ST. LOUIS – Taking a look through the lenses of the National Weather Service and how they prep for an active weather day can be a bit complex, as the real work begins several days in advance.

The National Weather Service’s messaging to area partners at local state and federal agencies is relayed as well as expanding and preparing for staffing needs.

“We have severe weather plans, winter weather plans, contingencies that we have written down and practice every single year so that when we have to enact those practices, we’re in lockstep so we’re knowing what we’re doing from step one all the way to the event itself,” said Matt Beitscher, lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service in St. Louis.

An all-hands-on-deck approach is implemented as our next system looms.

“We’ll be dividing up jobs so that we can do specific jobs very, very well as opposed to one person taking on a lot of stuff,” Beitscher said.

Divvying up tasks in a newsroom full of meteorologists, issuing warnings and collecting storm damage reports, the busy work goes in when the warnings go out. 

But the coverage of severe weather doesn’t stop after the storms—it continues with cleanup efforts.

The March 14 severe weather aftermath is still being felt area-wide, and specifically in Spanish Lake, where a collective pile of debris from fallen or broken trees has been brought together.

“We have 600 tons of vegetative debris that our Department of Transportation crews have picked up from the storms that swept through on March 14. In the coming weeks, our Parks and Rec crews will take the shredder and turn all of this vegetation into mulch,” Sam Page, St. Louis county executive, said.