The sky turned an eerie green over St. Louis on May 16.

Rapper and activist Antoine White, better known as T-Dubb-O, recognized the ominous hue immediately. Having family in the heart of Tornado Alley in Tennessee, he knew what was coming. With his wife and son beside him after a school field day lunch in Clayton, a suburb of St. Louis, he made the split-second decision to flee north, away from the city. Even though a tornado hadn’t hit the city in two generations, he didn’t want to risk it.

No tornado sirens wailed and no emergency alert pinged on his wife’s phone. But as White’s car barreled through gridlocked traffic, behind them, an EF-3 tornado carved a 12-mile scar through the area’s Black neighborhoods. Its 150 mph winds peeled roofs from schools and homes where many residents lacked basements to hide. Five victims — including three children — died in collapsed buildings that a responsive alert system might have evacuated. Generational Black businesses like The Harlem Tap Room and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed.

In total, across Missouri and Kentucky, the system of tornadoes left at least 27 people dead over the weekend and dozens of people trapped and injured in their homes. It comes just two months after at least 42 people lost their lives to a tornado system across eight states in March, with the most deaths occurring in Missouri and Mississippi.

In these storms’ wake, a brutal truth is emerging for Black residents: The nation’s emergency systems — from crumbling siren alerts to gutted federal programs — have left its most vulnerable residents dangerously exposed. From last year’s Hurricane Helene to this year’s wildfires , America’s emergency alert and disaster preparedness system isn’t keeping up.

“We’re sweeping up the ashes again,” White said two days after he witnessed tornadoes scar his hometown. “We’re dealing with disasters every day, in the aftermath of Ferguson. We’re dealing with poverty on an everyday basis, lead-tainted water, and violence.”

“That all plays a role in people’s ability to navigate this disaster,” he added.

Climate change is altering the atmospheric conditions that produce tornadoes — such as increasing heat and humidity, shifting storm seasons, and moving tornado-prone regions eastward — though scientists have not found a direct, consistent link between rising global temperatures and either the overall frequency or intensity of tornadoes, due to complex factors including limited long-term data.

As of four days after the tornadoes touched down, the federal government had failed to offer any recovery assistance, said St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer. The agency said they will touch down in St. Louis on Wednesday, five days after the disaster struck.

Just weeks before, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, designed to fund disaster-resistant housing and proactive infrastructure, had been axed by the Trump administration. Nearly $1 billion meant for Black and low-income neighborhoods is gone. At the same time, the administration is actively working to shutter FEMA as it currently operates.

For communities already navigating the everyday disasters related to poverty, history lays bare a lethal equation: Climate change plus systemic neglect equal catastrophe.

“The system is continuing to fail people,” said White, adding that the deadly weather is far from over. More severe storms were expected to roll across the central U.S. this week: thunderstorms and potentially baseball-sized hail across the Midwest, heavy mountain snow in the West, and triple-digit heat across the South.

“We’re asking people to prepare for this weather. Please find a safe place to go while the weather is coming in,” said St. Louis Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson about the approaching weather, calling on residents to take in their neighbors who lost their homes to the first set of storms. “It’s going to take your help to get through this next wave of storms.”

Ultimately, White said, it is the resilience of the community that will keep Black St. Louis whole.

“We’ve seen some of the most treacherous neighborhoods in the city come together. It’s a lot of gang treaties that’s happening under the scenes that people aren’t talking about. A lot of unification,” he said. “It’s not an organization or the government doing this work. It’s the everyday community.”

How tornadoes expose America’s racial divide

Research shows the pattern in St. Louis is repeated across America : Tornadoes strike communities with larger Black populations harder, then exacerbate racial segregation through displacement or abandonment in the aftermath. In North St. Louis, where residents were already “sweeping up the ashes,” residents said the storm brought another layer of institutional neglect: While neighbors rushed to help neighbors, pulling each other from rubble and sharing what little remained, federal assistance was absent.

St. Louis’ emergency management agency had known about gaps in its siren coverage since at least 2020, when residents began reporting dead zones through the city’s 311 system. Yet when the tornado struck, half of the city’s North City neighborhood reported hearing no alerts, a failure Mayor Spencer called “unacceptable” during a May 18 press conference. The city’s NotifySTL system, which is touted as a modern backup to aging sirens, relies on smartphone access, yet half of Black St. Louis households lack reliable internet and more than 10% of the city doesn’t have access to smartphones .

It is a national issue. Earlier this year when the Eaton Fire rolled through the Los Angeles suburb of Altadena, the area’s lone Black neighborhood also failed to receive emergency alerts. More than two-thirds of the lives lost to the flames were in that single neighborhood.

Last year, a Harvard study found predominantly Black counties receive 23% less per capita in FEMA funding for warning systems than their majority-white counterparts.

In St. Louis, as volunteers distributed bottled water and food in neighborhoods demolished by nature, the grim irony of the situation deepened for White. Many residents hadn’t needed disasters to experience scarcity.

“We were giving people water not because they didn’t have pipes, but because they couldn’t afford it before the tornado,” said White, who organizes efforts through HandsUp United. His observation aligns with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that shows that only 37% of Black households possess emergency supply kits. The gap stems partly from cost because a FEMA-recommended kit averages $300, researchers concluded.

The tornado exposed how decades of redlining and disinvestment compounded weather risks, residents have said. In St. Louis’ Central West End — where median incomes top $90,000 — less than 15% of buildings sustained major damage. In Jeff-Vander-Lou, a Black neighborhood with 45% poverty rates, 9 out of 10 structures were destroyed .

Nationally, tornadoes cause 40% more property damage in majority-Black counties despite similar wind speeds, a 2023 Journal of Economic Studies analysis found.

As J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, told Capital B in 2023, “Tornadic storms will continue to become more frequent in the South and the Southeast. We’ve created a big problem for ourselves because of our poverty and income gaps, which have decided how sensitive a community is to destruction and how able they are to bounce back.”

Federal policy amplifies these divides, advocates have explained . The Trump administration’s March 2025 cuts eliminated 2,000 FEMA positions, including 30% of community preparedness staff.

As St. Louis scrambled to recover, Congress remained deadlocked over the Weather Act, a bill that would fund new radar systems capable of detecting tornadoes 10 minutes faster than current technology . Reauthorizing the Weather Act will allow the National Weather Service to contract for more sites and expand coverage to additional Midwestern and Southern cities.

Local residents hope the storm doesn’t level a final blow to Black homeownership. Already in St. Louis, white residents are roughly twice as likely to own their homes compared to Black households, even though the city is roughly half Black and half white.

Marshell Smith’s aunt, Stella Hunt, lost her house to the tornadoes. “I pray the insurance company do her right. You pay and pay, and they make these rules,” said Smith about the ways that insurance payouts historically carve out Black neighborhoods. Her family’s story was featured by Humans of St. Louis, a community documentarian page about local residents. Predominantly Black ZIP codes face 23% higher insurance premiums due to discriminatory risk assessments.

“I had my wedding reception here at this house. There were flowers, peach trees, grape vines. It was beautiful, just beautiful,” Hunt said in the interview. “I would love to see all the damage in St. Louis rebuilt. I know this won’t be able to be repaired. I don’t think my house will ever be recovered.”