Re:
Well those videos I had not seen before. You are correct, they had ample warning to get those people out of there-had they been monitoring he NWS warnings. I guess the footage I saw was the one you mentioned, from Concourse E and the WN gate areas. Then the airport police start evacuating the gate areas and soon after is when the tornado moved through. But that was not a small tornado, it was an EF4 with winds around 165mph. What was lucky was it hit the main terminal and not the concourses directly (thus the photo of the large cargo van on the roof of the terminal). If it had directly hit the concourses I guarantee it would have been a far worse scenario. They are "just" enough away from the main terminal at STL.
At OKC, they evacuated the terminal about 15-20 minutes before the storm came through the area. Thankfully there was no actual on-ground tornado with the circulation and it moved just north of the airport. The nice thing about our airport is that there is a nice long tunnel that connects the parking garages to the terminal which is where everyone was moved. The lead warning time on the May 31st storm was about half an hour (since the El Reno tornado was moving very slowly). It was when the storms took a hard right and started moving southeast that the airport was in the path.
Originally posted by 3WE
View Post
At OKC, they evacuated the terminal about 15-20 minutes before the storm came through the area. Thankfully there was no actual on-ground tornado with the circulation and it moved just north of the airport. The nice thing about our airport is that there is a nice long tunnel that connects the parking garages to the terminal which is where everyone was moved. The lead warning time on the May 31st storm was about half an hour (since the El Reno tornado was moving very slowly). It was when the storms took a hard right and started moving southeast that the airport was in the path.
Comment