By Maeve Elder, Communication & Outreach Coordinator, Missouri Gateway Green Building Council
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a month since an EF-3 tornado tore through our city, leaving devastation in its wake. In its aftermath, the places we call home became unrecognizable – a 3D maze of uprooted giants, collapsed homes, shredded roofs, shattered windows and flattened cars. Power lines brought down by trees left homes, apartments and businesses without power while damaged cell towers interrupted phone reception. It was scary to experience so many aspects of our built environment that we take for granted undone simultaneously.
In the days and weeks since the tornado, we’ve watched the daily procession of people and trucks working tirelessly to get this environment back in working order. The uncanny scaffolding of fallen trees has been gradually disassembled and taken away bit by bit. Repairs to damaged homes and infrastructure are underway. The streets along my daily commute feel barren and exposed with so many trees missing or battered, yet we’re lucky that’s all we lost – unlike neighborhoods in the direct path where people lost their homes, their churches, the essential infrastructure of their lives. Losses that are life-shattering.
Now a month out, disaster response efforts continue to serve immediate needs while communities begin mapping out the longer-term process of recovery and rebuilding. Over this last month, I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and what it means for our region – now and into the future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines resilience as “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions.”
Since the tornado, it’s become clear that resilience is unevenly distributed across our city. The level of destruction to the built environment both immediate and long-term is vastly different depending on where you live. Our broader community knows this and has mounted a monumental response effort to support communities where the tornado’s impact has been the most devastating. As we begin the long road to recovery, I hope that our broader community remains engaged and committed to shaping a more equitable picture of resilience for St. Louis, so that in the future our neighborhoods, homes, churches, businesses and infrastructure – the built environment that anchors our lives – can manifest the same level of resilience as our people.