We'd been en route from London for 16 hours. Our connecting flight from Chicago was on the approach to St. Louis, already running almost two hours late because of the violent thunderstorms that had been sweeping across the Midwest. The storms out the window were frightening and impressive, with towering thunderheads above a thick carpet of clouds sparking with lightening. (The photo's not mine, but does 
give you a good sense of what I was seeing out the window.) A break between two storm fronts was giving us enough room to get on the ground.
Then the pilot pulled up. He announced that the control tower had been evacuated and we needed to fly on. A few minutes later, Lambert Field took a direct hit by a particularly violent tornado; the worst in St. Louis for 40 years. While we flew on to Kansas City, our friends who'd been waiting to pick us up were running for shelter on the lower level behind the baggage carousels. The windows in the terminal above had imploded, sending rain, tree branches and debris swirling through the building on currents of high winds.
Anne and Mike reported that the storm blast was over in a minute, but shock and fear followed, with people bloodied by the windows stumbling around looking for help and passengers getting off planes that had been caught on the tarmac in the midst of it all trembling with the trauma. Our friends saw no evidence of organisation or leadership from the airport staff, who were in the same panic as everyone else. News coverage suggests that things improved, but Anne and Mike didn't stick around to check it out. Checking via a weather app on his iPad, Mike could see that the coast was clear ... or, at least, tornado free ... made for the car and drove home carefully through the debris field that was the surrounding highways.
Back in Kansas City, 250 miles west of where we wanted to be, skies were clear and the night was warm. Less pleasantly, every rental car was sold out, there were no outlets open in the terminals to get food or drink and three full planeloads of people were milling around waiting for an announcement. Waiting for flights the next morning wasn't a reasonable option, as the St. Louis airport was closed and all the planes there would be grounded for a while as inspectors looked for damage. American was, instead, scrambling for buses. No easy commission late on a Friday night. Three finally emerged out of the dark at 11:30 and we scrambled aboard for a four and a half hour drive back across the state.
As we approached the airport, we had the surreal feeling of driving through a disaster film. It was incredibly dark, since power was out throughout the area. Most of the illumination came from the flashing blue and red lights of emergency vehicles, which were thick on the ground. Along the highway we could see overturned cars, snapped trees and slabs of debris that had been people's roofs, furniture and lives.
Though I grew up in the tornado zone and moved to the violent heart of it when I lived in Dallas, I still couldn't quite believe the damage I was seeing. Dawn brought in the news crews who captured the damage for the world, and there was St. Louis leading the national news. Every year there are four or five news stories about some community being flattened. You grow up knowing the signs and how to take action if a storm is coming. But seeing one wipe out a community I know well (in fact, the neighbourhood where I lived until I was seven) was sobering. Piers, who always teases me when I talk about the severity of Midwestern weather, was respectfully silent. And Anne and Mike may never volunteer to pick us up at the airport again.
It was a dramatic start to the trip. We're thankful that we, and all we care about, are safe, and that Chesterfield (where our house is) was entirely untouched. We're hoping the rest of the trip is a bit less extraordinary.
No comments:
Post a Comment