St. Louis’ emergency management chief has been placed on administrative leave, the city’s mayor said, after sirens meant to sound during a tornado warning failed to be activated ahead of Friday’s deadly twister.
Sarah Russell, commissioner of the City Emergency Management Agency in St. Louis, will remain on paid administrative leave as an external investigation proceeds into what went wrong.
St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer already ordered an internal probe in the immediate aftermath of the siren failure, when National Weather Service radar indicated that a tornado touched down between 2:30 and 2:50 p.m. local time. It initially struck near central St. Louis before ripping through the area, with officials estimating some 5,000 people were affected.
Five people in St. Louis were killed in the severe weather, officials said. Spencer described it as “one of the worst storms — absolutely.”
There is a system of 60 outdoor sirens stationed around St. Louis, which are meant to be activated once the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning for the area as it did on Friday. There are two places where they can be activated: the CEMA office and the Fire Department.
According to Spencer’s office, which announced Russell’s leave Tuesday, the commissioner was attending an offsite workshop with other emergency management staff when the tornado warning came down, and that prevented them from activating the sirens from their agency’s main building, about a half mile away.
Russell instead contacted the Fire Department to activate the sirens, but the directive was ambiguous, the mayor said. Her office released the recording of Russell’s call to the department, in which she confirms they are aware of the NWS warning and briefly clarifies the timing of it before saying, “OK, you got the sirens?” The person at the fire department replies “Yes, ma’am,” and the call ends.
“The direction was not clear,” Spencer said at a news conference Wednesday morning about the phone call. Russel did not clearly direct the person at the Fire Department to press the button to activate the sirens, she said, adding, “It’s my understanding that the button was not pushed.”
However, even if someone had pressed the button at the Fire Department, city officials learned Tuesday that the button was not working.
“Work to repair the button began Tuesday afternoon and is expected to be completed within days,” Spencer’s office said.
The button at the CEMA office was functioning, and Fire Department personnel will be stationed there 24/7 to activate the sirens if needed, the office said.
Spencer also signed an executive order Tuesday to change the siren activation protocol, putting the Fire Department solely in charge of activating the warning system. While the standard operating procedure for activating the sirens says the primary activation point is located at the Fire Department headquarters, the de facto protocol had been that CEMA would activate the system at its office and contact the Fire Department if it could not.
“With the mayor’s executive order, this lack of clarity has now been eliminated,” Spencer’s office said.
Until a permanent replacement for Russell is found, St. Louis fire captain John Walk will serve as the interim emergency management commissioner.
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