THEAREASURROUNDINGTHEAIRPORTWASAWASTE- land. Power was down. The roof on ConcourseCwas punched through, flooding the building with water.Windows and doors were blown out, and debris choked the roads. For the indefinite future, Lambert was closed. Andon Saturday, the initial crews wouldbe coming in to
begin setup for the FIRST Robotics Competition — which was expected to draw 25,000 competitors plus many other participants from around theworldto St. Louis’America’s Center complex on April 27–30. Thatwould be followedby another high-profile global event — the International Biomass Conference& Expo — bringing in nearly 1,500 people on May 2–5. In the immediate aftermath of the
tornado, it didn’t seem possible that the first flights would be able to landat Lam- bert within 24 hours, or that planes would begin departing the day after that. To find out howthat came about, Convene sat down with St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, Airports Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge, and Kathleen Ratcliffe, president of the St. Louis Convention&Visitors Commission (CVC), in the light-splashed second floor of America’s Cen- ter, not long after Slay andRatcliffe took the stage at the opening general session of ASAE’s 2011 Annual Meeting&Exposition. The story that Slay, Hamm-Niebruegge, andRat-
“The thought of devastation as you walked up to the airport was pretty overwhelming, but when you walked in and you saw every- body already kicking in and doing their thing—there were a lot of police offi- cers already at the air- port, on duty, and fire- fighters. They had
kicked in gear and, I think, calmed the fears of people.”
cliffe toldwas intensely gripping but not miraculous; it seems that preparation, communication, and pro- fessionalism carried the day—helped along by a sense of civic responsibility. “It was masses of people that we needed [to get Lambert back up],” Hamm-Niebruegge said. “I look back andI think, hadwe not hadthat outpouring of support, there was no way the airport staff could do that on their own. It goes to tell you that where you have an asset or something like this which can affect the business climate of the region —people said, ‘I need to be a part of this. I need to help where I can.’”
64 pcmaconvene October 2011
‘We Just Got Hit’ Tornado warnings for St. Louis County had been circulating throughout the night on Friday, April 22. Hamm-Niebruegge was out to dinner with her husband, but was receiving regular text updates. Then, at 8:13 p.m., her phone rang. “It was a young man who was in the operations center [at Lambert] at the time—it’s staffed24/7,” Hamm-Niebruegge said. “And he said, ‘We just got hit.’ AndI said, ‘Hit?’ Andhe said, ‘Yes, by a tornado.’” Hamm-Niebruegge was his first call. She toldhim to go through the rest of the emergency-notifica-
tion list, andshe left for the airport, which was about eight miles north
of the restaurant. While Hamm-Niebruegge was tracking the storm on her smartphone,
Slay was home, following it on TV. His wife was in the basement with their three
dogs, because there was a tornado warn- ing for their area. “When I saw on televi- sion that there was a tornado spotted at the airport, I knew there was an issue,” Slay said. “Then I got a call from Jeff [Rainford], my chief of staff. He said, ‘A tornado hit.’ So I headed straight to the airport.” Meanwhile, Ratcliffe had been at Lambert
earlier that evening to catch a flight to Dallas, where she was visiting her mother for Easter.“We called our team together by phone as soon as we heard [about the tornado],” Ratcliffe said, “and set
up a conference call.” Lambert is ownedandoperatedby the city of St. Louis, but sits on 2,800 acres in St. Louis County, out-
side city limits. Hamm-Niebruegge’s drive out there was eerily calm. “There really was no debris or anything,” she said. “And then as we got about a half-mile from the airport, right at St. Charles Rock Road, which is an intersection by the airport… you startedseeing a lot of debris on the highway.We turnedonto Rock Road, and that was the very front of where the tornado sort of hit—through the Bridgeton area, the St. Ann area [in St. Louis County]—and you started seeing the devastation to