SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
This past week, I went to St. Louis for work. And as I drove through town, I was shocked to see block after block of huge tree stumps and countless houses with missing roofs.
I mean, it is like line of stumps. It's - you can tell the trees used to be almost a wall or a shield, and they're just all gone, sheared off.
Six months ago today, a tornado ripped through the city. It left more than a billion dollars of destruction, including more than 5,000 damaged buildings. Now it's become a key experiment for President Trump's new policy on federal emergency response. He's shifting the burden of the recovery process from FEMA to the states. Residents say they're the guinea pigs of this experiment and many feel, at best, in limbo, at worst, abandoned. While I was in St. Louis, I drove along the path of wreckage left by the storm. With me was Hiba Ahmad, a reporter for the local member station, St. Louis Public Radio.
So the tornado basically tore down the path of this road and took down all the trees in its path.
HIBA AHMAD, BYLINE: Pretty much. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of like an iconic street in the city, and that has - it's just completely changed.
PFEIFFER: Yeah.
Hiba reports on education for St. Louis Public Radio. And in the six months since the tornado hit, she's been visiting and revisiting affected neighborhoods to track how residents are doing.
AHMAD: But this right here is Soldan International Studies High School. It's a magnet school in the St. Louis Public School System, and it's home to, you know, over 300 students. But this school is closed. If you look, there's tons of boarded-up windows. You know, the district has shared that this school, probably, the repairs on it are not going to be done until next December, December 2026.
PFEIFFER: Wow.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: More than a year.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: Is there any chance they won't reopen it at all?
AHMAD: Possibly.
PFEIFFER: Tornados aren't new in the Midwest, and St. Louis often gets grazed by them. But the last time a tornado of this ferocity hit the city was in 1959. That one killed 11 people. This time, there were fewer fatalities, but thousands of people were and continue to be severely impacted. St. Louis' famous Forest Park lost thousands of trees, and many of the multimillion-dollar homes along the park's perimeter are still missing roofs. But the tornado nailed the northern section of the city the hardest, areas that are majority Black, and that has exacerbated what were already severe local inequalities.
Look at that one. That's a huge brick apartment building - almost every window boarded up.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: You can see a toilet. The entire bathroom is exposed to the outside.
AHMAD: There once was a garage, maybe a home or...
PFEIFFER: My God.
AHMAD: ...Something here.
PFEIFFER: I am shocked that this is so much - so many months after the storm, and it just feels like it's been locked in time.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE PASSING BY)
AHMAD: This church - the stained glass...
PFEIFFER: Oh, it's all shattered. Again, six months later, the glass is still out, and they're entering winter.
Hiba and I drove slowly along Enright Avenue. Up close, the damage was even more revealing.
I mean, this one is even hard to explain. The entire side of the house is missing. You can see the stairscase (ph) leading from the first floor to the second floor, roof gone.
AHMAD: There's a lamp that's still sitting there.
PFEIFFER: (Laughter) Somehow it didn't fall over.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: That's absolutely amazing how tornadoes work - front door mostly gone, front porch mostly gone, second floor gone, piles of brick.
AHMAD: This is a neighborhood of residents who primarily own their homes. They've been here a long time, and many of them want to rebuild. And that's why you see a lot of the boarded-up windows. You see the piles of bricks. Here's scaffolding on a home. Oh, wow. They've made a lot of progress on this home. So if I can just give you an idea, this side of that - this entire wall of this home was gone.
PFEIFFER: And they've fixed it.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: But across from them, these houses look - I mean, they need a ton of repair. It's going to be a lot of money. Hard to know how many of these will eventually come back.
We met Larry Powell (ph), a Marine Corps veteran, on the uprooted sidewalk in front of his property.
I'm sorry this happened to your house.
LARRY POWELL: I am, too (laughter). This was going to be my retirement home before I go to the Marine Corps boot camp in the sky.
(LAUGHTER)
PFEIFFER: He said he's better off than some of his neighbors who didn't have insurance, but FEMA made it difficult for him to get financial help.
You said FEMA has been disastrous. Why?
POWELL: FEMA has not offered any assistance. Numerous people have applied to FEMA, and they were declined. And they have you jumping through so many hoops.
PFEIFFER: The chief recovery officer for St. Louis, a position created after the tornado, is Julian Nicks. He says a lack of critical services caused lots of confusion.
JULIAN NICKS: FEMA didn't do door-to-door knocking. They did not have their typical operations where people do door-to-door to reach. So there are some people who didn't come into our disaster assistance centers. We know that. We also know that there are a bunch of people who did, and they got frustrated with the paperwork and the process.
PFEIFFER: According to Nicks, the layers of applications and paperwork required to get assistance caused some residents to quit the process entirely.
NICKS: You have to bring reimbursements of all your receipts and things like that. For people impacted by a tornado, you're not tracking receipts.
PFEIFFER: Another problem he highlighted is that documentation is more difficult for people whose home was passed down to them by family members.
NICKS: Think about taking a family that makes less than $40,000 a year, who is uninsured, and then you go tell them, after they just lost generational home that they inherited, that, hey, you need to provide more insurance paperwork. Or, hey, this title still has your grandmother's name on it, and because of that, you're not eligible 'cause you're not the title owner.
PFEIFFER: FEMA has approved assistance for more than 9,300 people in St. Louis, but those relief funds haven't been enough. And Mayor Cara Spencer says the city didn't have enough time to develop a disaster response while it was in the middle of a disaster.
CARA SPENCER: There is a huge gap in what residents need and what we've been able to provide. That is unequivocal, just an enormous - a gulf of need that we have been unable to meet at this time. We have secured individual assistance from FEMA of over $50 million that have gone directly to residents, not nearly enough to make their lives whole, their homes whole.
PFEIFFER: NPR and many other media outlets have done reporting on FEMA over the years that exposed waste, inefficiency and bureaucracy at the agency. Earlier this year, President Trump promised reform.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level.
PFEIFFER: Trump said in June that FEMA would immediately, quote, "give out less money to states recovering from disasters." The agency's overall capacity was depleted after DOGE cuts eliminated a third of its staff. We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages FEMA, to ask about the new policy, but we haven't heard back. Mayor Spencer questions the logic of having every local government be disaster ready.
SPENCER: My argument would be that, as a nation, we would be better off, more efficient and certainly more effective if we centralize and share the resources and expertise across the nation for very unusual events, rather than saddling every single municipal government to being able to respond to what may or may not happen in the lifetime of each of those cities.
PFEIFFER: As Hiba and I drove along the 23 miles of the tornado's path, I asked her what it's been like living through a test case.
AHMAD: The administration wants to shift responsibility away from FEMA to states and cities.
PFEIFFER: How is that going for St. Louis?
AHMAD: I mean, you know, honestly, Sacha, in the early days of this storm, the city did not have the infrastructure to be able to respond to a disaster like this, and they've been really open about that. Mayor Cara Spencer, you know, she was in office for maybe just over a month when the storm hit, and there were not emergency protocols to be able to deal with this level of devastation. So it was the local nonprofits that stepped in. And these are nonprofits that are not trained in disaster recovery. But they stood up, you know, doing what they could to stack some of these bricks or clear the sidewalks or clear the tree debris just so that people could just feel a little sense of normalness.
PFEIFFER: Could it be that once that system gets running and cities learn how to do this, it will work, but because St. Louis is one of the first, they're really having to - they have a steep learning curve?
AHMAD: It could be, absolutely. But it feels as though, you know, do you need a natural disaster to happen first before you realize what type of infrastructure you need to be able to respond? And what if the natural disaster is something like this, where it takes out homes completely?
PFEIFFER: Yeah. Hundreds of homes, maybe more. The scale of this is actually hard to believe.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: It's just a wasteland...
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: ...In a major, American city, six months after a storm came through.
AHMAD: Yeah. Oh, and there's a resident who's...
PFEIFFER: And living in a tent in front of their house - mattress. Wow, another tent - people are tenting in their front yards.
AHMAD: Yeah.
PFEIFFER: Feels like we're in that uncomfortable between stage, where the federal government is trying to figure out how to do it better. And meantime, we have a city in great need, and a new approach hasn't quite been figured out yet.
AHMAD: Exactly. And in the meantime, you know, it's the local communities that have to step in and fill that gap, which they're really not equipped to do.
PFEIFFER: Hiba and I stopped again to talk with resident, Kim Holt (ph). She and her husband, Eli (ph), are trying to hold on to the home they bought in 2011.
KIM HOLT: We have put a lot of work in it. This is almost like the second time it's been renovated. It's just that, at this point, we didn't intend on doing the roof if we were going to do a renovation again.
PFEIFFER: Their roof was torn off during the tornado, their home suddenly open to the sky.
HOLT: We had to get a whole roof put on first and then gut out the inside.
PFEIFFER: Holt said they applied for FEMA assistance but were denied. So they turned to city programs, but that came too little too late. Months after the storm hit, she finally got a call back about having her roof tarped.
HOLT: I said, you got to be kidding me.
PFEIFFER: You're like, I'm way ahead of you.
HOLT: I said you know when the storm was, right? Why did it take you three months after I applied to call me, as if you think we're still standing in the same position? We were blessed not to be. But how do you think that's possible?
PFEIFFER: President Trump promised to phase out FEMA by the end of this year and give it a much smaller role in responding to disasters. St. Louis residents like Kim Holt and Larry Powell have seen what that means and tell me they feel like they're fending for themselves. They're doing what they can before winter comes.
(SOUNDBITE OF CARLOS LEON'S "HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER, HAT OF RAIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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