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ST. LOUIS — The administration of Mayor Cara Spencer on Tuesday still didn’t offer details on went wrong when sirens failed to properly activate before the tornado that killed five and injured dozens.

±«±Ê¶Ù´¡°Õ·¡:ÌýSt. Louis mayor places emergency management chief on leave for tornado siren failure

Moreover, official statements since the tornado have often contradicted each other.

“It is a very sensitive issue, and I want to be very, very accurate in this,� Spencer said.

Anger, however, continued to mount on Tuesday. Some city officials were already railing against Spencer, who had campaigned promising to fix broken city services. Families of those killed in the tornado said they believed the sirens could have saved lives.

“I feel like they’re responsible for my mother’s death,� said Reginald Holmes, whose mother Delois Holmes, 70, was one of five killed.

Holmes found his mother on the basement steps and says she was trying to take cover underground when the three-story home collapsed.

“If the sirens went off, her life would’ve been saved,� he said on Tuesday. “She would’ve had time to get to the basement.�

Friday afternoon’s tornado touched down in Clayton and tore northeast before reaching the Mississippi River. Winds that topped 150 mph shook trees loose from the earth and rattled homes off their foundations. Cars flipped, and patios splintered. Five people were killed, and dozens were injured.

That same day, residents began to complain that they hadn’t heard the city’s emergency storm sirens — even if they were outdoors.

St. Louis Recorder of Deeds Michael Butler, who ran against Spencer in the race for mayor, said he was outside at Forest Park when the tornado hit Friday afternoon and didn’t hear sirens. He said he took cover “seconds before the brunt of the tornado hit, but some of my friends did not.�

“Now, imagine thousands of other people doing the same thing,� Butler wrote in a social media post. “This isn’t a ‘my bad.’ ‘Hold me accountable.’ This is incompetence.�

Even a longtime emergency management expert in Missouri wondered how the city could make such a mistake.

“That makes no sense. How is that even possible?� said Bill Brinton, who leads emergency operations in St. Joseph and Buchanan County in northwestern Missouri. “Wow. I just can’t believe that.�

Spencer repeated on Tuesday that her priority was fixing the problem.

“Absolutely, we are doing our best to be transparent and forthcoming while also making sure that our focus is ensuring that it never happens again,� she said.

But her administration had released conflicting statements in the days after the storm.

‘A button wasn’t pushed’

St. Louis operates 60 warnings sirens that were installed in 1999. An is underway. The city has also had an online and text alert program since 2010. Tornado sirens are meant to alert people who are outside, not inside.

On Saturday, City Emergency Management Agency Commissioner Sarah Russell, at a news conference with Spencer, said the city had received “a lot of questions about sirens, and we are looking into that.�

At another news conference with Spencer the next day, Russell said that the “fire alarm office,� staffed 24 hours a day, was primarily responsible for activating the sirens. CEMA was the “secondary activation point.�

The CEMA office is small, Russell said, and works “closer to business hours unless the need arises.�

Russell also suggested at least some of the sirens sounded: “I have received reports from people that did hear it. I’ve heard from a lot of people that say they haven’t heard it.�

On Monday, Spencer acknowledged for the first time publicly “a human failure.�

“In those minutes between the warning and the time that we were experiencing a massive weather event, there was a failure, a human failure, a failure in protocol to get the sirens up and running,� Spencer said at a news conference.

She said the error happened because of a lack of clarity on who was supposed to set off the sirens — the fire department or emergency management.

“A button wasn’t pushed, and the sirens were not deployed,� she said.

She also said she was making changes: She moved the authority for activating the sirens to the fire department.

Russell was not at the news conference.

Anger grew overnight.

Spencer called yet another press event Tuesday. She said the city was also working to automate the alarms.

“Within a year, there will not be a need to have a human being press the button,� Spencer said.

She said there had been no personnel changes at CEMA.

“I have faith in our entire team,� she said. “Our team is robust.�

And she promised an internal investigation on the failure.

She declined to say if she believed Russell misled the public.

“Your questions, absolutely, they’re valid. They deserve an answer. ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ will get one. I just want to point out that we are triaging a whole host of things right now, and we want to be sensitive to that as well.â€�

But in Spencer’s Tuesday moving authority to the fire department, she identified part of the problem.

Only one city entity, the order says — CEMA — got “direct critical weather notifications.�

And on Friday, as the storm was bearing down on the city, CEMA staff were in a workshop at a city building at 1520 Market Street.

‘Are you going to come and apologize?’

Nicholas Brown, whose friend Juan Baltazar was killed Friday when a tree collapsed on his truck, said he can’t help but wonder if it would’ve made a difference for Baltazar, who was driving back from shopping at the time.

“I wonder if there had been just a little more time, if there had been minutes to warn somebody to drive faster, to pull over, something,� Brown said. “Even if it was small, it was a chance they could’ve had to save themselves, had things worked the way they were supposed to do.�

Another person was killed at Centennial Christian Church in St. Louis’ Fountain Park neighborhood — and volunteers at the church said they didn’t hear any sirens, according to the longtime former pastor of the church, the Rev. Derrick Perkins.

They had just finished serving lunchtime meals and were discussing future plans when the tornado hit and toppled the bell tower, trapping three people. One of them, 74-year-old Patricia Penelton, a longtime member known for feeding the homeless, was killed.

Perkins said the group didn’t have time to get to the basement.

“If those sirens had gone off, there would’ve been a great chance for people to adjust and take cover,� Perkins said Tuesday. “It’s a horrible mistake. It’s a horrible failure of leadership. And, unfortunately, lives were lost. The failure of the system failed the community.�

Holmes, who lived with his mother in the 4500 block of Cote Brilliante Avenue, said he had picked up his 6-year-old daughter from school Friday when his mom asked them to go to the store nearby to pick up some food.

They had heard that it might storm, and it was breezy outside. But there were other people out and other customers at the store, Holmes said.

At the store, he got a text that there was a tornado nearby. As they left, the wind picked up and the sky turned green, and his car started to shake. Then, he saw the tornado ahead. He ran home to find the home collapsed, his mom on the basement stairwell.

It all happened too fast, he said. Shortly afterward, people started to talk — no one had heard the sirens. But they had heard them a day earlier during a test.

Holmes said he appreciated the city “owning up� to the siren failure. But he questions what happens now.

“At this point, what do families get from this?� Holmes said. “Are you going to come and apologize to the five families that lost people? Are you going to pay for all their funerals?�