St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer says she feels validated by the findings of an external investigation into the early days of the city’s response to the May 16 tornado.
“We lived through this,” Spencer told reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday. “Many of us were there through this. So it was validating. We knew there were issues. We knew there were failures.”
The report by the law firm Carmody MacDonald, released Monday, documented “multiple cascading failures” that started with more than a third of the sirens being broken even before the storm and ended with City Emergency Management Agency Commissioner Sarah Russell being absent from the emergency operations center and often difficult to reach. It also found the city’s emergency operations plan was more than 20 years old and confirmed confusion over who was responsible for activating the outdoor warning system.
Spencer placed Russell on leave May 20 after learning that they and their staff had been away from the office at a seminar and unable to activate the sirens. Russell has said the responsibility for primary activation has always rested with the St. Louis Fire Department, but Chief Dennis Jenkerson has consistently disputed that. The report itself revealed confusion among fire department personnel about which city agency had responsibility for siren activation.
The report made a series of recommendations that included more money and staffing for CEMA and moving the agency under the purview of the fire department. It also suggested that until CEMA has the necessary personnel, the city needed to develop an incident response protocol to make sure that people have the authority to act in an emergency and that those people know how to follow federal emergency management protocol.
Spencer said her administration was taking the recommendations seriously and planned to implement them going forward. And 14th Ward Alderman Rasheen Aldridge, the chair of the Board of Aldermen's budget committee, said he looked forward to working with the mayor to get CEMA the funding and staffing it needed.
“Climate change is real. The storms are only getting worse. That means we also need to plan for it ahead of time so that moving forward, we are ready,” he said.
The mayor, he added, “has a track record of showing that she wants to work with the board post tornado, so I'm confident that she understands the need to happen right now.”
Any change to CEMA funding for this year would require a supplemental budget.
Russell wrote on Facebook last week that they had a disciplinary hearing on Monday and that they expected the result was a foregone conclusion. Although Spencer did not address Russell’s employment status directly on Tuesday, she spoke of “putting in place a permanent, longtime, long-term director of the emergency management system that will help us really staff that office out.”
