A tornado tells a bigger story

My town was struck by historic tornadoes yesterday and a storm is coming for you too.

An afternoon of shock

We had heard there was a potential for severe weather yesterday. It’s been a very strange few months in the St. Louis area. Record rains in April always seemed to just spring up suddenly. Yesterday, we heard there was a chance of bad storms then supercell thunderstorms rolled through.

My fiance’ had to abandon her shopping cart and take shelter in a parking garage. Kids were waiting for school busses and pick up. It went from sunny and warm to torrential rain and a monster tornado rolling through historic Forest Park, the Central West End, and North City.

It’s never happened before.

Ever.

This is a shocking picture of what they are calling a “wedge tornado” making its way from southwest to northeast across the city…from the Gateway Arch.

The videos and pictures of the damage are shocking for someone who grew up here and returned four years ago only to fall in love with our historic, and challenging, city and region.

Even our world class Zoo took significant damage but it appears all the animals are safe and there were no injuries.

St. Louis Zoo damage

As of this morning five people are reported dead in the city and power is out to at least 100,000 with no forecast on when it will return. Whole streets are inaccessible from debris and trees blocking the streets. One one street every single car on a six block strip were damaged or destroyed.

All I could think about this morning was how the last four months of insanity, years of neglect from the state of Missouri, and a city that has little to start with, will manage all of this.

I don’t have much hope for us and I have less for our future as a nation.

The next storm may not be predicted at all

Did you know that we are now short of enough weather forecasters to provide 24/7 prediction and management of weather stations? We weren’t four months ago then DOGE came in and Russ Vought at OPM froze hiring and fired thousands of probationary employees.

From the New York Times….on Thursday.

Instead, a few weeks later, the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk reshaping the federal bureaucracy, delivered the same order to the Weather Service that it has across the rest of the government: Make cuts. A lot of them.

Through layoffs and retirements, the Weather Service has lost nearly 600 people from a work force that until recently was as strong as 4,000.

The reductions cut across two vital functions of the agency: the work of collecting the data used to make forecasts, and the people who turn that data into crucial warnings when extreme weather is on the way.

Here is the part that will break you if you watched what I did yesterday in my hometown.

Now the cuts have led to a staffing crisis so dire that at least eight of the department’s 122 offices will soon no longer have forecasters working overnight, said Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees.

“It’s not a chain saw,” said John Sokich, a former director of congressional affairs for the Weather Service. “They’re using a hand grenade.

For weeks it’s been the talk of our region how it was strange how inaccurate the weather forecasts have become. Days that were predicted to be partly sunny ended up being thunderstorms. Cool planned afternoons turned into heat domes.

They nuked the most effective weather service in the world for “savings.” These are supposed to be businessmen. Do they not understand ‘return on investment?’ The answer is they do.

They are willing to let us suffer, die, lose businesses, crops and more from unpredicted weather.

They won’t help us after either.

The recovery won’t be FEMA

One of the top targets for Trump and his evil minions has been FEMA from day one. Whether because of the ugly stream of lies about federal support for disaster response in ‘red’ states or truly hateful twisting of grants to prevent damage from storms as being “woke or DEI” they have gutted a world class disaster response.

CNN from March:

Last week, FEMA employees received an email titled “Hiring Update,” which outlined a new process, effective immediately, requiring that the majority of the agency’s workers, many of whom hold 2-to-4-year term positions, be directly approved by Secretary Noem’s team in order to be renewed for another term.

The positions mentioned in the memo, obtained by CNN, include most of the public-facing roles that help deliver assistance to communities during disaster response and recovery. They hold a wide range of responsibilities, such as verifying disaster damage, operating recovery centers and helping victims register for aid.

“It’s practically everybody that goes out in the field,” a FEMA official said. “They are the backbone of the response, particularly in sustaining operations.”

The impacted positions, according to the memo, include the Cadre of On-Call Response Employees (CORE), Reservists, Local Hires, and Temporary Fulltime Employees.

CORE and Reservist employees make up roughly 74% of FEMA’s workforce, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

Since that time Trump has refused to provide Federal disaster assistance to North Carolina and Arkansas. The White House as announced that they want states to help themselves and “have an appetite to do so.”

The states will have an appetite to do their own recovery, huh? Missouri’s GOP has no appetite to help St. Louis at all…or anyone for that matter.

Missouri Republicans aren’t interested in governing at all

Now Trump has said its the states problem. You might think that there is good news at least for Missouri. As it turns out the state is sitting on a billion dollar plus surplus of funds! They started the just concluded legislative session off sitting on over $2 billion in extra money.

So, obviously, there is plenty of funds to improve the states aging infrastructure, help our major cities improve life for their residents, and generally make life better for average Missourians.

I’m kidding…they want to protect guns.

But, in a bizarre twist the Missouri Republicans in the House decided not to pass the annual construction bill. They literally worked on it all session and then decided that they didn’t like the vibe of digging halfway into the surplus to build things.

I’m not kidding.

They literally decided that they didn’t like the idea of spending money. I’m not going to bore you with the details, but they just acted in the most cowardly way imagineable and simply adjourned. They didn’t tell anyone. So, now the state simply won’t build new National Guard facilities, city water projects across the state, health clinics, and dozens more.

They just didn’t want to spend the money.

So, why on Earth would they spend money to help recover a city they have declared war on for over 20 years as being full of ‘liberals and gang bangers?’ A city they smear constantly. A city they literally just decided to take over the police department of and demand the city itself pay the state for their own police services.

St. Louis has faced decades of economic flight. White citizens have left for the county. Businesses have evaporated. The pandemic killed whatever downtown office development had been finally growing and large swaths are almost ghost towns.

…and the state hates them. They aren’t going to help anyone in St. Louis.

So, now what?

As residents walk among the wreckage of their town with massive trees blocking the streets, bricks strewn everywhere, cars destroyed, vital services lost, and businesses closed all we can ask is, who will help?

The purpose of government is to provide scaffolding for the building of a society. Over 250 years we have built a system that is a leader in the world for providing opportunity at all levels.

There are massive holes in it all. It is barely working for many Americans at all but we had always been committed to finding ways to make lives better for all of us with our own political lenses to what that might mean.

Then came Trump, Musk, Miller, and the most rotten of them all…Russel Vought. Hell bent on destroying whatever structure they could to dismantle the government and turn us over to the oligarchs and businesses.

A tornado went through my town yesterday, and no one in this entire country is going to help us….and the ones that should are fine with that.

Are you angry yet?

Because your turn in the barrel is coming. I’m not on Medicaid. I’m not trans. I’m not research scientist. I’m not a woman.

We just had a storm.

It’s coming for all of us. It’s time you started fighting back.

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All new ‘Too Late to Cancel’ tomorrow with Ken Casey of Dropkick Murphys, Public Defender and Creator

Eliza Orlins

, and comedian

Brittany Carney

.

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Author’s Note: Thank you to all of the new paid subscribers! We are closing on 500! I’m excited to add special paid subscriber events starting next week with a special Zoom to discuss the latest events and answer your questions. In light of the crazy moment and worries about all of our budgets being tighter I’m offering an “It’s May” discount so we can grow the community. It’s our most generous ever with 25% off all paid subscriptions….forever! I hope you’ll jump on this opportunity and I will post the invite for our first paid subscriber event on Sunday evening!