As Christmas nears, Amazon's share of online sales usually rises as customers look to the e-commerce giant to quickly deliver packages. Amazon hires hundreds of thousands of additional workers, both full-time employees and contractors, and runs its operations at full tilt to make that happen.
After a full day delivering packages north of St. Louis, one of them, Alonzo Harris, drove his cargo van into Amazon's delivery depot in Edwardsville, Ill. He heard an alarm on his phone. Someone yelled that this was not a drill. Mr. Harris ran into a shelter and heard a loud roar.
He said he felt like the floor was coming off the ground. The lights went out after I saw debris flying and people screaming and yelling.
One of the tornadoes that roared through Kentucky, Arkansas, Illinois and other states on Friday had slammed into Amazon's delivery station in Edwardsville. The governor of Illinois said six people died and 45 made it out alive.
There were no new reports of missing people on Sunday. It was not clear how many people had been at the site and what safety measures could have been taken. The tornado ripped off the building's roof. Two of the structure's walls collapsed.
The delivery station was hit by the tornado just as the company has the most workers. The deaths at the delivery depot became a public focus of the tornadoes.
Clergy and congregants at a church in Granite City, Ill., about 15 miles from where the tornado destroyed the Amazon site, tried to make sense of the disaster at a church service on Sunday.
Sharon Autenrieth, the pastor, said that she gets irritated if she can't get her Christmas gifts in three days from Amazon.
The rescue effort in Edwardsville was complicated by that logistical peak. More than 250,000 drivers like Mr. Harris who fuel Amazon's delivery network do not work directly for the company, but instead are employed by over 3000 contractor companies. Mike Fillback, the police chief in Edwardsville, said on Saturday that the authorities had challenges in knowing how many people they actually had at that facility.
A Madison County commissioner who declined to give his name said that only seven people were full-time employees at Amazon. He said that most of the delivery drivers were in their 20s.
The delivery center is located in a flat industrial area with warehouses, parked semi-trucks and muddy fields a few miles east of St. Louis and the Mississippi River. The fulfillment center was almost directly across the street from the delivery station. There were words on the front windows that said "Our Time To Shine" and "Peak 2021."
Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, said 190 people worked at the delivery station across all of its shifts, but wouldn't say how many of them were full-time workers. She said the tornado hit the parking lot and dissipated.
The tornado hit at the end of the shift as drivers returned their vans and headed home. Contract drivers don't have to clock into the building.
She said that one of the two places where workers were sheltered was directly hit. It was unclear if these areas were built to survive a tornado. According to preliminary interviews, the company calculated that about 11 minutes elapsed between the first warning of a tornado and the delivery station hitting.
The victims ranged in age from 26 to 62 years old.
The company started expanding its own deliveries in the year of 2018, rather than relying solely on shipping companies. One of the delivery stations built by the company was the one in the Edwardsville area.
The delivery stations employ fewer people than the fulfillment centers. Amazon employees sort packages for each delivery route. The packages are loaded into the vans and driven out when the drivers bring them into another area.
According to MWPVL International, Amazon has almost 600 delivery stations in the United States, with more planned. The company delivers more than half of its own packages worldwide, and as much as three-quarters of its packages in the United States.
Delivery Service Partners is a program where most drivers work. The contracting arrangement helps support small businesses that can hire in their communities, according to Amazon. The program allows the company to avoid liability for accidents and limits labor organizing in a heavily unionized industry according to industry consultants and Amazon employees involved in the program.
The Forrester analyst said that the holiday season is particularly intense for Amazon. She said that they are likely to experience the most last-minute purchases.
According to planning documents, the delivery station had room for 60 vans at one time.
The National Weather Service had a tornado warning in effect for the area. The county emergency management agency reported a partial roof collapse at the Amazon delivery depot and that people were trapped inside.
There were many vans with Amazon's logo underneath the rubble. Some of the vans were U-Hauls, which the contractors rent to serve demand during busy periods.
The couple said their son was a maintenance mechanic for Amazon. They spoke to him by phone on Friday night when he was at work, and he told them that he and other workers were on their way to the tornado shelter.
The tornado hit about 10 minutes later. They tried many times to call their son. They drove from their home in Illinois to the warehouse.
It was pretty devastating when we pulled up to the building. There were a lot of trucks and rescue vehicles.
Ms. Cope said that her husband feared the worst when he saw the damage. The night shifts are split between Mr. Cope and his son, who works on Wednesdays. She said that he knew that their son was likely to have been in the part of the building that collapsed.
The couple waited until 4:30 a.m., when officials told them that they had recovered their son's body.
When they tell you your son is dead, there is no words to describe it. It is unbelievable and devastating.
Mr. Harris, the delivery driver who survived the storm, said that after the tornado passed, he saw a green tornado shelter sign above Amazon's shelter.
He said that he didn't think anything man-made could survive Mother Nature's force. I think it was an act of God that our shelter remained secure.
Robert Chiarito,Mitch Smith, andSophie Kasakove were involved in the reporting.
