Tornadoes in St. Louis: 208 Since 1950, Ranked

Late on the afternoon of May 27, 1896, a violent tornado plowed across the south side of St. Louis, crossed the Mississippi on the newly built Eads Bridge area, and shredded East St. Louis on the Illinois shore. In about twenty minutes it killed roughly 255 people and injured more than a thousand, and some historians argue the true toll was higher because bodies were swept into the river and never counted. Per the National Centers for Environmental Information, it remains the third-deadliest single tornado ever documented in the United States, behind only the 1925 Tri-State tornado and the 1840 Natchez tornado.

Thirty-one years later, on September 29, 1927, another tornado tore through downtown and midtown St. Louis in barely five minutes, destroying more than 200 city blocks and killing about 78 people. Two of the deadliest urban tornadoes in American history hitting the same city, decades apart, is not a coincidence — it is geography. St. Louis is one of the largest metros sitting directly in the spring-severe-weather corridor, and a dense urban core turns any strong tornado into a mass-casualty event.

On May 16, 2025, an EF3 tornado with peak winds of 152 mph touched down in Clayton and carved a 22.6-mile path east-northeast through the heart of St. Louis, across the river, and into far-western Madison County, Illinois, per the National Weather Service damage survey. It killed five people, injured dozens, damaged roughly 5,000 buildings, and ran up more than $1.6 billion in losses — the most destructive tornado to hit the city in decades. (Because it happened in 2025, it falls just outside our SPC data extract, which runs through July 2024; the figures here come straight from the NWS St. Louis survey.)

What made 2025 land so hard is that it hit the city itself, not just the suburbs. Most of the metro’s 208 recorded tornadoes touched down in outlying counties; a direct, strong hit on the urban core is exactly the low-probability, high-consequence event the 1896 and 1927 disasters warned about. You can pull the actual conditions for that day, or any date back to 1970, on our historical weather lookup.

The other event most St. Louisans remember is December 10, 2021, when an F3 tornado on the Illinois side of the metro collapsed an Amazon delivery warehouse in Edwardsville, killing six workers. It was part of the December 10–11, 2021 Quad-State outbreak — the same event that produced the long-track Kentucky tornado that leveled Mayfield the same night. A violent, deadly tornado in December is a reminder that the Metro-East and the mid-Mississippi valley get a genuine cool-season tornado risk on top of the spring peak — the same overlap that fuels the Dixie Alley season to the south.

St. Louis is unusual because its tornado risk is split across a state line. Roughly half the metro’s recorded tornadoes touch down in Missouri (St. Louis city and county, St. Charles) and half in the Illinois Metro-East (Madison and St. Clair counties). That is why the death toll is spread across both sides of the river: the 1896 Great Cyclone killed on both shores, the 1959 F4 hit the Missouri side, and the 2021 Edwardsville and 2025 tornadoes both reached into Illinois. When you read a St. Louis tornado count, you are really reading a two-state number.

It also means the metro carries an outsized share of both states’ tornado deaths. Neither Missouri nor Illinois is Oklahoma, but St. Louis is the one place in either state where a strong tornado is nearly guaranteed to find dense population. See where the two states rank in our full states-with-most-tornadoes analysis, and how St. Louis’s deadliest events stack up nationally in the deadliest-tornadoes ranking (the 1896 Great Cyclone sits in the all-time top five).