Severe Weather in Missouri Kills at Least 116

We've always had our share of bad weather and natural disasters here in Missouri, but these last few years it seems to have gotten worse. Global warming maybe? We are susceptible around here to just about everything except hurricanes, and sometimes when there is one in the Gulf, we get enough rain to flood us.

I remember feeling a pretty good earthquake back in the sixties. The refrigerator in the kitchen started walking across the floor and part of the chimney fell off. Living in an old unreinforced brick house is not the best place to be during an earthquake. They say that another earthquake like the one we had back in 1812 is inevitable. That one was so violent that it made the Mississippi River run backwards. One like that today would cut a swath of total destruction all the way from Missouri to Tennessee.

We here in St. Louis are right on the intersection of two major rivers: the Mississippi and the Missouri, so we are no stranger to flooding. When I lived near the Meramec, I used to go to sleep with my life jacket on when a flood was forecast. One time I woke up to see a tin can float past my bedroom window. The great flood of 1993 washed my old house away. Good thing that I wasn't living there anymore.

But of all of the natural disasters around here, tornadoes are probably the most prevalent and deadly. Just a few days ago one killed some 116 people in Joplin Missouri and the body count is still rising. Back in the early 1900's a tornado struck the Lafayette Park neighborhood near downtown St. Louis where I grew up.

It was a very rich area of the city populated by the wealthy merchants that made their fortunes off of river traffic. It shook them up so bad that a lot of them moved into the mansions that are now located in the Central West End.

The recent span of bad weather has pretty much left my area alone, except the batch a few weeks ago when I saw tornadoes popping up all around me as well as softball-sized hail in some places. Seeing those broken windshields on the news prompted me to get full coverage on my car. Good thing because yesterday we finally got a little taste of it.

When I got home in the afternoon my trash cans were blown about two blocks down the street and I heard sirens and saw three police cars shoot down the street in front of my house as well as a firetruck and two ambulances. It seems that a large tree had been uprooted. I guess there must have been injuries because of the ambulances.

We also had some power lines down but the lights stayed on at my place. We must have had some hail as well because although no windows were broken, I did see a dimple or two on my Audi. At least I have the insurance now to pay to repair those.

So once again I was lucky compared to what happened to my neighbors in other parts of the state, but I wonder sometimes how long my luck will last. Of the 116 people killed so far in Joplin, four of them were in the hospital there at the time. They found X-rays that had been blown several hundred feet away. The weather forecast is for severe thunderstorms for the next few days.

The above is from personal observations of the author.