When it comes to preparing for disaster, Americans have often lived in denial.
Take tornadoes. A common myth in the nineteenth century was that they never hit big cities. An 1887 article in Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper said that because a large city “bristles with rods and spires, and is covered by a netting of electric wires,” this would likely repel tornadoes.
But on May 27, 1896—125 years ago today—a tornado a half-mile wide tore through the heart of St. Louis, then the nation’s fourth-largest city. At least 255 people died and more than 1,000 were injured. The upper span of the landmark Eads Bridge collapsed, sending huge granite blocks crashing to the railroad tracks below. The entire electric streetcar system was disabled, and some 7,500 buildings were either destroyed or badly damaged.
The human suffering was appalling. Some persons not killed by flying debris died in fires sparked in the aftermath. Two-year-old Oliver Bene was burned alive as his mother, trapped under heavy fallen beams and unable to reach him, watched in horror.
Some 200 funerals were held on Sunday, May 31, in houses of worship that survived the storm. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the mournful “mingling of life and death” at St. Patrick’s, East St. Louis, as 130 Catholic children, many of them bandaged and limping, were confirmed by the bishop as bells tolled for the dead across the city.
In the weeks after the disaster, the ongoing agony of victims belied a narrative of civic boosterism as the local press touted the city’s rapid recovery. Under pressure to host the Republican National Convention as scheduled in mid-June, St. Louisans worked day and night to patch up the urban infrastructure. “After the storm, the sunshine,” declared the Post-Dispatch on June 3. “In a few weeks, the scars which Nature’s violence inflicted … will be healed.”
The cheerful spin fit a long American pattern of overconfidence before the forces of Nature. Even a storm as big as “the Great Cyclone,” as locals called it, would soon be forgotten by other Americans.
But the lesson of the St. Louis Tornado is that no city is immune from natural disaster. And while technology in some ways has made us safer—there was no weather radar in 1896—it has also made us more vulnerable, increasing our reliance on electricity, for example, to power our digitally dependent society.
That’s why the Biden administration’s announcement this week of $1 billion in new spending to help communities prepare for disaster is welcome news. The federal infusion comes none too soon as climate change has increased the frequency and destructiveness of wildfires, floods, and other hazards. In 2020 alone, the United States experienced a record-breaking 22 disasters costing over $1 billion each.
Recent history has again reminded us of the potential for destruction in major cities. The two costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, Katrina (2005) and Harvey (2017), exposed the extreme vulnerability to flooding in New Orleans and Houston.
Given the urgency and scale of the dangers, some experts have questioned whether the $1 billion in new federal spending is enough. But as Daniel Kaniewski, FEMA’s deputy administrator for resilience in the Trump administration, told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times, it’s “a down payment to reduce future disaster impacts.”
I’d add that universities also have a major role to play. Research institutes such as the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware and the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder are more important than ever as we try to be proactive, rather than merely reactive, in the face of threats to our collective future.
© 2021 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Illustration credit: Library of Congress
Bibliographical Note
Details on the St. Louis Tornado are from Peter J. Thuesen, Tornado God: American Religion and Violent Weather (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 93-100. The quote about “rods and spires” is from “Tornadoes and Large Cities,” The Inter Ocean (Chicago), August 7, 1887. Daniel Kaniewski is quoted in Christopher Flavelle, “Biden Doubles FEMA Program in Preparation for Extreme Weather,” New York Times, May 25, 2021. For an incisive historical analysis of the most notorious big-city disaster in modern U.S. history, see Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915-2015 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).