Is FEMA all to blame? How decisions in City Hall also slowed St. Louis' tornado recovery 11%
By Kate Grumke56% Kavahn Mansouri63%
5/11/2026, 10:00:00 AM
Keywords: St Louis Tornado, Tornado, Cara Spencer, St Louis Mayor, Nahuel Fefer, Community Development Administration, U S Army Corps Of Engineers, Mike Kehoe, Missouri Governor, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Fema, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Trump Policy, North St Louis, Extreme Weather, Stlpr Investigates, Audio Features
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Self-Serving Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.7% saturation with 902 hits. Analysis detected 5,560 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,651 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28.3% and a BS Rank of 11% (14,972 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.00% of the article peer group.
The sun was shining over the Mississippi River as U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers leaders filled a conference room on a boat docked next to the Gateway Arch.
They were in St.
Louis for their annual low-water inspection trip on Aug.
15.
From the outside, it might have looked like a routine gathering of officials.
But the attendees were some of the region’s top leaders — mayors and state representatives, as well as Maj.
Gen.
Kimberly A.
Peeples, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the Army Corps.
One official not in attendance: St.
Louis Mayor Cara Spencer.
It was nearly three months to the day since a powerful tornado damaged or destroyed thousands of homes in the majority Black, historically disinvested north St.
Louis neighborhoods.
That same day, Spencer announced that the city was asking the Army Corps to take over debris removal from the storm, a request that would ultimately be denied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“We are part of a strong bipartisan effort to push for the Army Corps of Engineers to take on that effort,” Spencer told reporters on Aug.
15.
“This is something we've been working on for the last month, and we are continuing on that effort.”
Spencer had said in a July letter requesting help that she believed the Corps could finish the job by March 2026.
St.
Louis Public Radio has learned that Spencer was offered the opportunity to meet with Peeples and other Corps leaders that day to talk about “St.
Louis City priorities,” as a planning email said.
In an interview on Friday, Spencer denied that the meeting was explicitly about the recovery.
But Missouri state Rep.
Colin Wellenkamp, R-St.
Charles, who arranged the meeting with the mayor, confirmed to STLPR that the tornado recovery was expected to be part of the meeting.
Wellenkamp declined to comment further.
Spencer didn’t take the opportunity.
A month later, FEMA denied St.
Louis’ request for the Army Corps to take over debris removal.
It’s now almost a year since the storm, and debris still covers much of north St.
Louis.
Residents have wondered why recovery has been slow and disorganized.
Spencer has consistently passed blame to turmoil at FEMA.
STLPR wanted to know if federal failures alone are to blame for the slow recovery.
For the past year, STLPR has filed dozens of public records requests and interviewed Spencer and St.
Louis’ Chief Recovery and Neighborhood Transformation Officer Julian Nicks multiple times, as well as more than 60 affected residents and local and national emergency management experts.
STLPR sought out insights from insiders who are sounding the alarm on what’s going on in city government.
That reporting reveals Spencer and top tornado recovery officials made decisions that have left most tornado survivors still waiting for help a year later.
Spencer assembled a team to lead the tornado response whose members had little to no experience with disaster recovery or FEMA.
As a result, they relied heavily on consultants.
They spent two months creating a new Office of Recovery with the help of a consultant with a checkered past.
Then that office took months to develop aid programs that have only just begun scaling up their efforts.
All the while, the city delayed starting some recovery work as officials waited for a long-shot request for FEMA reimbursement for work the agency typically doesn’t cover.
“Despite the best of intentions and the extraordinary efforts of many individuals, the city's tornado response has been a failure,” said Nahuel Fefer, former director of the St.
Louis Community Development Agency.
Fefer, who had worked for four mayors by the time the storm hit on May 16, repeatedly clashed with Spencer’s team over his efforts to quickly redirect funds toward tornado recovery.
Fefer became so alarmed after meetings with top St.
Louis tornado recovery officials that he began saving emails and documenting his interactions.
He recalled a meeting with Spencer’s interim chief of staff, Nancy Hawes, who had told him victims displaced by the tornado should only stay in hotels as a last resort.
“Because they were too comfortable,” Fefer recalled.
“God forbid people are comfortable when their lives have just been destroyed, their homes have been destroyed, their lives have been turned upside down.”
Hawes told STLPR that she disagrees with many of Fefer’s concerns, saying that keeping residents out of hotels was about practicality, not denying them comfort.
She said the decisions in the immediate wake of the tornado were made as the mayor’s team navigated a huge disaster as a new administration.
Spencer had taken office only about a month before the storm.
Still, she agrees with Fefer on one point: The city’s efforts to help north St.
Louis haven't worked.
“I think it's terrifically disappointing," Hawes said.
“I don't think that, a year in, the city is in much better shape.
… You wouldn’t necessarily expect it to be in better shape, but I don’t think it’s been put on the trajectory to get in better shape.”
The Spencer administration fired Hawes in August, and Fefer resigned in November.
Meanwhile, city officials repeatedly emphasized that they were navigating disaster recovery for the first time.
Spencer told STLPR she didn’t have “personal experience in disasters” besides the 2022 floods when she was on the Board of Aldermen.
Nicks told STLPR he is new to disaster work and to St.
Louis’ government processes.
Chief Cost Recovery Officer Jim Hill was also new to City Hall and told STLPR he had never gone through the FEMA reimbursement system before.
“We didn't have anybody in the room really — within the mayor's Cabinet's administration — who had gone through this,” Hawes said.
Spencer fired one of the only people who did have experience with disaster recovery, City Emergency Management Agency Director Sarah Russell, after tornado sirens failed to sound under their leadership.
Spencer has kept Russell’s successor — Gregg Favre, who has significant disaster recovery experience — away from the recovery effort as he works to rebuild CEMA.
And when the tornado hit, Spencer’s administration had just cleaned house, firing many staffers from the previous administration and preparing to remove others.
The lack of disaster experience was not typical in the tornado’s nearly 23-mile path.
Other communities relied on experience and said FEMA didn’t seem much different, according to multiple interviews with staff in various municipalities and agencies that dealt with the aftermath of the May 16 tornado.
Although they all acknowledged their needs were not nearly as widespread or complex as St.
Louis’, officials from St.
Louis County, St.
Louis Public Libraries and the cities of Clayton, Richmond Heights and Brentwood told STLPR they didn’t notice anything particularly out of the ordinary when dealing with the federal agency in the past year.
Dan Stumpf, St.
Louis County’s deputy director of emergency management, has dealt with a series of disasters in his 15 years there.
They include two historic floods within two years in the Meramec River Basin, multiple tornadoes, the flash flooding in 2022 and FEMA projects in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He stressed that he has not noticed a difference working with FEMA in the past year.
“The process for us, whether it was 15 years ago or whether it's just a year ago, for us, it has not changed,” Stumpf said.
“We've had the same response.
We've had the same support.”
In Clayton, as in St.
Louis, a new mayor had taken office just a month before the disaster, but that didn’t have much effect on operations, said Mayor Bridget McAndrew and City Manager David Gipson, who organized the response and did not change with the new administration.
Experience with disasters in Clayton runs deep.
Gipson had dealt with FEMA on a flood event while working for St.
Charles.
Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes is on a national FEMA task force and is regularly deployed around the country to help with initial disaster responses.
In the finance department, the director had been through the FEMA reimbursement process before and knew what was needed.
“Overall, I don't think that there's anything through this process that has surprised us or where we've been, you know, overly disappointed with the speed of things,” Gipson said.
“I don't think [FEMA is] too far off from where they've been in past events.”
Spencer emphasized that the city’s disaster was many times the scale of the other communities’ combined and said that to make up for the lack of experience, the city sought advice from and hired multiple consultants, including Deployed Resources, Tetra Tech, SLS, Ernst & Young and McKinsey & Company to help with recovery work.
The city also worked with Missouri’s State Emergency Management Agency.
It took months for the mayor’s office to launch the new tornado-focused Office of Recovery.
Top officials in the mayor's administration formed the office with help from McKinsey.
The global consulting firm has faced multiple allegations, including that it recommended Purdue Pharma “turbocharge” opioid sales.
Although McKinsey did not admit guilt, the company settled for $650 million after a federal probe.
McKinsey also faced allegations of working to raise the stature of authoritarian governments, as uncovered by reporting from the New York Times.
McKinsey did the work in St.
Louis for free, according to an internal memo obtained by STLPR.
The group helped design the Office of Recovery’s structure and develop St.
Louis’ initial recovery strategy.
But some of the programs created for the new office duplicated work that city programs had performed, wasting precious time for tornado survivors living in damaged homes or without housing at all, Fefer said.
Spencer and Nicks often refer to the city’s tornado response as a plane they had to build mid-flight.
“We know progress has been slow,” Nicks told STLPR in a Jan. 23 interview.
“A lot of that, and I've said this before in many interviews, is that the infrastructure and things necessary to respond to a disaster did not exist in the city.”
Fefer said the new recovery office added unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and red tape, while also consolidating decision-making power in the mayor’s office.
“[It] not just slowed down recovery, in many cases, it totally prevented it,” Fefer said.
It took the administration until July 10 to get the office up and running and longer to get the aid programs off the ground.
The office launched the Private Property Assistance Program on Oct.
21.
By May 6 of this year, residents had submitted more than 3,500 applications for property assistance of all kinds, and the city had completed work for 92.
The Private Property Assistance Program also handles requests for demolition, debris removal and repairs.
But four days after the storm, emails show Fefer tried to pivot existing Community Development Agency funding to support tornado recovery.
A month after the storm, he sent a packet of proposals to rework existing programs.
“We had a hoteling program, a home repair program, a rental assistance program, a down payment assistance program — all before the tornado,” Fefer said.
“All of which could have been scaled up if funded to meet needs a lot more effectively than they were.”
In emails to Spencer and other members of her administration in early July, Fefer said that his agency’s repair programs could start repair work within weeks with local funding and that he had worked with disaster management consultants his office had contracted for the 2022 floods.
But Hawes said the administration didn’t want to work with Fefer because he was set to be fired.
“He wasn’t playing with the team and wasn’t really being included with the team,” Hawes said.
“He’s trying to do his job to help the administration, but nobody in the administration really wanted his help.”
Mayoral spokesperson Rasmus Jorgenson questioned Fefer’s motives in speaking to STLPR in an email on Friday, and Spencer said the Community Development Association didn’t have a good track record of spending ARPA money.
“The vast majority of funds we had awarded many years before to CDA were still unspent when I walked in the door,” Spencer said on Friday.
“The idea of putting more funds into a department that was clearly incapable of getting funds effectively out the door was something I was very, very skeptical of.”
Nicks told STLPR that his team had to make new programs because the existing ones were a fragmented ecosystem that residents had trouble navigating.
And the Healthy Home Repair program run by CDA does have issues.
For one, the program’s website warns there is a long waiting list — Fefer said some applicants waited years for repairs.
Nicks’ office’s new programs faced similar complaints.
Along with requiring long waits and providing little communication, the tornado office often denied applications for property assistance because the eligibility guidelines were narrow.
Nicks and other city officials pledged to make the application process simpler in January.
At community meetings throughout the year, residents repeatedly asked the Spencer administration why they hadn’t received help yet and expressed their confusion about the newly formed programs.
“I relocated, I’ve followed the process and I’ve been patient, but what I’m seeing does not match up with what's being told,” said Jamila Mitchell, a tornado victim who was evicted from her apartment in the 11th Ward, at a February meeting.
“The language [of the city response] says ‘recovery.’
The lived reality says ‘stagnation.’”
On Oct. 21, when the mayor announced the new Private Property Assistance Program, Pat Miller was there.
She said she applied soon after the program launched.
Her Fountain Park home lost a wall and most of the roof in the storm.
Miller had insurance, but it wouldn’t cover enough to make her home livable, and the house deteriorated more with every rainfall.
“What I'm trying to do is age in place,” she said.
“I'm trying to rebuild my house where I can stay there.
When I leave there, I'll go to the funeral home.”
Six months later, Miller is still not back in her home, and help still hasn’t come from the city.
On May 4, someone from the private property program finally visited her home.
The next day, Miller looked back on the promises Spencer made at the October event.
“Bless her heart.
Nothing that she talked about in that meeting has occurred.
Nothing,” Miller said.
“And it's because of the system that the mayor is working within.
It’s because of the nonchalant attitude of the aldermen.
Some of them don't even come to the meetings.”
Amid the chaos of the first months of tornado response, St.
Louis unwittingly became an early test case for a changing FEMA, an agency President Donald Trump publicly fantasized about dismantling within days of declaring a federal disaster for Missouri.
But the Spencer administration was also navigating the FEMA process without experience and sometimes went back and forth with the agency for months, seeking clarifications before starting much of the work.
The hesitation sometimes proved fruitless.
City officials ultimately did not get what they asked for, like debris removal help from the Army Corps of Engineers.
In some cases, the city was making requests such as for FEMA to reimburse demolition of vacant buildings that public guides clearly said wouldn’t qualify.
The effect of the city’s hesitation was especially apparent in work on privately owned, condemned homes, which Nicks said represent 30% of damaged structures in the tornado’s path needing demolition.
In a FEMA guide to public assistance, which city officials were briefed on a month after the tornado, the agency states that it doesn't cover demolition of structures that were condemned before the disaster.
But instead of running with that information, St.
Louis delayed beginning that work with city funding.
In part, that’s because officials were following advice from the Missouri State Emergency Management Agency, which told the city in the briefing that, “when in doubt, ask before performing work.”
St.
Louis was in doubt, so in December, Spencer and Nicks sent a list of questions to FEMA about what would be covered in a private property project, including asking the agency to “expand eligible property types” to pay to demolish vacant or condemned buildings.
It would take FEMA two months to respond, telling St.
Louis in February that condemned buildings and other categories wouldn’t be covered, which Nicks said disqualified more than 900 buildings, about 250 of which were condemned before the storm, of the roughly 5,000 damaged in the storm.
In the end, the city had to do that work.
The demolitions started 10 months after the storm.
“Did we think [FEMA] would come?”
Nicks said in an interview on Friday.
“No, but for all of our residents, we knew that this is a massive disaster, and we had to advocate at every level for as much as we could.”
“Well, we did think that,” Spencer broke in.
“I mean, I did think we would get those funds.”
She said they hoped FEMA would make an exception because of the extreme devastation.
An STLPR analysis of the time that passed between the city’s requests and FEMA’s responses shows St.
Louis spent at least 25 weeks waiting for the agency to respond to private property work.
That included 10 weeks waiting to find out if the work would be covered at all and another eight weeks waiting for that clarification about vacant properties and other categories.
Trump’s push to change the agency slowed down the speed of responses in the past year.
Especially impactful was the loss of experienced staff, said former FEMA administrator Pete Gaynor, who ran the agency in Trump’s first term and is now the president of Bright Harbor Recovery, a disaster recovery firm.
But he said mayors and governors have to put in a lot of effort to make sure their recovery gets the attention it needs from FEMA and other federal agencies.
“I have told a number of elected leaders that you have to be the squeaky wheel, right?”
Gaynor said.
“You have to make demands on everyone, to include federal agencies, to make sure that you get every single dollar, every single resource that you possibly can get.”
Spencer and her team said they did do that, though much of the work was happening behind the scenes in ways that weren’t visible to the public.
Just two months after the storm, some members of the Board of Aldermen were already raising concerns about the effect of waiting on FEMA.
Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier told Nicks directly that she worried the focus on FEMA reimbursement would push tornado survivors out of the city at a Budget and Public Employees Committee meeting.
She wanted city officials to help people right away.
Board President Megan Green agreed.
“I would rather spend money and retain residents than wait on the hope and dream that FEMA comes through,” she said.
FEMA’s response in St.
Louis was slow in other ways, said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on FEMA response times.
While the Joplin tornado in 2011 became a federally declared disaster within one day and the 2022 floods in St.
Louis got a declaration in 14 days, the process took 24 days for the May 16 tornado.
“It was an extraordinary event,” Labowitz said.
“It so obviously met the threshold for a federally declared disaster and usually, when that kind of high-profile, high-impact disaster happens, we see FEMA act much more quickly.”
The federal context put St.
Louis and other cities dealing with 2025 disasters in uniquely difficult situations, Labowitz said.
“The position St.
Louis has been put in is a terrible one,” Labowitz said.
“And then the result of that is that it requires a lot more local leadership and a lot more creativity about where the money is going to come from and the level of advocacy that it's going to take to shake it loose.”
Other major sources of funding have not materialized in St.
Louis, according to Labowitz, including money from other federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The agency has a community-level grant for disaster recovery that has to be passed by Congress.
For the 2011 Joplin tornado, HUD allocated $45 million within 11 months and for the 2022 floods, it took 10 months to get $25 million, but St.
Louis has not yet received any of this funding for the May 16 tornado, according to the Disaster Dollar Database run by Labowitz and her team.
In other disasters, Labowitz said cities sometimes hire lobbyists to advocate for receiving those funds in Washington.
Spencer said the city will soon open a new opportunity for lobbying after years with the same lobbyist.
She said city officials are in regular communication with the offices of Missouri’s U.S. senators and U.S.
Rep.
Wesley Bell.
Back on Bayard Avenue, Miller walked through her home, considering the work ahead of her.
Water dropped through a hole in the ceiling onto a pile of debris in her former bedroom, seeping through a peeling ceiling into the living room where she used to celebrate holidays with generations of her family.
“This is just my home, and I'm fighting for it,” Miller said.
“I want to fight for other people to know that you can't give up.
And for God's sake, we need to hold these politicians accountable for what they don't do.
They have not rallied like they should have for north St.
Louis.”
The mayor addressed residents like Miller on Friday.
“We're going to keep showing up, and you know it's about putting one foot in front of the other,” Spencer said.
“While we recognize that this recovery has been slower than we've wanted, and certainly than our residents have wanted, we're going to continue to show up.”
St.
Louis Public Radio's Hiba Ahmad contributed to this report.
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