Workers at dozens of Metro East warehouses have no safe rooms to shelter from tornadoes
EDWARDSVILLE — The atmospheric conditions across the St. Louis region were particularly favorable for tornadoes on an unseasonably warm December day before one slammed into an Amazon warehouse.
The National Weather Service had issued a tornado watch for the most populous parts of the region by late afternoon, and areas of that watch upgraded to a warning shortly after 8 p.m.
The Weather Service warnings urge people to immediately “take cover” and “move to a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building.”
But that wasn’t entirely possible for the 46 workers at the Amazon facility when an EF-3 tornado, with wind speeds between 136 and 165 mph, bore down on the building. Six people died when portions of the 1.1 million-square-foot facility buckled under the force of the storm.
The loss of life that night has left some wondering how such deaths could be prevented in the future.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/economy-business/2022-02-16/workers-at-dozens-of-metro-east-warehouses-have-no-safe-rooms-to-shelter-from-tornadoes