At a tornado response meeting in July for St. Louis Wards 13 and 14, Gwen Hudgins directly asked St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer to drop a dumpster off on her block in the Ville neighborhood to collect the lingering debris from the May tornado.
She told Spencer at the town hall that many homes near the 3000 block of North Newstead are flattened and that piles of rubble are scattered across yards. Spencer told her that she would work on figuring out how to get a dumpster to her block.
To this day, Hudgins has not seen a dumpster from the city in her neighborhood, nor has the debris from her tornado-destroyed home been removed from her front lawn by the city. The only help she has received so far has been from Grassroots Redeeming Love, a community nonprofit working to assist tornado survivors in north St. Louis.
“The first time I met her was at a city town hall meeting, and she was begging the mayor to come show up for her and to do something,” said Ginelle Bess, founder of Grassroots Redeeming Love. “And then we showed up, and we just hadn't left.”
Over the past month, Bess and multiple volunteers have filled five, 50-yard dumpsters with debris from Hudgins’ home. The dumpsters are not city funded; the organization purchased them with donations from the community. So the group has collected about $50,000 to support families ravaged by the storm.
“I don't know how many dumpsters in total we've bought for north city, there's been tons,” Bess said. “We spent tens and tens of thousands of dollars just on dumpsters alone.”
Bess founded Grassroots Redeeming Love the day after the May tornado hit and turned it into a nonprofit on July 7. The small-business owner wanted to help north St. Louis after she noticed the lack of city support in the area after the storm compared to the support provided to families in St. Louis County who were devastated by the storm.
“I pulled up with cases of water, and I was almost embarrassed to start handing them out, because I'm like, ‘Wow, these people need so much more than water,’” she said. “I've just been out here every day since the 17th.”
One of the first places Bess set up shop was across the street from Centennial Christian Church in Fountain Park. She helped families in the area try to salvage personal items, piled bricks on the curb, cleaned out homes and helped fill out documentation for aid. She even purchased a dumpster from Waste Management for about $1,000 to help collect leftover debris for the community.
“The city has nothing to do with any of the work we're doing. It's all just good Samaritans,” Bess said. “We've begged them. I show up at the meetings and beg them.”
She said that at first, city officials told her they would help, but it was not until Grassroots Redeeming Love became a nonprofit that officials actually began to keep them in the loop. However, Bess said the organization has not yet received any physical help, just loads of information.
Her organization has deployed nearly 150 volunteers across north St. Louis to help with whatever families need. At Hudgins’ home in the Ville, she needed help finding lost items that were buried underneath dirt, old plywood and parts of her home. She was ecstatic to have some extra hands, which provided some mental relief.
“I really needed my pictures. I got all my pictures,” Hudgins said. “I tried to go through my CDs, because I had some cuts, I had some music.”
Throughout August, Bess and other volunteers stacked broken and salvageable bricks up on Hudgins’ front lawn, found family photos of Hudgins’ late husband and located art supplies, clothes, medication, books, certificates, money and tools inside the rubble.
“We know we can't rebuild, that's not our goal here,” Bess said. “It's to just let her know people are here and we care.”
The organization is trying to help her find a new place to live in the meantime. After the storm, Hudgins was living in a tent next to her home to protect it from looters. Eventually, she and her son found temporary housing with family members and received hotel vouchers from the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. Hudgins said she hopes the city will help her rebuild the home where she lived for 40 years.
Good Samaritans have been overwhelmingly helping north St. Louis recover, but it is time for the city to step in with funding and other support now, Bess said.
“We need them to recognize the racial divide here in St Louis and try to work towards that, because that is at the forefront of all this work, and that's the reason we're in this situation now, the tornado just brought light to it,” she said. “We need the city to see north St. Louis, specifically. ‘When are you all going to see us?’ I guess we'll wait and find out.”
Months after the tornado
Hudgins is not the only person asking the city to urgently do something about the excess debris in north St. Louis. Residents have been speaking up to Spencer and other officials at town halls over the past four months, saying they are tired of waiting for the city to clean up what’s left after the storm on private property.
Many north St. Louis residents said at multiple town halls that the response by the city has been poor, and hearing officials talk about what will be done for them in the future is becoming annoying. One resident at Ward 13 and 14’s July meeting said that if it were not for the community and the local organizations, they would not have had any help.
In early July, the City of St. Louis allocated $19.2 million, mostly from Rams settlement funding, to help families with rental assistance, home repairs, meals and nonprofit support. The city also brought on Spirtas Worldwide, a Creve Coeur demolition and remediation company, to help with debris removal.
According to city officials, the company started removing debris from the northeastern part of the city and headed southwest. However, the $3 million contract was short-lived, as the company backed out of its commitment because the scope of the project was beyond its capacity.
During a recent appearance on St. Louis on the Air to discuss the city's response to the May 16 tornado, Spencer said the Army Corps of Engineers would be best equipped to handle the scale of debris removal required in north St. Louis.
“It would take years for the city to be able to administer that level of contracts and really do that enormous amount of work,” Spencer said. “I think if we can get the Army Corps here, we'll see that accelerated tremendously, and that's why we're pushing so hard to get that work done.”
On July 11, Spencer formally requested help from the Army Corps with removing debris from private property. The city is still waiting on a response from the Corps. However, if the city’s request is accepted, it could take Corps staff members six to eight months to completely remove the debris, even if they could start as soon as possible. However, if the city’s streets and forestry departments continue removing the leftover debris on private property, it could take several years to complete.
City officials estimate that there is still an estimated 1 million tons of tornado debris left in the city to be collected.
Volunteers received multiple calls
Nevertheless, residents are still calling upon community members for help instead of the city. Since May 16, Michael Jones, owner of Clayton Park Lawn Care, received hundreds of calls asking for help removing trees from homes, taking debris to the front lawn and moving furniture, all because his company was mysteriously listed on a working tornado recovery Google Doc.
“I got a lot of ‘I've been trying to call folks and ain't nobody been able to help or I've been trying to call the city and ain't nobody been able to help,’” Jones said. “Everybody kept saying they got my name off this list that was circulating.”
Jones had no idea his company was listed under the tornado debris removal section on the recovery list; however, he figures it’s because he posted on May 16 to Facebook that he would not charge anyone from north St. Louis who needed help removing debris.
“I easily received 12, 13, 14, 15 calls a day,” Jones said. “I will wake up to calls, and it would just be call, call, call, call, call, call.”
To handle the demand, he started with whoever called him first. Jones would work from sunrise to sunset because of his personal connection to north St. Louis. He said he was furious when he saw how quickly people in Clayton and the Forest Park area were able to get their trees removed and debris picked up compared to families in north St. Louis.
“Every day you ride through there, you could hear chainsaws, but not like my Home Depot chainsaw, I'm talking about the good one,” he said. “They had lifts. Their stuff was taken care of really quickly.”
This motivated him to do the same for people impacted by the storm in north St. Louis. He spent about $5,000 of his own money to purchase a heavy-duty chainsaw, toiletries and multiple hotel rooms. He also bought a used pickup truck to help deploy some of his employees to other parts of north city.
He even paid his employees out of pocket for weeks of tornado cleanup.
“If we don't cut [grass], they don't get paid … because that is the way my business is structured,” he said. “They also have their own stuff to do, so I … paid them out for as long as I could.”
Eventually, around mid-August, the calls for debris removal slowed down, but Jones said he still gets calls occasionally. Jones is upset with city officials, knowing there are still tons of debris sitting in front of family homes or lots.
If the city does not do something soon, north St. Louis could end up like some of the predominantly Black neighborhoods in New Orleans that never recovered from Hurricane Katrina, Jones said.
“I own property in New Orleans, Louisiana … if you ride through the Lower Ninth Ward parts of it still look like Katrina just left,” he said. “I knew when I was riding down there (north St. Louis) Friday on May 16, that how it looked right then was how it's going to look for years.”
Many residents like Hudgins want to rebuild, but to do so, debris has to be removed. Hudgins is concerned that many impacted residents will never return to her neighborhood or north St. Louis.
“I didn't even expect it (a tornado) to happen, but then for it to still look the way it looked then, I thought they would have gotten us help right away,” Hudgins said. “I thought they would have been moving; they are moving slow as ever. They want us to leave … that's all I can say. They want us to leave.”
