The mayor’s office said Commissioner Sarah Russell’s directive to activate the outdoor warning siren during a call to the fire department was “ambiguous.”
ST. LOUIS — A day after St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer said the city’s outdoor warning siren wasn’t activated during a deadly tornado because of “human error,” the commissioner of the City Emergency Management Agency was placed on paid administrative leave.
The mayor’s office cited multiple serious issues with Commissioner Sarah Russell’s response to Friday’s tornado that killed five people and called Russell’s directive to activate the sirens “ambiguous.”
At 2:37 p.m., about four minutes before the tornado touched down, Russell placed a call to fire department communications.
A dispatcher picked up the phone and asked Russell to hold on so she could broadcast the tornado warning issued by the National Weather Service for the St. Louis area until 3:15 p.m.
Once the dispatcher finished, she returned to the call.
“You got the tornado warning. I think it’s going to go to 2:35,” Russell said.
“The one that we just got is … it says … (3:15), but you said until 3:45?” the dispatcher asked Russell.
“Maybe, maybe I got the numbers backward. Yeah, 3:15. 3:15. Got it,” Russell replied.
Russell asked the dispatcher if she “had the siren,” to which the dispatcher replied, “yes ma’am.”
The one-minute call then ended.
“(That) cannot happen when a tornado is sweeping through our city and St. Lousians’ safety depends on being alerted immediately,” the mayor’s office said in a written statement.
Russell and CEMA staff were at a workshop at 1520 Market St. in a building that houses several municipal departments as the tornado touched down in the city.
The siren activation button is located about a half mile away at the building on Olive Street that primary serves as headquarters for the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
“As a result, when a tornado warning was issued, Russell or other CEMA staff could not personally activate the siren, and Russell contacted the fire department,” the mayor’s office said.
During a test of the siren system scheduled for Tuesday at 3 p.m., the activation button at the fire department was found to not be working. At about 3:15 p.m., the fire department activated the system from the CEMA office.
The mayor’s office said work to fix the button began immediately and was expected to be completed within days.
Spencer said CEMA exists, in large part, to alert the public to dangers caused by severe weather.
“The office failed to do that in the most horrific and deadly storm our city has seen in my lifetime.” Spencer said. “Commissioner Russell has served our city for years and is a person of good will, but I cannot move on from this without providing accountability and ensuring that our emergency management is in trusted hands.”
In the hours after the tornado, Spencer ordered an internal investigation to correct the city’s siren activation protocol.
Spencer signed an executive order on Tuesday that tasked the fire department with activating the siren from an office that will be staffed around the clock.
Spencer said an external investigation would be launched into the failure to activate the sirens “and any other potential issues.”
“The failure to activate the siren during a tornado has rightfully angered St. Louisans, including myself,” Spencer said. “While my first priority on this issue was to make sure this can never happen again, our community deserves full transparency and accountability.”
The mayor’s office released a copy of a standard operating procedure for activating the siren that appeared to have been drafted by Russell in 2021, adding that it “may never have been fully implemented.”
“The outdoor warning siren system is to be activated at the primary activation point, the fire alarm office at St. Louis Fire Department headquarters. If the activation cannot be completed at the primary activation point immediate contact must be made with the commissioner of CEMA to activate the system from the secondary or tertiary activation points,” the document said.
Despite the document’s instructions, in practice, CEMA was tasked with activating the siren, and if no one was available, the responsibility fell to the fire department.
The mayor’s office said another layer of confusion existed because of an “outdoor warning siren fact sheet” posted on CEMA’s website that laid out a different siren activation protocol.
A member of the fire department would be stationed at the CEMA office until the siren activation button was repaired, Spencer’s office said.
The city said it would conduct additional tests of the siren system to find out how may sirens were damaged during Friday’s storms.
St. Louis Fire Department Capt. John Walk will oversee CEMA until a permanent commissioner is named, the city said.
A message sent to a phone number belonging to Russell was not immediately returned.
