s response,” Hamilton says. “She reached out to all the political officials at all levels to help people get back in their homes as quickly, as safely as possible.”
Before hitting St. Louis, the tornado originated in Clayton, a suburb bordering the city to the west. Becky Patel, a Clayton alderperson, was also at work when the tornado hit her house in Clayton, and arrived home to find three uprooted pine trees resting on the side of her 104-year-old brick home, her slate roof smashed, and her gutters, windows, and an air conditioning unit all destroyed.
As in Hamilton’s neighborhood—but not Crawford’s—help arrived immediately in Clayton, where the median income is more than triple that of Crawford’s neighborhood. Patel recalls that within a few hours after the tornado, she saw city personnel walking through the neighborhood to assess damage, as well as firefighters, EMS department staff, and emergency personnel from surrounding suburbs.
One day post-tornado, more home repair professionals reached out to Patel. Within three days, her broken windows were boarded, a crane had come to take the trees off her house, and private contractors were swarming the neighborhood to offer their services. “My hope,” says Patel, “is that I can return my house to its original state, and that insurance will help me do this.” She’s also focused on restoring the beauty of her neighborhood. “It’s not a matter of money. You can’t replicate old trees. How do we think about this as an opportunity without dramatically changing our neighborhood?”
Patel says she paid for all of the necessary repair services out of pocket—except for the tree removal, which was done by the city—and received word from her insurance company that she would be reimbursed. “I asked for help and I received it,” she explains. “My insurance company told me to focus on securing the home.”
According to Ray Porter, a longtime property owner and landlord in North St. Louis, there’s a common narrative within the city that North St. Louis residents often don’t have insurance and fail to maintain their houses. This stereotype, he says, is inaccurate and only distracts from the true causes of devastation in the neighborhood. “People have insurance, they just can’t always get full coverage because they are refused it,” Ray explains. “But more importantly, the real issue is that you can’t pay off with insurance the price of restoring these old brick houses with three layers of solid brick.”
“The tornado hit the richest part of St. Louis, and then it turned north, and hit the poorest part, literally one mile away,” the St. Louis police officer recalls. “People in the wealthy areas paid for their own cleanup and to get things fixed. In the poorest areas, [homes] and buildings are destroyed. Entire blocks are gone. These are houses handed down from generations. We look at the devastation. I don’t think it comes back for a long time. A lot of residents won’t return.”
Within one week of the tornado, the city of Clayton reported that with the help of city crews and the generous support of nearly twenty neighboring municipalities, Clayton’s intensive debris removal operation was ahead of schedule.
“We are so fortunate to have partnerships with other county municipalities to help each other,” says Patel. “I wonder what we can do as a region to ensure that others have the same quality of experience, expertise, and response.”
One month after the tornado, Crawford’s house continued to deteriorate. Workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not arrive in St. Louis until four weeks after the tornado. They conducted a two-hour assessment of the damage, and then said it would be at least twenty days before they followed up. Crawford says that the house is still without electricity; the electric company refuses to fix the damage done to her electric box, and she cannot afford the $6,500 repair cost.
In the aftermath of the tornado, dozens of North St. Louis residents slept in tents outside of their crumbled homes for more than a month. City officials estimate that 10,000 buildings were damaged by the tornado. Federal aid through FEMA was activated by the White House on June 9, and capped at $42,500 per home for assistance.
The Army Corp of Engineers also arrived in St. Louis a month after the tornado to “craft a cleanup plan for post-tornado debris still littering the North side.” That same day, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed a bill to allocate $125 million for recovery aid in St. Louis—as well as a bill to approve $1.5 billion of incentives intended to keep the Kansas City Chiefs in Missouri. St. Louis City officials estimate the costs of the tornado damage at $1.5 billion.
“I hope people that need help are not neglected,” says Hamilton. “I think there is a greater interest across the political spectrum to work together to help people get their livelihoods back. When disaster strikes, it doesn’t matter who you are, people work together. Local community is really what it takes to get back.”
Six weeks after the tornado, Patel and Hamilton have each returned to their homes. As of now, Crawford is living with her daughter in her one-bedroom apartment, waiting to hear about the possibility of government or private aid; her brother is living with other relatives, and her son is staying at a hotel. The tornado hit their three neighborhoods, which are within just six miles of each other, in the span of ten minutes. Two of those neighborhoods are on the road to a full recovery, while residents of the North side are still waiting for answers.