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- St. Louis blues: A harm-filled history
- Natural disasters, aid, and compounded oppression
- Media and construction of disaster narratives
- (Even more) unprecedented times: Bureaucracy and privatization of aid in Trump’s second term
- What can we do instead?: A grassroots approach
- Conclusion: Aid and hope when disaster hits
Times of crisis highlight existing gaps and failures in our official systems. However, they can also show strength of community networks and possibilities for restructuring.
Tornadoes the weekend of May 16, 2025, tore a 23-mile path through St. Louis, Missouri. The disaster left seven dead, 38 injured, and an estimated $1.6 billion in damage to homes, schools, and businesses.
Long-known gaps in coverage in St. Louis’s emergency alert system reportedly left historically underserved areas of North City without warning of the incoming storm.
If this weren’t enough, it took nearly a month for the Trump administration to approve the federal disaster declaration in the aftermath; leaving families in limbo awaiting basic assistance. It took over a month for the first FEMA center to finally open in the city to help those affected.
What exactly was the hold up in aid? Why did thousands spend weeks without basic resources like power, shelter, food, and medical care?
The answer lies in a version of history many would prefer to forget; one which continues to play out each time we ignore it.
The storm’s path tore through areas infamous for redlining, racism, and violence going back long before the city’s founding. As a result of this oppressive infrastructure, already underserved communities in St. Louis were left, as usual, to organize their own recovery
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.
The May 2025 storms weren’t just a singular natural disaster: they were a predictable amplification of existing structural violence. St. Louis is located in a region of the midwestern United States colloquially dubbed Tornado Alley due to the frequency and intensity of tornadic activity and other severe weather. It’s located in a flood plain, with many areas prone to dangerous floods and ice storms.
Despite well-documented evidence that escalating climate emergencies are intwined with institutional racism, federal programs continue to leave those most vulnerable unprepared and unsupported.
Climate change is a multiplier of all forms of social disadvantage, with divisions along class lines, gender, age, and much else besides.
— BBC
The same chronically under-resourced neighborhoods that are over-policed daily are the first to be governmentally abandoned or violently militarized (often some combination) when disaster strikes.
In St. Louis, this meant generationally black-owned homes and businesses, communities that have fought so hard for a shred of safety and security, were left sifting through the rubble themselves.
St. Louis blues: A harm-filled history
Looking at a map of the tornado’s path, we can heartbreakingly foresee which neighborhoods will recover quickly and which will be devastated by this newest trauma.
Anyone familiar with the history of the area could see that this was the system as usual. Oppression compounding on itself; each additional crisis digging another groove into our collective memory that things have always been this way and should, therefore, be treated as normal.
How much has racism built into our core systems; from local ordinances, to healthcare, to zoning, to housing, contributed to what’s happening in St. Louis now?
Walter Johnson’s historical analysis in The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States provides context for the impact of these storms on areas unjustly burdened by centuries of structural violence, white flight, and racist urban planning.
African Americans in St. Louis are twelve times more likely than white residents to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which often contain environmental risks, including poor air or water quality, industrial toxins, and failed sanitary infrastructure… Sure conditions compound other political, social, and economic disadvantages, which undermine access not just to economic opportunity but to adequate social services, decent schools, and nutritious food.
— Johnson
The May 2025 tornadoes are just another example of traditional humanitarian frameworks that perpetuate harmful systems by underreacting to symptoms rather than addressing their causes.
Looking to another large-scale disaster from recent memory; federal response during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic highlighted stark racism and bigotry built into the core of cities like St. Louis.
Vulnerable populations were more at-risk of facing environmental circumstances out of their control, putting them at higher risk of exposure. Some examples include necessity of using public transportation; lack of access to PPE; living in areas of higher population density; inability to quarantine due to job or living situation; lack of access to healthy food options and testing facilities; and pressure to work while sick.
The pandemic disproportionately affected people of color due to existing disparities in healthcare, education, financial, and legal systems. As a result of this compounding harm, Black and Latino populations were three times more likely to contract the virus and twice as likely to die in comparison to white populations.
Natural disasters, aid, and compounded oppression
Communities can and do come together to respond after disaster, but how can they address the deeply-rooted systemic problems when they’re so busy fighting its many heads?
The humanitarian imperative shouldn’t be complicated: when disaster strikes, we band together and respond with everything we have, immediately. But that must include challenging systems that create vulnerability in the first place.
A study of volunteering in response to the 2011 Tuscaloosa tornadoes provides quantitative data on community response patterns. Shown were ways communities consistently demonstrate capacity for self-organization that challenged assumptions about needing external control during crisis. Yet traditional humanitarian frameworks rarely account for or strengthen these existing community assets in their response.
A more effective approach requires acknowledging the fact that communities facing crisis are not blank slates awaiting salvation. We possess existing networks, knowledge systems, and survival strategies that have sustained us long before any outside intervention.
Mutual aid networks glimpse what grassroots disaster response could actually look like given proper support: sustained community accountability that builds alternatives rather than begging existing harmful systems to reform.
This requires moving beyond the “temporal violence” of emergency response and learning toward engagement with the structural conditions that produce vulnerability.
Media and construction of disaster narratives
Media representation plays a crucial role in shaping public understanding of disaster response. A recent documentary about another infamous Missouri tornado that occurred in Joplin in 2011, Twister: Caught in the Storm highlighted how popular media often emphasizes individual heroics and dramatic rescue stories while overlooking the sustained work of mutual aid efforts that continue long after cameras leave.
While highlighting individual stories can draw attention to the importance of systemic issues, focusing on spectacle and emergency temporalities can also support humanitarian frameworks that rely on crisis virality rather than addressing underlying structural conditions.
Mainstream media tends to focus on emotionally-evocative stories of individual resilience, exceptionalism, and charity rather than true structural change; often missing the transformative potential of community-led response and structural support. This glamorizing of disaster narratives hearkens to what’s been described as the “CNN effect”.
As a result of this imbalanced attention; media coverage doesn’t simply document crises, but participates in their social construction, determining which suffering becomes visible and actionable and which goes unseen.
Coverage of the St. Louis storms demonstrates similar patterns: mainstream media sources covered the excitement of the disaster itself. Only local, increasingly limited coverage continues to show efforts at recovery and criticism of emergency management by the federal government.
(Even more) unprecedented times: Bureaucracy and privatization of aid in Trump’s second term
Since his reelection in Jan. 2025, Trump has been attacking, discrediting and defunding federal aid and health organizations. He’s made dramatic cuts to organizations such as FEMA and USAID in a clear attempt to push responsibility to individual states.
At the same time, those same states are actively and desperately calling for emergent federal help due to lack of resources.
In the period shortly after St. Louis tornadoes hit, 17 disaster requests were left pending, a dramatically high number for the time of year. Just weeks before the storms, Trump slashed nearly $1 billion in disaster aid meant for Black and low-income neighborhoods. Much of the money was meant specifically to improve crisis management in these areas.
This isn’t just administrative inefficiency; it’s a cruel, deliberate strategy that treats disaster relief as a political tool to be withheld rather than a human right.
When you’re already dealing with the psychological impact of losing everything, bureaucratic uncertainty becomes another form of violence.
When disasters like this happen, we see people forced to fend for themselves as the infrastructure around them fails. Every day of delay compounds the harm.
People displaced from homes, jobs, and resources by natural disasters (including those impacted by climate change), don’t just need shelter. They need stability, predictability, and hope.
What can we do instead?: A grassroots approach
For too many communities, 911 is the only social support available. What if we dared imagine something better? What might emergency response look like unfiltered by institutions built without control at their forefront?
Each delayed ambulance response, every neighbor stranded without basic resources, every preventable emergency deemed unworthy of attention; these are patterns showing the system failing exactly as intended.
What good are our supposed rights when the systems responsible for enforcing them are the ones withholding and violating them? We refuse to accept false promises that harmful systems can be reformed into just ones. Instead, we imagine and build alternatives that don’t rely on their broken logic.
Critics might argue that local mutual aid, however admirable, can’t handle disasters of this magnitude alone. A $1.6 billion disaster requires federal resources and coordination that grassroots networks simply cannot provide.
This is an invitation to love, study, struggle, search, and imagine what we have around us to make this possible, today… Abolishing the prison industrial complex does not mean that there will not be emergencies or harm; it recognizes that the vast majority of harm is preventable and can be eliminated — Purnell
But this criticism misses the fundamental point of a grassroots mindset. The St. Louis tornado response teaches us that communities already know how to care for each other. That was never the question.
The question is whether we’ll build systems that support this knowledge, or continue investing in band-aid frameworks that treat symptoms while ignoring (or actively contributing to) causes.
This is a long term vision, one with a focus on rooting out and breaking down oppressive systems to create something new.
Conclusion: Aid and hope when disaster hits
It’s no secret current federal systems of emergency response aren’t serving all areas equitably. But if these systems so obviously aren’t working for people when they need them most, what are we doing?
The delayed response in St. Louis was a bureaucratic failure that reflected fundamental harm in maintaining existing power structures. But as the systems around them failed, who stepped up with everything they had?
Community-led relief efforts mobilized during and immediately after the storms. Individuals, local organizations and mutual aid networks popped up to respond and effectively help their vulnerable neighbors with whatever they could contribute.
Organizations like Food City StL, City Foundry, and Action St. Louis organized crowdfunding and direct aid; building networks of care recognizing collective humanity and need for community health.
Grassroots community organizers have shown themselves capable of quickly showing up for those most impacted; using local knowledge to rebuild from the ground up rather than waiting for permission from politicians.
These are the tools we should be investing in. These are the example we should be following.
What disaster response demands isn’t elimination of large-scale coordination, but transformation of how aid coordination operates. The entire logic of top-down relief that assumes external agencies know better than communities themselves needs turning on its head.
Rather than siphoning resources from struggling communities during normal times (only to paternalistically return inadequate aid during crises), we need approaches that strengthen existing community-led efforts.
Supporting grassroots efforts to fill existing gaps in federal services is how we can work our way toward improved crisis response and gradual nonreliance on our current failing systems.
This isn’t an overnight fix, but one requiring ongoing community support and participation. No one can do everything, but everyone can all do something. Knowing what we know, anything less than this isn’t just policy failure: it’s moral failure.
What recent events have impacted your local community? How did your community respond, and what can we do better in the future?