Craig Cole was at the convenience store in his neighborhood of Fountain Park when the storm alerts went off on his phone. He ran to his royal blue Ram truck parked outside.

"It literally had looked like a bomb had just went off," one volunteer said of the tornado's damage in north St. Louis. "Blocks and blocks of homes that are just gone."

The EF-3 twister was part of a massive outbreak sequence on May 18 that also spawned tornadoes in Kentucky, killing at least 19 people in that state and leveling the small town of London, about 80 miles south of Lexington.