Tornados n stuff in St. Louis

[zilch]

Strong winds and several tornados touched down in suburban St. Louis today.
Lots of damage and if you are flying through Lambert International Airport, there was damage there and the airport is closed.

I'm in south county so i ok... anybody else affected?

[Jeff-E]

How is Maryland Heights? I used to live there.

[zilch]

Maryland Heights got hit pretty hard.

No loss of life, but lots of property damage.

[doolbnoom]

i heard about this but didn't see it on TV and i'm sure they showed it.
glad you're ok.
twisters scare the shit out of me! i'm in a wheelchair so i'd be massively fucked!

[LtMarvel]

The storm passed through mid-Missouri a couple of hours before hitting St. Louis. There was large hail and "wall clouds" (rotating clouds that hadn't touched down). My sister-in-law got great pics.

What was ugly is that I had no idea bad weather was a possibility. It had been a quiet, but gray, day. The tornado sirens blaring was my first clue. (Oddly, they went off when my area wasn't in danger. Even the local weather people didn't understand why they were going off--other places where the storm was and headed towards, yes.)

I must say that the local media did a great job of covering the warnings. I watched the tornadic storm flow all the way to Montgomery County.

I can't imagine anything more scary than being in a jet plane on the tarmac when the tornado hit. Someone wrote that they heard a passenger describe the plane being picked up thirty feet in the air and then dropped and pushed to the side.

A newspaper account had a church group watching "Passion of the Christ" when someone received a text message that a tornado was in their suburb. The group got to the basement one minute before the tornado destroyed the upstairs. Over 2,700 buildings had serious damage.

People at the airport described being pushed against the wall. (One of the networks had security video showing stuff being blown in the main hallway while people tried to get to the side.) Someone posted that two baggage handlers were partially outdoors; one got his head slammed into a wall about twenty feet from where he started, the other managed to hang on to something.

In the 1890s, St. Louis had its deadliest twister (called a cyclone then). No real warning systems in place, of course. The twister carved a path approximate to I-44 today and killed over 500 people. If the eyewitness report of a barometer reading is correct, the change in air pressure was greater than Hurricane Andrew.

That would have been an f5. 2011's tornado is being described as an f4; yet there were no fatalities.