A violent storm that hit left homes in the area of St. Louis flattened in the suburbs around the main airport, which has been closed for most of Saturday after being hit by a tornado.
Houses exploded debris covered the ground in the neighborhoods around the city, while trees topped and overturned cars strewn lawns and walkways. Air, a home looked like a doll's House which has had its roof took off.
The tornado that devastated the region Friday evening is a not severely hurt who either.
"It looks almost like a little divine intervention when you look at the devastation,", said the Governor Jay Nixon, who overflew the area to assess damage.
The storm damaged a building of St. Louis of the Air National Guard. (Sarah Conard/Reuters)Nixon, said that the President Barack Obama promised aid Federal Saturday in a telephone conversation. Some 750 houses in the area of St. Louis were damaged, and less than 100 were uninhabitable, the Governor said.
Cleaning tilted in full speed Saturday. With the din of chain saws and beats hammers pounding in the background, the owners sifted through the wreckage so that the crews scrambled to restore power to 26,000 customers still without it.
Roofers were going door-to-door offering free temporary repairs. Claims arrived in trucks to help their clients. Neighbors helped each other get trees of roofs and pick up the pieces of metal, glass and branches exploded yards.
"It is crazy - as something you would see in a film,"27-year-old Tim Kreitler says that he helped a neighbor to clean-up."
At Lambert Airport, workers are mounted on board up windows and swept glass in the main terminal, where the tornado tore part of the roof and blown in half of the large glass Windows.
The airport was reopened on Saturday evening for a handful of flights arrivals and officials should approximately 70 per cent of arrivals and departures regular go as expected early Sunday. The damaged Hall was likely to remain closed for a maximum period of two months.
Director of the airport "we will not have the prettiest airport tomorrow, but we will have an airport operations," Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge said.
A Southwest Airlines spokesman said one of its planes was damaged when the wind pushed a conveyor belt for loading of luggage inside. Five other aircraft on the ground when the tornado strike are OK, spokesman Marilee McInnis said. Southwest - the most important carrier to Lambert, with 85 departures per day - cancelled all flights to St. Louis by 4 p.m. CT Saturday.
American Airlines, which operates out of the main terminal heavily affected, said four of its aircraft were damaged, two of them significantly. 130 Km/h winds buffeted an aircraft travelling to a landing when the tornado hit, and this plan was being checked for possible damage to its landing gear, said spokesman Ed Martelle. American canceled 51 flights Saturday, five Sunday and its seven early Monday morning.
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