The city of St. Louis is grappling with a catastrophic breakdown in emergency management, and the core question—how does Sarah Russell still have a job—deserves more than a shrug. On Friday, as an EF3 tornado ripped through the northern part of the city, emergency sirens that should have sounded to alert thousands remained silent. Not because of a system malfunction or a cyberattack. No—it was pure, unfiltered, human failure. Specifically, a failure from the very office designed to protect lives in moments exactly like this.
The tornado that struck St. Louis last Friday was not a minor event. The EF3 classification means winds between 136–165 mph—powerful enough to uproot homes, snap trees, and kill indiscriminately. And kill it did: five lives lost in what Mayor Cara Spencer called “the most horrific and deadly storm our city has experienced in my lifetime.”
This is St. Louis CEMA Commissioner.
As a tornado with 152mph winds arrived, Sarah (they/them) and her staff was not available to activate the tornado siren.
5 kiIIed, 38 injured. pic.twitter.com/qTXYR5JDR6
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 22, 2025
The alarm system? Silent. Not due to a power outage. Not due to technical malfunction. But because Sarah Russell, the city’s Emergency Management Director, was not in her office—and neither was her team. They weren’t on a break. They weren’t out in the field. They were at a workshop downtown.
Let that sink in: with severe weather forecasted, the team responsible for coordinating the city’s emergency response wasn’t stationed at their command post. They were off-site, and when the moment of decision came, they weren’t prepared to act.
According to the timeline released by Mayor Spencer’s office, Russell attempted to contact the fire department to have the sirens activated. But the call—now publicly released—was ambiguous and ineffective. No clear directive. No firm command. And ultimately, no action. The fire department didn’t sound the alarm because it wasn’t clear they were being told to do so.
Great accountability questions from @shoshana_stahl last night. Notice how it takes three times before CEMA Commissioner Sarah Russell finally admits CEMA staffers were at a workshop when they should’ve been sounding an alarm. Russell also blames fire dept, old battered sirens. https://t.co/JvHSRqvX4A pic.twitter.com/9g7jCYBxJm
— Mark Maxwell (@MarkMaxwellTV) May 20, 2025
This isn’t just a slip-up. It’s a textbook case of operational negligence. When the system is designed to be activated by human input and the humans are missing, the entire model collapses. And in this case, it led to people dying without warning in their homes and cars.
Mayor Spencer did the bare minimum—placing Russell on paid administrative leave and launching an internal investigation. That’s not accountability. That’s damage control.
And it’s not just Russell. It’s systemic. Why wasn’t there redundancy? Why wasn’t someone on-call at the emergency management office during severe weather alerts? Why is an entire city’s early warning system contingent on a single team’s presence in one room?
The level of incompetence is staggering. https://t.co/lWBwRIX8At
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) May 21, 2025
In any other high-responsibility role—say, air traffic control, hospital triage, or nuclear oversight—a dereliction of this magnitude would result in immediate termination and possible legal action. But in public administration? You get a taxpayer-funded vacation while a committee figures out how to make the scandal palatable.
