Tuesday, 24 June 2025

St. Louis SUSPENDS “They/Them” Emergency Chief For Failing To Deploy Sirens During Deadly Tornado

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City Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) Commissioner Sarah Russell has been suspended after failing to activate tornado sirens in St. Louis.

Prior to Friday’s deadly tornado, Russell left her city’s residents under-prepared by not deploying the tornado sirens. Five people died and many others were injured.

Take a look:

By the way, Sarah Russell goes by “they/them” pronounces, per the St. Louis website:

St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer is investigating the matter and has placed Russell on leave.

Daily Mail reported:

The City Emergency Management Agency (CEMA) director has since been placed on paid administrative leave, Mayor Cara Spencer announced on Tuesday, saying she wanted to ‘provide accountability’ after the life-saving alerts weren’t deployed.

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In a statement, Spencer said CEMA failed to ‘alert the public to dangers.’

‘Commissioner Russell has served our city for years and is a person of goodwill, but I cannot move on from this without providing accountability and ensuring that our emergency management is in trusted hands,’ the mayor said.

Spencer said an internal investigation into the siren failure revealed ‘multiple’ issues, prompting her decision to seek an external investigation of CEMA.

Sarah Russell claims that she directed the Fire Department to activate the sirens because she was too far away from her agency’s building at the time.

However, the recording of her call to the Fire Department reveals that her ‘order’ was very vague.

And, even if the Fire Department had tried to deploy the tornado sirens, they wouldn’t have worked anyways…

You see, as it turns out, the button for the sirens wasn’t functional.

Per CBS News:

There is a system of 60 outdoor sirens stationed around St. Louis, which are meant to be activated once the National Weather Service issues a tornado warning for the area as it did on Friday. There are two places where they can be activated: the CEMA office and the Fire Department.

According to Spencer’s office, which announced Russell’s leave Tuesday, the commissioner was attending an offsite workshop with other emergency management staff when the tornado warning came down, and that prevented them from activating the sirens from their agency’s main building, about a half mile away.

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Russell instead contacted the Fire Department to activate the sirens, but the directive was ambiguous, the mayor said. Her office released the recording of Russell’s call to the department, in which she confirms they are aware of the NWS warning and briefly clarifies the timing of it before saying, “OK, you got the sirens?” The person at the fire department replies “Yes, ma’am,” and the call ends.

“The direction was not clear,” Spencer said at a news conference Wednesday morning about the phone call. Russel did not clearly direct the person at the Fire Department to press the button to activate the sirens, she said, adding, “It’s my understanding that the button was not pushed.”

However, even if someone had pressed the button at the Fire Department, city officials learned Tuesday that the button was not working.

“Work to repair the button began Tuesday afternoon and is expected to be completed within days,” Spencer’s office said.

She had one job, and her failure to perform cost lives.

DEI kills.

Russell shouldn’t be placed on paid leave. She should be fired, stat!

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport.

View the original article here.


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