Residents reflect on twister experience

An EF-3 tornado barreled its way more than 40 miles across portions of St. Francois, Ste. Genevieve, Perry and Randolph (Illinois) counties Sunday evening, damaging several homes in the St. Mary area shortly after 9 a.m.
No injuries were reported, though there was significant damage on Seventh Street, to both residences as well as the Antique Mall.
Citizens Electric Corporation initially said 1,700 members were without power after the evening of storms came through.
A preliminary damage survey by the National Weather Service confirmed five tornadoes in southeast Missouri and southwest Illinois Oct. 24. Besides the twister which passed through St. Mary, another EF-3 twister with a max wind speed of 140 mph passed just north of Fredericktown and entered the southwest portion of Perry County, plus two more EF-1 tornadoes were confirmed, one in Reynolds County that traveled 1.15 miles with max winds
105 mph and another in Iron County which had max winds of 95 mph and went 0.3 miles.
The surveys of the damage began Oct. 25 and were concluded Oct. 26.
In many of the cases, the areas to access were difficult to get to, according to Mark Fuchs of the National Weather Service in St. Louis.
It was a “painstakingly long process,” Fuchs noted.
The storm that passed through St. Mary continued to the Chester area. Initially, it was rated as an EF-2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with max winds of 150 mph and a total length of 42.4 miles, but this was upgraded to an EF-3 tornado Tuesday evening. This does not necessarily mean that EF-3 damage was sustained for the entire track of the tornado.
Shirley Grogg resides on Seventh Street in St. Mary. He has called the town home for the past four decades. Sunday evening, as he paid attention to the threatening weather, he described the arrival of the tornado.
“The sirens were going off and I have a weather radio, too, which was saying it was supposed to hit at Bloomsdale first,” he said. “But then it kind of slid, didn’t really go there and it came this way, and they it was headed toward 55, and then wherever they said (Highways) J and N, at Ozora, I knew that’s getting too close.”
The tornado wasn’t in the area very long, he noted.
“You heard the wind pick up, and you heard the tin going from some place, and then I’ll say less than a minute (later), that was it,” he said.
As for checking on the damage, that wouldn’t occur for several more hours.
“There was not really much you could do at night, you didn’t have electric,” Grogg said.
Right whenever the tornado came through, the power went out, Grogg noted. Contact was made with an insurance provider, notifying the business of potential tornado damage.

When daylight arrived, the clean up process began.
“If there is stuff to get cleaned up, get it cleaned up,” he said. “That’s what our insurance company (told us). We took pictures first thing this morning.”
Grogg reported he had no major structural damage. He did have a little roof damage as well as a broken window in the rear of his house. The same cannot be said for others on Seventh Street.
Timothy Schwartz rode the storm out in his bathroom, as his home has no basement.
About 10 after nine, that’s when the tornado arrived.
Schwartz got a message from a family member informing him the tornado was less than five minutes away
“It was almost exact,” he said.
After the twister tore through the area, he attempted to assess the damage.
“You couldn’t really see anything, and then I walked back here and there was a tree about like that down,” Schwartz said, pointing to a fallen tree from the storm. “Then I walked out on the street and you could see by the lightning, you could see the roof of the antique hall was gone.”
“I was shocked,” Schwartz said. “I didn’t think there were this many trees down, but you couldn’t see. Wow, this little bit here is all I’ve seen.”
Schwartz has lived in St. Mary since 2005 and the only other close call from a tornado in that time was one that passed through Brewer in 2017.
After Sunday’s tornado, the damage to his home was minimal, there were trees damaged but just a few shingles lost on the roof.
Asked if he felt fortunate that there was not more damage to his property, Schwartz responded, “Definitely.”
CEC reportedly make significant progress in storm restoration following damage to widespread areas within the CED service territory, according to a press release. Within the first 24 hours after the storm, CEC and local electrical contractors repaird numerous transmission structures and replaced or repaired more than 40 distribution poles in both Perry and Ste. Genevieve counties. It was estimated that more all of the power would be restored by afternoon hours Oct. 27.
Fred Glass, senior meteorologist with St. Louis office of the National Weather Service reported EF-2 tornado damage in the Oct. 24 tornado, in an interview with The Weather Channel.
“The damage that we’ve seen here, the highest end we’ve seen has been the lower end of the EF-2 scale. We’ll have to double check with more sources of information to see exactly where it falls in the EF-2 scale. Right here in St. Mary the highest end we’ve seen is EF-2. We’ve got a lot more areas to survey in this tornado track.”
Preliminary reports of that the twister began west of Farmington and traveled east, passing through Coffman on its way to St. Mary.