It's been six months since a tornado ripped through a densely populated part of St. Louis last May.

More than two dozen are dead across Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia after a storm sent tornadoes through these states over the week.

St. Louis Mayor, Kara Spencer, called the devastation, quote, truly tremendous and said an estimated 5,000 buildings were impacted.

The storm was nearly a mile wide and stayed on the ground for about 27 minutes.

By the time it was over, it had killed at least four people in St. Louis.

It injured dozens more.

It also left more than a billion dollars of destruction.

That includes more than 5,000 damaged and destroyed buildings

from homes to local businesses. One of the thousands of people living in the path of the tornado

was Larry Powell. I heard debris hid in the house and, you know, I recognize, you know,

tornado activity. And I jumped in the bathroom across the hall, which put three walls

between me and the tornado. I knew that if I had not jumped in that bathroom, I'd have been

Swiss cheese. President Trump declared the tornado a major disaster a month later. That opened up

critical federal assistance,

and it also created an important test case for the Trump administration's new push for states,

not FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to manage the response to disasters.

The mayor of St. Louis, Kara Spencer, says the city didn't yet have the infrastructure in place to respond adequately.

I have been frustrated. We have all been frustrated and disappointed with FEMA's failure to drive the response,

providing housing, providing food, the logistical nightmare that was immediately apparent in the hours,

certainly days and weeks following the tornado that we were building as we went.

Consider this. The president says he wants a local, not federal,

approach to managing emergencies, but having to fill FEMA's shoes so quickly

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