OSHA inspectors, who have been at the warehouse since Saturday, will investigate if workplace safety rules were followed and have six months to finish the investigation, spokesperson Scott Allen said.
“What did the damage was all the debris going through like a bulldozer,” Craft said.
Felton said a majority of the 46 people in the facility called a “delivery station” went to a shelter on the north side, which was “nearly undamaged” after, while a smaller group went to the harder-hit south end. The company said the places are away from windows and considered safer than other parts of the plant, but not separate safe rooms.
The Edwardsville warehouse is part of a vast patchwork of concrete-and-steel structures that have popped up in the St. Louis region over the past decade, drawn by its confluence of major highways and railroads, cheap costs and Americans’ expectations for getting packages delivered soon after they click a link to order them.
“We don’t think of warehousing as one of the industries that’s going to be severely impacted by climate change but then you have a case like this,” said Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “How do we make sure the facilities are built in a way to best protect the workers inside?”
At the governor’s press conference Monday, Nantel emphasized that the 1.1-million square foot building was “constructed consistent with code.”
But Pritzker raised the possibility that current codes aren’t enough to meet the dangers of increasingly devastating storms. He said there will be an investigation into updating code “given serious change in climate that we are seeing across the country.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
