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The Whirlwind

The Whirlwind

Last updated on: May 20, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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The Whirlwind 2025-05-19T13:46:03-04:00 Gene Veith

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Here in St. Louis, they blow the tornado sirens if radar picks up rotation in the sky anywhere in the county, so we’ve already been to the basement a half a dozen times since we moved here. So I didn’t think much of it when the siren blew on Friday afternoon.

We went down to the basement as instructed, and then it occurred to me that I could use this time to work on my blog.

So I went upstairs to get my computer exactly at 2:45 p.m. That was when it hit. The noise was deafening. The rain and hail were hitting so hard that it sounded like rattling, but with no time between the rattles. The wind was roaring. I looked out the window and could see almost nothing, the rain was so thick, except for a tree that was just flailing back and forth.

I high-tailed it back to the basement. In minutes, it was all over. I went back up and the sun was shining.

I went outside and saw that some bricks had been blown off of our building! I don’t know how that happened! One heavy decorative pediment on the corner of the roof had been blown down, but instead of falling straight to the ground and its weight would cause one to expect, the wind that blown it to the middle of our building, right in front of the door!

We checked on our daughter, who lives with her family on the seminary grounds in faculty housing, just a few blocks from where we are. A huge tree had fallen on their car and crushed it!

Our car seemed to be fine, but we couldn’t drive it because all the roads were blocked with downed trees. We walked over to their place, past blown down fences and other debris, as our neighbors peeked out to survey the damage.

The seminary grounds are quite beautiful, what with the gothic architecture and huge, majestic trees. Many of those trees had massive branches blown off, and some were completely knocked down. One tree must have been 50 feet tall, with a diameter of four feet. It was plucked out of the ground, roots still showing, lying on its side. It must have stood for 150 years or more, but it couldn’t withstand the tornado of 2025.

In our community, no one was killed or seriously injured—amazingly—though 5 were killed and 38 injured elsewhere in St. Louis county. Here in the Clayton neighborhood, houses were damaged, but not destroyed, though some people in the region did lose their homes.

I grew up in Oklahoma, the tornado capital of the world. We didn’t have a basement or a storm cellar, so when the sirens blew, we would drive to church, usually the Presbyterian Church, which had a better basement than our congregation. But that took time. I remember having to hide underneath our parents’ bed. I crawled out to look out the window and saw in the distance a funnel that had descended from the clouds. It was bearing down on us, but it dissipated before it hit our city limits.

I was in Norman, Oklahoma, for a speaking gig on the night that nearby Moore was hit by a monstrous EF-5 twister. (Ours in St. Louis was an EF-3, which was bad enough, but EF-5s are at the very top of the scale.) On the ride back to the airport in Oklahoma City, we drove through utter devastation, with strip malls, motels, fast food joints, and apartment complexes reduced to match sticks. A few years later, I flew back for another visit to Norman, arriving the day after Moore had been hit by yet another EF-5. We drove through utter devastation again, as all of the rebuilt homes and businesses were again reduced to match sticks.

So I know tornados. But I had never been in a tornado until last Friday in St. Louis. I had always assumed that the funnel is the tornado, so if you just dodge that, you’ll be OK. But, of course, a tornado is wind, which can’t be seen. The visible funnel is from the debris, but the circulating winds can be much wider, so the path of ours was several blocks wide. They can also hop from point to point, going back up into the clouds and then dropping down again a few miles later, so that a single tornado can travel a long ways, as this one did.

Friday was supposed to be graduation at the seminary, but all of the carefully lined up folding chairs on the quad were blown every which way, so the event was postponed until Saturday. In the meantime, Lutheran Disaster Relief, which is headquartered here in St. Louis but usually ships out all over the world, descended on the campus. I have to give them credit. Men with chain saws and trucks did a remarkable job in cutting apart the downed trees and hauling away the debris. Others pitched in, such as the children of students and faculty, including my grandchildren, who raked the lawns and set up the chairs again. I was proud of them and of the seminary community, indeed, of Clayton and St. Louis as a whole, as neighbors pulled together and city services were out immediately, round the clock, doing their jobs to get the city back on its feet.

Now we had to deal with being without electricity. You could see lots of trees that fell on power lines, making the restoration of power a huge task. And if you don’t have electricity, it isn’t just that you don’t have lights: your cell phones will run down, there is no internet, and the food in your refrigerators is going to be ruined.

Fortunately, other parts of the city still had power, but we had to become ingenious. At one point, I drove aimlessly, exploring the city, in order to charge our phones with our car. The cell phone system was also impacted, so my hot spot only intermittently let me be on line. Sometimes I could get on the free wifi of a grocery store not too far away, though it would periodically flicker off, making me lose what I had written. I write this on Monday and we still don’t have power. Some are saying it may be towards the end of the week before we do.

This week’s posts were mostly written before the tornado, but we hit the road next week, so I had intended to work ahead. I feel an obligation to you, my subscribers, who are paying good money to read my blog, to put up a daily post. So I am defying the natural disaster to do that!

“The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind” (Job 38:1). Indeed, whirlwinds, a.k.a. tornadoes, are some of nature’s most sublime and awe-inspiring manifestations, a fitting image for God’s overwhelming revelation (Job 38-40).

Photo: St. Louis tornado, May 16, 2025, view from the arch, webcam, Gateway Arch Foundation via Meteorologist Erin Moran, Facebook

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