The St. Louis Tornado or The Great Cyclone of 1896 took place on Wednesday, May 27, 1896, just after 5:00 pm. This tornado was not only the single worst disaster in St. Louis history but the St. Louis Tornado was one of the most destructive and deadliest tornados in United States history. The storm caused approximately one hundred million dollars in damage to the City of St. Louis and East St. Louis. In today’s dollars this would equal about two point nine billion dollars in damages. It would take decades for St. Louis and East St. Louis to fully recover from the devastation.
The day of the storm it was relatively calm and most people did not notice the dark clouds moving in. There was a sharp drop in temperature and the storm erupted
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catching most people off guard and without warning. By today’s ratings, this tornado would have been categorized as a F4 on the Fujita Tornado Damage Scale, which is used to rate the severity of a tornado with numbers from zero to six. It is based on the level of damage caused to man made structures in the tornados path. The St. Louis Tornado was part of a major tornado outbreak across the central United States on the 27th that continued across the eastern United States on the 28th causing damage in many other States such as Oklahoma, Texas and Illinois. The tornado lasted anywhere from twenty to twenty-five minutes and it swept a wide winding path through St. Louis crossing the Mississippi River into East St. Louis eventually cutting a ten-mile long path of destruction. The tornado first touched down in St. Louis near the City Poor House on Arsenal Street, just east of Hampton Avenue. Approximately one thousand three hundred of the city’s elderly and poor lived there at the time. The tornado caused heavy damage to the building but no loss of life. It also tore off part of the roof of the Female Hospital across the street and narrowly missed the St. Louis Insane Asylum again with no loss of life. The tornado then hit Tower Grove Park and Shaw’s Garden (today this is called the Missouri Botanical Gardens) knocking down and uprooting hundreds of trees and plantings. The Liggett & Meyers Tobacco Company on the edge of the park was constructing a new building and many ironworkers who were up on scaffolding when the storm hit were knocked off and killed either by the fall or the debris that landed on them. The Lafayette Park neighborhood was one of the places that was hit the worst during the tornado.
Lafayette Square Park was the City of St. Louis’s first public park. The forty plus year old trees in the park and many of the large homes and churches that surrounded the park were completely destroyed in only a few minutes. Pieces of the main bandstand in the park were found four hundred yards from where it once stood. Lafayette Park did not recover for decades after the storm. “The 36 acre park was turned into a wasteland of trees and stumps” (Source 3). The tornado made a direct hit on the Lafayette Park neighborhood.
The path of the tornado continued along the route of today's Interstate 44 to The City Hospital complex, completely destroying the hospital’s crematorium and ripping off roofs of many other buildings. The hospital had more that four hundred patients at the time but only minor injuries were reported. The tornado continued to get stronger as it moved east into the Soulard neighborhood where its worst damage occurred. Many people lost their homes and some lost their lives as houses and apartment buildings were destroyed killing at least twenty-one
people. The pressure and high winds of the tornado caused St. John Nepomuk Church in Soulard to
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explode. The tornado moved on to the St. Louis riverfront where it damaged or destroyed over twenty riverboats of various sizes and uses. One boat, called The Anchor Line, was thrown all the way across the river and destroyed on the Illinois riverbank. The Eads Bridge was also damaged in the storm as it moved across the Mississippi River near where the Arch now stands into East St. Louis. Two baggage cars from a train crossing the bridge were knocked off the track and many wagons full of supplies were blown off the bridge and destroyed on the ground below. The City of East St. Louis was flattened including the police station and the courthouse and over one hundred people lost their lives there. The St. Louis, Vandalia, and Terre Haute Railroad Depot rail yards were also hit hard. It is reported that fifteen of the thirty-five workers at the depot were killed and that the survivors found their boss wandering the yard in shock. Once the tornado finally moved out of the cities of St. Louis and East St. Louis, they looked nothing like they had just twenty-five minutes earlier. The St. Louis tornado completely destroyed three hundred eleven buildings in the St. Louis area and damaged ten thousand five hundred others, some of them severely. Huge fires erupted fed by wood burning stoves that were knocked over and wood from destroyed buildings in both St. Louis and East St. Louis. Luckily, most of the fires created by the tornado were put out by the two and a half inches of rain that came later that night. The tornado officially killed one hundred thirty-seven people in St. Louis City, one hundred eighteen people in East St. Louis, and another tornado killed thirteen people in Illinois. It is assumed that the death toll was really much higher because of the great number of people who lived in shanty boats and houses that were destroyed along the edge of the river and whose bodies were never recovered because they were carried down river. After the storms dissipated, thousands of people emerged to start looking for loved ones and other survivors.
There were many death stories reported in newspapers but almost no survivor stories. The night after the storm, diggers found a young girl named Ida Howell cradled in her mothers arm's but sadly they were both dead. However, searchers did find a woman alive after spending two days under the rubble. Many newspapers reported that people who were not physically harmed by the tornado still died from "fright" and "shock." After the storm, mourners crowded many sidewalks and roads for days outside of morgues looking for loved ones. The Post Dispatch noted, “All over the city bells were tolling for the dead” (Source 2).
People came together in the weeks after the storm and slowly started to clean up and rebuild the houses, churches and factories that were damaged or destroyed. Once the telegram lines were fixed and the rest of the country found out what had happened in St. Louis, outside people came to help. Because of the efforts of the people of St. Louis, the city was able to host the 1904 Worlds Fair just eight years after this devastating
tornado. One hundred and nineteen years after the St. Louis Tornado, Soulard is a vibrant community full of homes, businesses and restaurants. Lafayette Park has its tall trees and big homes back. Shaw Park (Missouri Botanical Garden) is one of the top botanical gardens in the country drawing thousands of visitors to our city every year. St. John Nepomuk Church in Soulard was rebuilt and is one of the oldest Czech Roman Catholic Churches in the world. The City Hospital still stands and has been repurposed and renovated into a large condominium complex. Today, it is hard to believe that The St. Louis Tornado ever happened or that two hundred fifty-five people lost their lives here.
The history-making documentary footage made available by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has been subjected to careful analysis. As noted by Grazulis (1993; pp. 879-880), the tornado in question was part of an outbreak in Kansas on that day, including a violent killer tornado near Clyde, Kansas, and a "barn shifting" F1 tornado in Rooks county. It seems that shifting human structures was a common feature of tornadoes on that
In the article by Jeff Piotrowski and the article on the Joplin Tornado: Evil Swirling Darkness, explains that the Joplin tornado took out the city of Joplin, Missouri. The tornado came into the town of Joplin on May 22, 2011 and was about a mile wide. Fires were attacking the city and homes from broken gas lines, and many people were buried alive in their houses. The fire department was gone and no one could find any police to help. Neighbors helped neighbors, pulling each other out of the ruble. Over 125 people had died all from being trapped and suffocated, to be cut open by sharp objects that fell. In the end many people had died and were injured during the tragic tornado that came through and left Joplin in horror and terror.
On May 22nd, 2011 a massive tornado hit Joplin, Missouri killing 162 people and injuring 1150. With wind speeds of 322km/h, the tornado made a total cost of over $2 billion for the city. 8000 structures were destroyed, 2000 of which were homes. Many people were left homeless. The tornado held an incredible EF5 rating on the Fujita scale, measured from the amount of destruction. The tragic event lasted 38 minutes, from 5:34 pm to 6:12pm. Cool wind from the Rockies in Canada and warm wind from the gulf of Mexico formed into a supercell thunderstorm creating a tornado in Kansas. The tornado rapidly moved into Joplin and continued on its 35 km path.
The reasons why there was such a high number of fatalities was because of the magnitude of the tornado, its path through a heavily populated area, the people having a desensitized attitude toward the tornado warnings, the lack of safety facilities, and the mistake by the National Weather Service. First, the magnitude was just so large that it wiped out everything in its path. EF5 tornados winds exceed 200 mph which are deadly. Second, Joplin has thousands of residents and could have killed many people. Third, the people did not react to the first siren that went off because they were ...
In the late summer of 2005, a terrible tragedy occurred that changed the lives of many in the south-east region of the United States. A Category 3, named storm, named Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August and led to the death of 1,836 and millions of dollars’ worth of damage (Waple 2005). The majority of the damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. Waple writes in her article that winds “gusted over 100 mph in New Orleans, just west of the eye” (Waple 2005). Not only was the majority of the damage due to the direct catastrophes of the storm but also city’s levees could no longer hold thus breaking and releasing great masses of water. Approximately, 80% of the city was submerged at sea level. Despite the vast amount of damage and danger all throughout the city, officials claimed that there was work being done to restore the city of New Orleans as a whole but many parts, and even the people, of the city were overlooked while areas of the city with higher economic value, and more tourist traffic, were prioritized along with those individuals.
In conclusion, the deadliest and most devastating U.S. tornado outbreak of the 20th century was the April 3–4, 1974, “Super Tornado Outbreak.” It lasted 16 hours and at least 148 twisters tore up 2,500 miles of Earth through 13 states over a 24-hour period, according to the National Weather Service. The "super outbreak," as meteorologists now call it, left 330 people dead and 5,484 injured. Property losses were placed at $600 million and only ten of the thirteen states that were hit, were declared a disaster area.
With the winds and waters sweeping away taking away people’s lives and property the storm made it to be one of the costliest in the history of America. According to FEMA:
On May 4, 2007, the town of Greensburg, Kansas was devastated by an exceptionally strong tornado. With maximum winds estimated to be in excess of 205 miles per hour, and leaving a damage path as wide as 1.7 miles, the storm would go on to be rated a rare EF5, the first recorded in the United States since 1999. When the storm finally subsided, 95 percent of Greensburg had been destroyed, killing eleven people.
One obvious reason that this hurricane was so devastating was due to weather patterns. Harvey was originally just a tropical storm, but jumped from a category
Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters to happen in the United States. The storm resulted in more then US$100 billion in damage when the cities flood protection broke and 80% of the city was flooded (1). The protection failure was not the only cause for the massive flooding, the hurricanes clockwise rotation pulled water from north of New Orleans into the city. 330,000 homes were destroyed and 400,000 people from New Orleans were displaced, along with 13,00 killed (1). Although the population quickly recovered, the rate of recovery slowed down as the years went on leading us to believe not everyone
Hurricanes are born over the warm waters of tropical oceans and are formed by a low-pressure system caused by the heating of water. The heat causes the air to rise and form lower pressures in a feedback loop, making the hurricane stronger. Heavy rain results from a condensation of water and strong winds develop from warm air rushing to the eye of the hurricane. Essentially, greater storms and winds occur when the hurricane feeds of the rising temperature of the water. In addition, researchers studied disturbances and intense thunderstorms in the atmosphere over Western Africa and believe they are partly to blame for extreme hurricanes affecting the United States and Canada. While these are all the main ingredients of a perfectly natural process, they were not the primary causes of the damage done by Hurricane
About a week later a tornado razed a better part of North Houston. It brought rain. It brought hail. It upended cars; it flooded houses. And in its trail it left fallen branches and trees, and removed, in whole, one tiny tomato-onion-potato-and-green-bean garden located behind my garage.
Every year many natural disasters happen around the world. In New Orleans, and several other states, a devastating hurricane struck. High speed winds and major flooding caused many people to lose their homes and even their lives. Many people have heard of hurricane Katrina, but not everybody knows what caused it and the affect it had on the United States.
Tornadoes are one of the deadliest and most unpredictable villains mankind will ever face. There is no rhyme or reason, no rhythm to it’s madness. Tornados are one of the most terrifying natural events that occur, destroying homes and ending lives every year. April 29th, 1995, a calm, muggy, spring night I may never forget. Jason, a buddy I grew up with, just agreed to travel across state with me so we could visit a friend in Lubbock. Jason and I were admiring the beautiful blue bonnets, which traveled for miles like little blue birds flying close to the ground. The warm breeze brushed across the tips of the blue bonnets and allowed them to dance under the perfectly clear blue sky. In the distance, however, we could see darkness. A rumbling sky was quickly approaching.
Astonishingly, About 90 percent of the deaths that occur during hurricanes result from drowning in floods, and The world’s worst hurricane (for loss of life) took place in 1970 in Bangladesh. That hurricane created a flood that killed more than one million people. Now, we have a hurricane coming right towards us! I will discuss the destructive part of tornadoes, the past damages, and injuries sustained and hopefully persuade you to be more opening to evacuating our city.