St. Louis area suffers another hit

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By St. Louis Post-Dispatch staff | Saturday, July 22, 2006 1:16 AM CDT | () comments

Odell Mitchell Jr./POST-DISPATCH Strong winds blew over a light pole on top of this car during a storm Friday in Madison County (Ill.) near St. Louis.

ST. LOUIS — The second punch was another ringer.

A wild thunderstorm that pounded the St. Louis area at midday Friday was a close copy of Wednesday’s first roundhouse blow.

The new wave of storms brought the total “to-do” list for repair crews back up to 570,000.

As of 7 p.m. Friday, the utility company AmerenUE was reporting that 552,000 customers in the area remained without power.

There also were two more deaths Friday: A 42-year-old dump truck driver who died in Affton in a construction site accident during the storm and a 93-year-old Jefferson County man who died from the heat. Two previous deaths were blamed on Wednesday’s storm and ensuing power outage.

The National Weather Service said Friday’s storm had peak winds of 60-70 mph as it roared across northern St. Louis County, intensifying to gusts as high as 90 mph over the farmland east of the Metro East across the Mississippi River in Illinois. That roughly equaled Wednesday’s top gusts in St. Louis.

The storm also dumped 1.3 inches of rain at the Lambert Field airport. It began over central Missouri, where it dropped 1-inch hail on Columbia and roared eastward. The worst damage in the St. Louis metro area ran roughly from St. Charles County through northern St. Louis County into Granite City, Collinsville and Mascoutah, Ill.

The Friday storm was somewhat different from Wednesday’s, which erupted with 100-degree heat as the catalyst. Friday’s system followed the arrival of a cool front that had kept pre-storm temperatures in the upper 80s. But a common factor, weather service meteorologist Ron Przybylinski said, was high humidity.

After Friday’s storm, some places were left almost totally without power. AmerenUE’s running count reported that about 90 percent of the community of Jennings was without power Friday afternoon, as were more than 75 percent of Florissant, Mo., and Granite City, Ill.

An Ameren spokeswoman said the utility had not determined how many lost power Wednesday, enjoyed a restoration and then lost it again Friday.

AT&T said the storm cut telephone service to about 7,000 customers.

With power outages expected to last for days and affect thousands of people, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt mobilized the state’s National Guard on Thursday to help with cleanup and cooling operations. St. Louis County declared a state of emergency and the mayor of St. Louis declared the city a disaster area.

Hospitals and nursing homes were evacuated throughout Thursday.

In St. Charles, Mo., Dennis Wagner was standing at his door Friday when a large tree cracked and split, falling 15 feet from where his son was standing on the porch.

“There’s probably 3,000 pounds lying on the (power) line,” he said.

Lightning was suspected as the cause of a fire on the roof of a building at the Brandywine Condominiums in Chesterfield, Mo., which displaced 40 residents, many of them retirees.

“You heard a pop,” said Betty McClinton, 70, who lives next door to the damaged building. “I didn’t actually see the bolt hit the building, but you could hear it and then you saw the flames.”

In the Baden neighborhood of far north St. Louis, wind blew a metal roof onto a car at a service station. The collapse smashed the front and back windshields of the car, and its four occupants escaped without injury.

“We heard a boom, and then the front doors popped open and we ran out of the car,” said Felicia Echols, 33, who was with her son, sister and nephew. “We were lucky, real lucky, to get out.”

In Illinois, the American Water Co. issued a boil advisory for most of its service area after power was lost at its East St. Louis treatment plant.

The second round of power outages again snuffed out traffic lights and gasoline pumps, causing traffic jams at intersections and service stations. Lisa Maclin of Jennings sat in a line of more than 50 vehicles at a Quick Trip, one of the few in the area with working pumps.

“I should have filled up yesterday,” she said.