On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado directly hit St. Louis, Missouri, where I live. It began in Clayton, a municipality near Washington University, and passed through Forest Park, host of the 1904 World’s Fair and then into the neighborhoods to the north. The storm was a mile wide and is estimated to have done an estimated $1.6 billion in damage.
My neighborhood, and my street, and my house got clobbered. I wrote about the sensation of it in the moment for The Atlantic. At the time, I felt fortunate that myself and my family were okay (five people died in the storm), and cowed by the sublime. My mother had died earlier in the week, and the lesson
But then weeks and then months passed. Rubble remains, along with enough stark-white shrink-wrapped roofs to bring a cursed version of snow-topped charm. Every day I see devoured trees, boarded up windows. Rebuilding moves slowly; many of my neighbors and city-mates are still fighting with their insurance for remedy. I was only spared this fate through the dumb luck of having paid for extremely high-end insurance.
I’ve found it difficult to explain to people what it was like during the storm and why the recovery is so slow and so arduous. People ask you, every time they see you, “Is everything fixed?” or “Is everything back to normal?” No, it is not.
I feel like I’ve committed a massive error of imagination, but I did not previously understand natural disasters, despite thinking that I did. Nor how long disaster recovery takes. A 2024 Nature article concluded that in the wake of a natural disaster (the study covered tropical cyclones, but still) the people impacted are more likely to die for the next 15 years.. The alienation of this daily disconnect—people you work with or hang out with are unaffected; you are not—is hard to describe. A tornado, even one a mile wide, is surgical and many locals have no idea what it looks like in the impacted areas, even still. It is like living in a parallel universe. It is dissociating.
The video above was recorded by of my home security cameras on the afternoon of the tornado. The electricity went out early on; my UPS kept power running to it and it captured the full duration of the storm as it passed over us. I was inside, in the basement. You should turn the sound on.
I had been sharing this video privately, and the people who watched it found it clarifying. I’m posting it here in the hope it might offer similar clarity to others.
