St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer says she feels validated by the findings of an external investigation into the early days of the city’s response to the May 16 tornado.

“We lived through this,” Spencer told reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday. “Many of us were there through this. So it was validating. We knew there were issues. We knew there were failures.”

The report by the law firm Carmody MacDonald, released Monday, documented “multiple cascading failures” that started with more than a third of the sirens being broken even before the storm and ended with City Emergency Management Agency Commissioner Sarah Russell being absent from the emergency operations center and often difficult to reach. It also found the city’s emergency operations plan was more than 20 years old and confirmed

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