Tornado recovery in St. Louis is a mess. The city blames Trump's FEMA changes

Summary

Podcast Summary: Consider This from NPR

Episode Title: Tornado recovery in St. Louis is a mess. The city blames Trump's FEMA changes
Date: November 16, 2025
Host: Sacha Pfeiffer (NPR), with local reporting from Hiba Ahmed (St. Louis Public Radio)
Duration: ~15 minutes

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Main Theme

This episode explores the ongoing disaster recovery in St. Louis, six months after a devastating tornado struck in May 2025. The discussion critically examines the changes to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) policy under President Trump’s administration, which shifted disaster response responsibility from federal to state and local governments. St. Louis serves as a key “test case” for this policy, and the episode highlights both the deep struggles of affected residents and the systemic gaps in aid and preparedness.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Recap of the Tornado’s Devastation

• The tornado was nearly a mile wide, with winds of 152 mph, and lasted about 27 minutes.
• Impacts: Over 5,000 buildings affected, 4 deaths, dozens injured, and damages exceeding $1 billion.
  (00:18, 00:21, 00:44)
• Its path most severely affected North St. Louis, a predominantly Black area, amplifying existing inequalities.
  (06:01)

2. First-hand Accounts of Survival and Damage

• Larry Powell (local resident and Marine veteran) describes surviving by sheltering in a bathroom:

  "If I had not jumped in that bathroom, I'd have been Swiss cheese." (00:44)

• Hiba Ahmed and Sacha Pfeiffer tour destroyed neighborhoods, describing devastation that appears "locked in time," with many houses still in ruins, windows boarded, and even residents living in tents.
  (05:21–07:54, 13:09–13:27)
• Kim Holt, another homeowner, recounts waiting months for any assistance:

  "Why did it take you three months after I applied to call me as if you think we're still standing in the same position?" (14:41)

3. The Fallout of FEMA Policy Changes

• Under Trump's new policy, states and cities were asked to manage tornado recovery with minimal FEMA support.
• St. Louis Mayor Kara Spencer expresses frustration:

  "We have all been frustrated and disappointed with FEMA's failure to drive the response." (01:30)
  "There is a huge gap in what residents need and what we've been able to provide... just an enormous gulf of need." (10:11)

• Local officials created new roles, like Chief Recovery Officer Julian Nix, but lacked resources and experience to keep up with the community’s needs.
  (08:52–09:56)

4. Barriers to Aid for Residents

• Residents faced complicated application processes, documentation hurdles (such as homes inherited without clear titles), and slow or denied assistance from both FEMA and city programs.
• FEMA approved aid for 9,300 people and $50 million to residents, but officials and recipients say this barely scratches the surface.
  (09:56–10:37)
• The episode illuminates that uninsured and lower-income families are effectively left behind, unable to navigate “layers of applications and paperwork.”
  (09:16, 09:23, 09:38)

5. The Local Response and Its Limits

• The absence of robust city-led programs or disaster protocols meant nonprofit groups and residents themselves performed essential cleanup and recovery tasks, despite lacking training or resources.
  (11:59–12:42)
• The city’s inexperience resulted in “a deep learning curve,” leading to delays and significant suffering.
  (12:47–13:46)

6. Broader Reflections on Disaster Preparedness

• Mayor Spencer and local officials challenge the philosophy of pushing all disaster preparedness to municipalities:

  "As a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize and share the resources and expertise..." (11:17)

• The administration’s aim to “wean off of FEMA” puts vulnerable communities at greater risk, especially before local and state governments possess the necessary infrastructure.
  (10:48, 11:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• Larry Powell:

  “If I had not jumped in that bathroom, I'd have been Swiss cheese.” (00:44) “Why FEMA has not offered any assistance... They have you dripping through so many hoops.” (08:37)

• Kara Spencer (Mayor):

  “We have all been frustrated and disappointed with FEMA's failure to drive the response.” (01:30)
  “There is a huge gap in what residents need and what we've been able to provide—that is unequivocal...” (10:11)
  “As a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize...” (11:17)

• Hiba Ahmed:

  “Do you need a natural disaster to happen first before you realize what type of infrastructure you need to respond?” (12:53)

• Kim Holt:

  “Why did it take you three months after I applied to call me?... How do you think that's possible?” (14:41)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00–01:18] – Overview of tornado devastation, summary of destruction
• [04:01–05:45] – On-the-ground accounts and visual descriptions of damaged neighborhoods and structures
• [06:26–07:54] – Details on home and community damage, effects on local residents
• [08:10–09:38] – Residents’ struggles with FEMA and city bureaucracy
• [09:56–11:17] – Insufficiency of aid, structural issues in disaster response, Mayor’s critique of FEMA policy shift
• [11:59–12:42] – Nonprofit and community response, lack of city preparedness
• [13:09–13:46] – Everyday realities: residents still living in tents, scale of ongoing crisis
• [14:05–14:41] – Kim Holt’s story: delays and denials of assistance

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Conclusion

St. Louis’ experience demonstrates the profound effects of shifting disaster recovery to local authorities without adequate infrastructure or federal support. The episode highlights gaps in assistance, administrative hurdles, and how vulnerable communities bear the consequences. The hosts and guests urge reconsidering disaster policy to ensure efficient, centralized support—before another city must learn these lessons the hard way.

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Transcript

[Narrator / NPR Host]

It's been six months since a tornado ripped through a densely populated part of St. Louis last May.

[Sponsor Announcer]

More than two dozen are dead across.

[Hiba Ahmed]

Kentucky, Missouri and Virginia after a storm sent tornadoes through these states over the week.

[Kara Spencer]

St. Louis Mayor Kara Spencer called the.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Devastation, quote, truly tremendous and said an.

[Kara Spencer]

Estimated 5,000 buildings were impacted.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

The storm was nearly a mile wide and stayed on the ground for about 27 minutes. By the time it was over, it had killed at least four people in St. Louis. It injured dozens more. It also left more than a billion dollars of destruction. That includes more than 5,000 damaged and destroyed buildings from homes to local businesses. One of the thousands of people living in the path of a tornado was Larry Powell.

[Larry Powell]

I heard debris hitting the house and, you know, I recognized, you know, tornadic activity. And I jumped in the bathroom across the hall, which put three walls between me and the tornado. I knew that if I had not jumped in that bathroom, I'd have been Swiss cheese.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

President Trump declared the tornado a major disaster a month later. That opened up critical federal assistance. And it also created an important test case for the Trump administration's new push for states, not fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency state to manage the response to disasters. The mayor of St. Louis, Kara Spencer, says the city didn't yet have the infrastructure in place to respond adequately.

[Kara Spencer]

I have been frustrated, we have all been frustrated and disappointed with FEMA's failure to drive the response. Providing housing, providing food, the logistical nightmare that was immediately apparent in the hours, certainly days and weeks following the tornado that we were building as we went.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Consider the president says he wants a local, not federal, approach to managing emergencies. But having to fill FEMA's shoes so quickly has left a significant void while people are desperate for help. We went to St. Louis to see what's happening as communities find they're not getting the type of response from FEMA.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

They once expected.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

From npr.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Hi, I'm Sacha Pfeiffer.

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[Narrator / NPR Host]

It's Consider this from NPR. From NPR News, this is All Things Considered.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I'm Sacha Pfeiffer.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

When a tornado with winds of 152 miles an hour hits St. Louis in May 18, it was one of the first major natural disasters of the second Trump administration. And it became a key experiment for the administration's new policy on federal emergency response. Under President Trump, the burden of the recovery process is meant to shift from FEMA to the states. St. Louis residents say they've become the guinea pigs in this experiment, and thousands of them feel at best in limbo and at worst abandoned. I went to St. Louis this week and drove along the path of the wreckage left by the storm. With me was Hiba Ahmed, a reporter for the local NPR member station, St. Louis Public Radio.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

So the tornado basically tore down the.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Path of this road and took down.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

All the trees in its path?

[Hiba Ahmed]

Pretty much, yeah.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I mean, it is like line of stumps. You can tell the trees used to be almost a wall or a shield and they're just all gone sheared off.

[Hiba Ahmed]

I mean, this is kind of like an icon street in the city that is just it's completely changed.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Yeah.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Hiba reports on education for St. Louis Public Radio. And in the six months since the tornado hit, she's been visiting and revisiting affected neighborhoods to track how residents are doing.

[Hiba Ahmed]

But this right here is Soldan International Studies High School. It's a magnet school in the St. Louis Public School system. And it's home to, you know, over 300 students. But this school is closed. If you look, there's tons of boarded up windows. You know, the district has shared that this school, probably the repairs on it, are not going to be done until next December, December 2026.

[Larry Powell]

Wow.

[Hiba Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

More than a year.

[Hiba Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Is there any chance they won't reopen it at all?

[Hiba Ahmed]

Possibly.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Tornadoes aren't new in the Midwest, and St. Louis often gets grazed by them. But the last time a tornado of this ferocity hit the city was in 1959. That one killed 11 people. This time there were fewer fatalities, but thousands of people were and continue to be severely impacted. St. Louis's famous Forest park lost thousands of trees. And many of the multimillion dollar homes along the park's perimeter are still missing roofs. But the tornado nailed the northern section of the city the hardest areas that are majority black. And that has exacerbated what were already severe local inequalities.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Look at that one. That's a huge brick apartment building. Almost every window boarded up. You can see a toilet. The entire bathroom is exposed to the outside.

[Hiba Ahmed]

There once was a garage, maybe a home or something here.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I am shocked that this is so many months after the storm and it just feels like it's been locked in time.

[Hiba Ahmed]

This church, the stained glass.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Oh, is all shattered again. Six months later, the glass is still out and they're entering winter.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Hiba and I drove slowly along Enright Avenue. Up close, the damage was even more revealing.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I mean, this one is even hard to explain. The entire side of the house is missing. You can see the stairs case leading from the first floor to the second floor roof gone.

[Hiba Ahmed]

There's a lamp that's still sitting there.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Somehow it didn't fall open. That's absolutely amazing how tornadoes work. Front door, mostly gone. Front porch, mostly gone. Second floor, gone. Piles of brick.

[Hiba Ahmed]

This is a neighborhood of residents who primarily own their homes. They've been here a long time, and many of them want to rebuild. And that's why you see a lot of the boarded up windows, you see the piles of bricks. Here's scaffolding on a home. Oh, wow. They've made a lot of progress on this home. So if I can just give you an idea, this side of that. This entire wall of this home was.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Gone and they fixed it. Yeah, but across from them, these houses look. I mean, they need a ton of repair. It's gonna be a lot of money. Hard to know how many of these will eventually come back.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

We met Larry Powell, a Marine Corps veteran, on the uprooted sidewalk in front of his property.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I'm sorry this happened to your house.

[Larry Powell]

I am too. This was gonna be my retirement home before I go to the Marine Corps boot camp in the sky.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

He said he's better off than some of his neighbors who didn't have insurance. But FEMA made it difficult for him to get financial help.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

You said FEMA'S been disastrous.

[Larry Powell]

Why FEMA has not offered any assistance. Numerous people have applied to female and they were declined. And they have you dripping through so many hoops.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

The chief Recovery Officer for St. Louis, a position created after the tornado, is Julian Nix. He says a lack of critical services caused lots of confusion.

[Kara Spencer]

FEMA didn't do door to door knocking. They did not have their typical operations where people do door to door to reach. So there are some people who didn't come into our disaster assistance centers. We, we know that. We also know that there are a bunch of people who did and they got frustrated with the paperwork and the process.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

According to Nix, the layers of applications and paperwork required to get assistance caused some residents to quit the process entirely.

[Kara Spencer]

You have to bring reimbursements of all your receipts and things like that for people impacted by a tornado. You're not tracking receipts.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Another problem he highlighted is that documentation is more difficult for people whose home was passed down to them by family members.

[Kara Spencer]

Think about taking a family that makes less than $40,000 a year who is uninsured, and then you go tell them after they just lost generational home that they inherited that hey, you need to provide more insurance paperwork or hey, this title still has your grandmother's name on it. And because of that, you're not eligible because you're not the title owner.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

FEMA has approved assistance for more than 9,300 people in St. Louis, but those relief funds haven't been enough. And Mayor Kara Spencer says the city didn't have enough time to develop a disaster response while, while it was in the middle of a disaster.

[Kara Spencer]

There is a huge gap in what residents need and what we've been able to provide that is unequivocal, just an enormous, a gulf of need that we have been unable to meet at this time. We have secured individual assistance from FEMA of over $50 million that have gone directly to residents. Not nearly enough to make their lives whole, their homes whole.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

NPR and many other media outlets have done reporting on FEMA over the years that exposed waste, inefficiency and bureaucracy at the agency. Earlier this year, President Trump promised reform.

[Larry Powell]

We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Trump said in June that FEMA would immediately, quote, give out less money to states recovering from disasters. The agency's overall capacity was depleted after DOGE cuts eliminated a third of its staff. We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages fema, to ask about the new policy, but we haven't heard Back. Mayor Spencer questions the logic of having every local government be disaster ready.

[Kara Spencer]

My argument would be that as a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize and share the resources and expertise across the nation for very unusual events, rather than saddling every single municipal government to being able to respond to what may or may not happen in the lifetime of each of those cities.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

As Hiba and I drove along the 23 miles of the tornado's path, I asked her what it's been like living through a test case.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

The administration wants to shift responsibility away from FEMA to states and cities. How is that going for St. Louis?

[Hiba Ahmed]

I mean, you know, honestly, Sasha, in the early days of this storm, the city did not have the infrastructure to be able to respond to a disaster like this, and they've been really open about that. Mayor Kara Spencer, you know, she was in office for maybe just over a month when the storm hit, and there were not emergency protocols to be able to deal with this level of devastation. So it was the local non profits that stepped in. And these are nonprofits that are not trained in disaster recovery, but they stood up, you know, doing what they could to stack some of these bricks or clear the sidewalks or clear the tier, the tree debris, just so that people could just feel a little sense of normalness.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Could it be that once that system gets running and cities learn how to.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Do this, it will work?

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

But. But because St. Louis is one of the first, they're really having to. They have a deep learning curve.

[Hiba Ahmed]

It could be, absolutely. But it feels as though, you know, do you need a natural disaster to happen first before you realize what type of infrastructure you need to be able to respond? And what if the natural disaster is something like this, where it takes out.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Homes completely, hundreds of homes, maybe more? The scale of this is actually hard to believe. It's just a wasteland in a major American city six months after a storm came through. Yeah. Oh, there's a resident who's living in a tent in front of their house. Mattress.

[Kim Holt]

Wow.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Another tent. People are tenting in their front yards.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Yeah.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

Feels like we're in that uncomfortable between stage where the federal government is trying.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

To figure out how to do it better.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

And meantime, we have a city in great need, and the new approach hasn't quite been figured out yet.

[Hiba Ahmed]

Exactly. And in the meantime, you know, it's the local communities that have to step in and fill that gap, which they're really not equipped to do.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Hibba and I stopped again to talk with resident Kim Holt. She and her husband, Eli, are trying to hold onto the home they bought in 2011.

[Kim Holt]

We have put a lot of work in it. This is almost like the second time it's been renovated. It's just that at this point we didn't intend on doing the roof if we were going to do a renovation again.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

Their roof was torn off during the tornado. Their home suddenly opened to the sky.

[Kim Holt]

We had to get a whole roof put on first and then gut out the inside, holt said.

[Narrator / NPR Host]

They applied for FEMA assistance but were denied. So they turned to city programs, but that came too little, too late. Months after the storm hit, she finally got a call back about having her roof tarped.

[Kim Holt]

I said, you gotta be kidding me. I said, you know when the storm was right? Why did it take you three months after I applied to call me as if you think we're still standing in the same position. We were blessed not to be. But how do you think that's possible?

[Narrator / NPR Host]

President Trump promised to phase out FEMA by the end of this year and give it a much smaller role in responding to disasters. St. Louis residents like Kim Holt and Larry Powell have seen what that means and tell me they feel like they're fending for themselves. They're doing what they can before winter comes. This episode was produced by Avery Keatley in collaboration with Hiba Ahmed and Jason Rosenbaum from St. Louis Public Radio. It was edited by Sarah Robbins. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenig. It's Consider this from npr.

[Sacha Pfeiffer]

I'm Sascha Pfeiffer.

[Sponsor Announcer]

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