Resilience in Real Time: North St. Louis Tornado Response
- Frank Romo
- Jun 16
- 9 min read
Tornado in North St. Louis
On the evening of May 16, 2025, a powerful EF-3 tornado touched down in north St. Louis, Missouri leaving a trail of devastation across residential neighborhoods and community corridors. With winds reaching up to 140 miles per hour, the tornado uprooted trees, peeled back roofs, collapsed porches, and scattered debris across streets. Amidst this natural disaster, entire blocks lost power and families huddled in basements and closets as homes shook around them.
When the storm passed, it left behind fractured infrastructure, overwhelmed services, thousands of residents facing immediate uncertainty, and a shared urgency. The community in north St. Louis quickly mobilized through intentional coordination—led by community members who already knew their streets, neighbors, and needs. At the heart of that community response was LOVEtheLOU assisted by RomoGIS .
Residents took initiative and looked out for each other. Neighbors stepped over fallen power lines to check on elders. Volunteers gathered supplies even before outside help arrived. While waiting for outside help, the community itself became the first responder to this disaster. This community spirit set the tone for the impactful efforts that followed.
LOVEtheLOU Community Anchor
LOVEtheLOU has long served as a stabilizing force in north St. Louis. Known for mentoring youth, restoring vacant homes, and supporting families, so their headquarters was already a trusted space when the tornado hit. In the hours after the storm, the leadership team made a bold decision to turn the LOVEtheLOU center into a neighborhood distribution hub. They cleared rooms, opened their doors, and began coordinating incoming supplies with speed and precision. Tables that once hosted after-school programs now held pallets of canned goods, hygiene products, diapers, and first-aid kits. Volunteers from the neighborhood stepped in without hesitation, helping organize, package, and deliver resources across the city. In a matter of hours, their space became the center of a relief network stretching across the city.
Community leaders at LOVEtheLOU packaging food supplies in boxes for distribution throughout the community.
LOVEtheLOU used their community expertise, trust, and relationships built long before the storm to transform operations quickly. Families came not only to pick up supplies, but also to ask questions, get information, and find a sense of calm. The LOVEtheLOU leaders efficiently coordinated, effectively communicated, and scaled rapidly to meet the emergency needs of the community throughout the city. It was grassroots logistics at its best: agile, adaptive, and deeply rooted in local knowledge. This was mutual aid refined into operational excellence. LOVEtheLOU didn’t just respond—they led.
Organizing the Chaos
RomoGIS arrived with a readiness to support what was already working and contribute their community organizing and emergency management expertise. The team quickly served alongside LOVEtheLOU's organizers to help establish essential backend systems—focusing on collecting and organizing incoming data. RomoGIS supported the creation of digitized intake logs which helped improve distribution of incoming donations. RomoGIS trained student leaders in digital skills to help catalog and visualize data in real-time. Food packaging and delivery stations were set up and RomoGIS supported with labeling systems and delivery support to avoid overlap and waste. Additionally, RomoGIS set up clear communications and access to databases and tools where the team could collaboratively work with minimal confusion under the high-pressure environment.
Each step of the process—from intake to drop-off—was structured around LOVEtheLOU’s knowledge of the entire community: families in need, blocked streets, and open distribution centers. The LOVEtheLou leadership held so much knowledge about the community resources, roadblocks and needs. RomoGIS worked alongside LOVEtheLOU leaders and other community partners to establish better data management systems around the incoming data regarding community resources and needs.
This was a system designed in real time to transform community knowledge into community action with intention and care. At a moment when coordination meant everything, RomoGIS helped build strategic clarity into every step of the process. By supporting the emergency management strategy, RomoGIS helped scale the capacity of LOVEtheLOU’s grassroots network that was already leading with purpose to more efficiently meet the immediate needs of the community.
In collaboration with Lucas Rouggly and Kim Plank, RomoGIS was able to create better infrastructure for data collection. These improvements on data collection meant better knowledge about community needs and allowed LOVEtheLOU to position leaders more effectively throughout the neighborhood for greater impact. In the first 72 hours, well over 500 packages of items were processed through the center and delivered where they were needed.
Inspecting the Damage
After establishing an effective community distribution response system, a second challenge emerged: understanding the full extent of the tornado damage across the impacted neighborhoods. LOVEtheLOU’s youth leaders partnered with RomoGIS to begin a detailed on-foot assessment effort. Using mobile phones equipped with custom survey forms, they canvassed streets documenting collapsed roofs, broken windows, displaced residents, and power outages.
Every observation became a data point, and more importantly, it was an opportunity to check in with community members directly, ask questions, and offer support. This method ensured that damage reports were specific to each home, each corner, each family. The assessments aimed to capture the property status and highlight specific needs. RomoGIS handled the technical setup of the forms and data, but the power of this process came from the people collecting this important information. Community and student leaders played a vital role in collecting this and relaying this data back to the headquarters.
The youth leaders who went out to perform these assessments made powerful efforts to support and established community trust. Residents were responsive to the community leaders because recognized a familiar face. Youth from LOVEtheLOU weren’t just helping—they were leading, and they continued to grow in these efforts. The young people lead a great community awareness and a level of local intelligence that improved these emergency response efforts. These assessments supported both short and long-term support for residents and in some cases, those assessments led to the delivery of supplies within hours.
Eyes in the Sky: Drone Capture
To complement the door-to-door efforts, RomoGIS partnered with local drone pilots to conduct aerial imaging flights over the hardest-hit areas. LOVEtheLOU youth leaders’ community insights once again came in handy here. Student leaders helped identify the best areas to capture data across the neighborhood. In this case, their knowledge of the recent volunteer efforts and community outreach gave them additional insight into which areas needed surveying for damages. These flights produced high-resolution images showing wide-scale damage patterns and were later used as resources to help improve community outreach and recovery efforts.
By layering drone footage with field data into interactive maps, these maps can help stakeholders advocate for support from outside relief agencies by showing clear, mapped evidence of where intervention was most needed. For RomoGIS and LOVEtheLOU, drones became another way to gain information, build community capacity to respond, and document the tornado’s impact for insurance claims and other recovery support applications.
Supply Distribution Dashboard
All the data from walking surveys to drone imagery to volunteer coordination was then unified in a few different dashboards and platform for LOVEtheLOU to utilize for strategy and outreach. The LOVEtheLOU Recovery Dashboard, co-developed by RomoGIS and LOVEtheLOU, showcases the type of food and supplies that have been delivered from LOVEtheLOU. Designed to be public-facing and easy to use, the dashboard served as a great digital resource during the recovery operation. It displayed real-time updates on damage reports, supply deliveries, cleanup locations, and volunteer activities.
LOVEtheLOU’s team has used this dashboard and others like it while in the field to decide where to send volunteers, how to track inventory, and when to reroute supplies. The dashboard also served as a learning platform for community members. It was used to help volunteers and partners quickly understand the scope of the operation and the importance of capturing data to support local response. The dashboard was sent to City officials to help them understand the local perspective and make informed decisions on where deploy equipment or restore power. The dashboard was also used as a teaching tool for other youth at LOVEtheLOU showcasing how technology can be utilized to support community recovery.
Throughout the response, local leadership led the way. The relationships, decisions, and action plans came from the community and LOVEtheLOU leadership. RomoGIS worked behind the scenes to build the systems that could help facilitate greater knowledge sharing among the community and provide guidance in the recovery efforts. As the immediate crisis evolved into long-term recovery, efforts expanded to support a neighborhood wide canvassing campaign. This campaign focused on capturing resident needs not just in terms of damage, but in terms of what they needed to rebuild their lives—mental health support, legal aid, school access, or long-term housing assistance. The goal was to acknowledge and support immediate needs, but to also plan with residents what was needed next for long-term recovery.
The campaign also became an opportunity for leadership development. RomoGIS worked with the initial response team and trained youth leaders on a wide variety of technical topics and community organizing skills to support LOVEtheLOU's efforts. Youth leaders from LOVEtheLOU learned how to collect, interpret and visualize data and communicate it publicly. Canvassers used RomoGIS tools to log responses quickly and communicate them back to headquarters for updates. Data was collected and reviewed daily along with general processes to ensure responsive strategies in real time.
The community needs surveys helped facilitate conversations, grounded in trust and care and built a greater awareness of LOVEtheLOU's vision and commitment. The act of asking, listening, and delivering sent a message: you are seen and your needs matter.
A series of images showcasing the overwhelming support from all members of the community to support neighbors, residents and families in St. Louis.
Rebuilding With Purpose
What’s happening in north St. Louis isn’t just recovery—it’s passionate community-led reconstruction. LOVEtheLOU'S passion, mission and heart shine through these recovery efforts. Their ability to organize and mobilize the community has helped touch thousands of lives. RomoGIS has helped LOVEtheLOU strategically organize, amplify, and scale their efforts by building tools that improve their community response. Through this process RomoGIS has built a strong foundation with LOVEtheLOU and seeks to build upoon that by training even more leaders, establishing better systems and creating greater impact.
LOVEtheLOU continues to lead neighborhood restoration efforts and are now backed by tools and structured workflows that can improve their resource delivery. Their young leaders can now manage data platforms, understand neighborhood logistics, and lead canvassing efforts to support the community. This is a remarkable example of how a neighborhood is being rebuilt by the people in the community. These community leaders have grown in their strength, leadership, commitment and overall development. Not only overcoming the adversity of the tornado but turning it into a moment for leadership, person and community development. That’s not just recovery—that’s resilience in action.
Ongoing Comprehensive Response
The work continues with community meetings, new block-by-block recovery plans, and youth-led assessments of long-term needs. As new needs unfold, new strategies must unfold to be adaptive to the community. Communication from residents is key to understanding how to best deploy services and resources. LOVEtheLOU and RomoGIS are continuing to improve their data collection, feedback process and community needs surveys everyday. The goal is to enhance workflows and improve data collection to support the highest priority needs of local residents. Data collected can be used on various scales from understanding which blocks need roof repair to identifying which residents needs their food supplies replenished. Through this process, RomoGIS has made recovery a visible, trackable, and adaptable process which has helped rebuild a stronger, and more connected community.
Recently, LOVEtheLOU has become a sponsored site for the American Red Cross because of the remarkable community leadership and comprehensive model of organizing that facilitated an efficient emergency response process. In the days and weeks that followed the St. Louis tornado, LOVEtheLOU led this neighborhood recovery process and became a model of what it means to respond with coordination, humility, and heart.
RomoGIS is grateful to collaborate with LOVEtheLOU, offering community organizing support and technical assistance that could support the extraordinary work already unfolding on the ground. This project will continue to evolve, and and as it does it will provide tools and stories that not only serve as a record of the impact, but as a guide for how communities across the country can lead their own effective recovery efforts.
A series of images showcasing volunteers and community leaders working side by side to support disaster recovery efforts.
Thank You to all of the Community Partners and Leaders in St. Louis who helped us including but not limited to the following:
LOVEtheLOU: All the LOVEtheLOU Staff, Lucas Rouggly, Kim Plank, Kiesha Williams; Student Leaders: Eternity Braden, De'Asia Clark, Romondo Gillespie; Photography & Drone Footage: Captured by Charlyn Mwihaki & Arik Hotopp Community Partners: American Red Cross, Local Churches, God's Helping Hands, Home Depot, Lowes, 100 Black Men, Mission St. Louis, Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, St. Louis Churches, Together STL, For the Ville, Walmart, Alderwoman Daniela Velazquez, Jonathon Strong, Mayor Cara Spencer and her great staff. RomoGIS Partners: A big thank you to all of the partners who invited our team to St. Louis and continue to uplift and suport our efforts in the city including Brian Monheiser, Anthony Calamito, Claire Anderson, Emily Hemingway, John Berglund and the entire geospatial community who has welcomed us.
Community members wasted no time stepping into action.
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