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Surviving Tornadoes
SharkJumper writes "We here in central Oklahoma, USA are just climbing out of the wreckage of another series of tornadoes. Unlike the tornadoes of May 3rd, 1999, which killed 47 and injured more than 800, we now have much better tornado information and prediction technology. Largely because of this, there have been far fewer injuries, and (as of this morning) no reported deaths. Here in the greater Oklahoma City area, we can even register our storm shelters with the city. After a severe storm, GIS technology is used to create a map for rescuers detailing location and type of the shelter as well as emergency contact information. Rescuers can then use these maps to search for survivors that may be trapped by debris in their shelters."
Being a big fat ass can actually increase your chances of survival.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Don't live where they happen.
We here in central Oklahoma, USA are just climbing out of the wreckage of another series of tornadoes.
/. and they'll post it!
Ok, you just climbed out of tornado wreckage (which is nothing to laugh about, I've been through a couple when I lived in Indiana), but the first thing that comes to your mind is dude, I bet we can submit this to
Seriously, though, its cool that technology can help when mother nature is being a muthah...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
*ducks*
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Just ejoy where you live. If you feer about these things move. I live in OKC. I've helped dig people out. But I still wouldn't move.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I've always wanted to see a cow fly by like in Twister...
Ok, seriously, I know that they always tell you to get in a doorway, or bathtub, supposedly because it is a 'more sound structure'~ I would think you wouldn't want to be near porcelain at a time like that...
And not living in an area like that, how often do people build their own 'shelter' as opposed to a central/public one?
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
It's wierd... I grew up in Tulsa, and I moved to NYC when I was 19. I'm now back in the Tulsa area. Why? I missed the storms. Granted, I've made sure that the areas I live in have been geographically pre-disposed to not having tornadoes, and I don't like the idea of people being hurt... but being in a shelter as an enormous supercell passes overhead is a bit of a rush.
go fig.
Oh sure, it seems harmless now -- "Just register your shelter with the government, and we'll help you out later!"
But the next thing you know, Big Brother has these lists of shelters! It only makes it easier when they need to confiscate them later!!
I tell you what, you can have my unregistered shelter when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
--
and technologies so that people who live in tornado alley do not lose their home or their life.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
but, seriously... I have often wondered.
... again... next may. Hell, maybe in two months?
Why do people live in places like this when they get hit _every year_ by tornados? I mean, holy crap - what kind of stress must it be to know that, next year, come May, you or someone near you has almost a 100% chance of having their new house flattened
I live in CO - we have snowstorms, but you either shovel, or wait for the snow to melt, and that's that.
What is it that draws you people to live there, why do you not move from such an obviously inhospitible place to live, and why do you insist on FEMA paying your (collective Kansas and Oklahoma) asses money to rebuild your houses in the same Goddamned spot so the next Chet-chasing twister can blow you to hell all over again?
Okay, that started sounding callus toward the end, sorry.
I serously don't get why people live there, and why they expect taxpayers to buy them new trailers every few years. Its silly, and its insane, and its expensive for everyone.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Am I the only one who read this as "Surviving Tomatos?
Just do like they did in Twister and chain yourself to a metal post.
Funny, I also have similar inclinations. Some of the most vivid memories that I have as a child include huddling up with my family in a hallway in our house. My dad had pulled matresses off of our beds and placed them as a temporary shelter in the hall. During one such storm a large tree (big enough that kids climbed in it) was uprooted from a neighbors backyard. It was fun at the time. Oddly I miss that kind of experience.
These things can survive just about anything short of a direct hit with a nuke.
You know, millions of dollars and thousands of lives could be saved if you Okies just, you know, moved somewhere that wasn't right in the middle of tornado alley...
:-)
Just a thought.
evil adrian
You mean move to another planet???
Seriously, tornadoes can occur *anywhere* where a _thunderstorm_ can develop. That's pretty much most of Earth's surface between the Arctic and Antarctic circle latitudes. Of course there are unique areas within these zones where thunderstorms are rare like extremely high mountain tops, etc, that interfere with thunderstorms.
Of course you can also build a city under the sea to escape them.
Works for nukes, too.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
As someone who survived the "Terrible Tuesday" tornado of 1979 in Wichita Falls, TX, my heart and prayers go out to my neighbors north of the Red River.
The 1999 tornado in Moore Oklahoma killed so many not because there wasn't enough warning, but because it was the most powerful tornado every recorded. It was listed as an F5, the nastiest class of tornado, but many meterologists say that the F5 classification doesn't fit, because the 1999 tornado was off the scale.
That tornado was so powerful it removed the foundation of the homes and left barren earth. Unless you had a dedicated storm shelter underground, you were at risk.
I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I saw the devestation too. There was plenty of warning about this tornado, but when they are this nasty, this powerful, this devestating, sometimes there isn't anything anyone can do.
That same storm cell went up I-44 and hit Tulsa a few hours later. The tornados by then were not nearly as powerful, but that was the first time in my life I was actually scared of a tornado. I was 21 at the time, have lived in Oklahoma all my life, but when they show a street level map of you neighborhood and show the path of the tornado coming right at you, it is unnerving to say the least. (Especially after seeing what this storm cell did to the poor folks in Moore.)
Our home did not get hit, as the tornado hit the Arkansas River and went back up into the wall cloud. It touched down again across town.
Here, tornados are a fact of life. Most people who live in "Tornado Alley" accept this, and just pray it never hits them. My heart goes out to those who have suffered losses from this tornado.
I tought we owed all of our Tornado research to Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.
You realize that government registration of shelters is just the first step to taking our tornado shelters away. And then we'll be totally dependent on our government for our own personal safety.
You can have my tornado shelter when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
A program that has helped (even in the network age) to speed warnings is SKYWARN. SKYWARN is an adjunct program of the National Weather Service that trains spotters to deliver real time, on the ground, info to the NWS.
Four words: decoy mobile home parks.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
What is it that draws you people to live there, why do you not move from such an obviously inhospitible place to live
There was a documentary about Tornado Alley on Channel 5 last week, which showed horrific devastation from past tornadoes that seemed mainly to hit trailer-parks and cheap housing in places like Oklahoma.
I infer from this that many/most people who live in those areas of the US are not able to move elsewhere, because they are simply too poor to do so.
(not a Troll, by the way, I'm sure there are plenty of affluent people in OK too - but the rural community really isn't well-off, as I understand it)
Mod early, mod often.
What is it that draws you people to live there, why do you not move from such an obviously inhospitible place to live, and why do you insist on FEMA paying your (collective Kansas and Oklahoma) asses money to rebuild your houses in the same Goddamned spot so the next Chet-chasing twister can blow you to hell all over again?
I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I don't think you realize the very very small likelyhood of being hit by a tornado. While tornados themselves are not rare, it is not everyday that they hit populated areas. It only seems that way because of the last few weeks.
You say it is inhospitable? What about California? Earthquakes hit on a massive scale and destroy HUGE areas. A tornado, while devestatingly powerful, does not destroy hundreds of square miles like an earthquake will.
Also, being hit by a tornado TWICE is really against the odds. You really are far more likely to be struck by lightening than to be hit by a tornado.
Get out of the trailor park... Dude... Stop driving a Yugo, get an H2.
You can see some pictures and read about the new radar here.
The current radar technology used for all weather forcasting (NEXRAD) is really pretty old. By using a phased array, the scan times are much quicker than the old spinning dish style.
We hope to get this thing operational really soon. Off the above site, there's a webcam where you can see the progress of its construction.
IANAM, but...
I came from the Hampton Roads area, an area well known for tornados, and one observation I made was that high-voltage (10kV) powerlines act as tornado fences.
That is the observation. Here is what I believe is a related fact:
The wind power of the tornado is approximately equal to the electrical power that has been measured flowing through the tornado. That is, in Kansas approximately 1.2 Amps was measured flowing through a huge voltage (millions of volts), from ground to sky.
Another related fact: the air ionizing during lightning results in a cracking sound--but no boom. That boom is a capacitor discharging: Ground - cloud, just like your monitor before it goes bad. It is the clouds literally bouncing up and down after the discharge and released pressure on the dielectric air.
So these tornados are electrically driven. The storm drops a layer of charge, the right soil type holds the charge, then you get the tube, which forms a *low* power tornado, but the return of water ions to an electrically neutral state drives it up to high power.
But what happens in the zone of the power lines? The power lines disrupt the pickup and return process of the ions, which stops the tornado from crossing its path. So the tornado starts to run along the power lines, looking for a way through. Add in one other unit like a well-grounded tower, and -- in the case of the Hampton Roads tornado, it killed the tornado.
Now, that's not going to happen for a *really* large tornado, but for the small but deadly ones, getting on the other side of the power lines could be an advantage. Staying near the power lines could be bad.
Just as an aside, what's the reverse situation? Well, how about raising electrical ground over a large area? How about, for example, raising electrical ground by 20 feet over a square mile? Wouldn't that attract the tornado? Energy minimization would seem to draw a tornado in that direction, I would think. [A mobile home park, of course].
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
...just not right before.
If Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton can easily survive them anyone can.
I actually grew up in Oklahoma, just north of Tulsa in Bartlesville, and graduated from OU. I live in Seattle now, and I actually miss the weather some times as crazy as that sounds. A few days ago I saw lightening and heard thunder here and it brought a smile to my face.
If you haven't ever been to the middle of the US, and you get a chance, watch the weather reports some time. If you're from the west coast they will simply amaze you. All the weather people are real meterologists (most with phd's) and they really know what they're talking about. When there is a severe storm or tornado they track the thing and tell you at what time it's going to hit certain intersections in the city. The weather people here are just a joke.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Oklahoma is a beautiful place to live...and it is far more likely you will die from a bolt of lightening than from a torando. The odds of being hit by a tornado are small, especially when you consider the wide scale devestation of an earthquake in californnia.
These past few weeks we have seen a lot of tornados, but it really is the exception and not the rule to see lots of homes destroyed in the scale we have seen lately.
I would rather live with tornados than earthquakes, but that is just me. I love it here; I have lived here all my life. Sure, it isn't perfect, but it's home.
I went through many in my life back in Michigan. Most just travelled overhead without touching down, but still.
I'll never forget the green and purple "bruised" skies that tornadoes produce.
This place is Brazil. We don't have tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, blizards are *very* rare, floodings happens sometimes in some places but are quite rare too and not too severe and mostly due to abnormal wheater fenomena as the "El Niño". I'm not 100% sure but I believe our surrounding countries have the same lack of wheather disasters. This makes me ask myself sometimes why people lives in such places, have to been aware of tornados, for instance. Don't get me wrong, I understand what is been attached to where you were born but it's a life threat of huge proportions we're talking about.
Faith can move mountains. I prefer dynamite.
The "Act of God" clauses in insurance are why you have insurance. The insurance covers you in case of "acts of God". If I'm hit by a tornado, my insurance will pay for everything.
I think you are confusing what "act of God" clauses are. Federal aid is for those who do NOT have insurance and are hit by a natural disaster.
Yeah, this whole big tornado season reminds me of that movie ... Playing God. That sucked too.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
His 600 pound mulleted mother-in-law. Well 630 pounds because of that mainsail she calls a muu-muu.
.223 hunting rifle, a keg and a stopsign.
Most heard phrase at his 'house': I wash myself with a rag on a stick.
or
Get me my reachin' broom!
Least heard phrase: No officer, that's my jag. My wife has the other one.
Fun time at his place involves a
Bathtime consists of the river floodin.
England has weather that's quite unlikely to kill you.
Unless of course you find a winter season that lasts from September to June a bit too depressing and kill yourself.
I had a roommate back when I was an undergrad who was from near Birmingham. Everytime we'd have a rainy, cold, gloomy, miserable day he'd get homesick. None of us quite understood why you'd miss that but hey, it's home right? You get used to it I guess. Being from near Cleveland, I don't think it's winter unless there is two feet of lake effect snow on the ground.
Anyway England is a nice place but it needs a roof.
What about tangerine trees and marmalade skies?
Any change/attempt to direct the path of a tornado by appropriate landscaping?
-Max
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
The next first post will be posted soon, but trolls with money can beat the rush and prepare for it early!
My next house will certainly have one of these.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
Tornados have been recorded on 6 of 7 continents, and in all 50 states. If you've had a thunderstorm, you can have a tornado. Granted, they take a very specific set of conditions to form, and even then you've got no guarentees. Move to Antarctica if you want to avoid them.
Here in SE Michigan you can get a very easy feel for what storms you can watch from the porch, and what storms you should watch from the TV in the basement. "good" storms track West to East. A high percentage of storms come off of lake michigan, track across the state, then split north or south when they hit Ann Arbor.
(The city's a heat island. 10-ish square miles of concrete and asphault that forms a giant column of rising air that tends to split all but the biggest storms. Once the storms hit Ann Arbor, they either go north and hit Oakland county or Head south and slam Monroe. Ypsilanti, which is just west of Ann Arbor, seldom catches the full force of a storm.)
"bad" storms are the ones that trace South to North. Theres nothing south of us (except ohio farm fields, ideal storm breeding grounds) to protect the urban areas. The worst storms I can remember have all run South - North.
Moral of the story; know your local weather, your TV weather man is a dipshit, weather.com radar is your friend, and when in doubt, go for the basement. (if you have one, you insensitve clod)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Sell your trailer and buy a real house!
That is all.
OK here's one just for you! "And this just in, a tornado is heading for ... hummm we'll get back to you on that, as soon as we re-boot our system, it just blue screened!"
I read that as:
- Surviving Tomatoes
I think its time to find some lunch, and torment someone with a rendition of "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"
See this neat opinion piece in the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/08/opinion/08KIND.h tml (FRR).
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Get some cedar mulch and you'll be fine.
Let me first say that Experiencing a Tornado must ne terrifying and devostating but why are houses made of wood ?
In Earthquake zones there are requlations on buildings to protect them as much as possible from the affects. So why oh why don't they make at least 1 room of the house from a good sturdy brick construction?
Oklahoma City is changing the way it issues permits for alarms. This includes home and business alarms for both fire and security.
Alarm permits will now be renewed annually. The first permit is $20. After that, each annual renewal will be $5.
If you received an alarm permit before September 30, 2002, you will need to get a new permit at the first-time cost of $20. If you received a permit after September 30, 2002, you'll be covered by the $5 annual renewal.
I'm not trolling, but this seems weird to me. Is it standard practice?
Disclaimer: I'm not from the US.
Get your own free personal location tracker
living on a flood plane earthquakes active volcano hurricanes tornados wildfires forestfires droughts big crime we get almost none of that in new york. but now we seem to have new problems... bottom line - don't like it - one word MOVE Anywhere do your home work Use the internet
Did anyone notice the Pringles crisis caused by a tornado last Sunday?
"As anybody with half a clue knows, all severe weather is caused by closed source, Microsoft anti-chaos climate control devices located in Redmond. If only the source code to these devices would be released to the public, the bugs that cause tornadoes, hail and other extreme atmospheric distubances could be eliminated. When it is eventually released, the GNU/linux GnStorm software will prevent these tragedies. Of course, the evil, neo-fascist, corporate worshiping Busch administration and their E-VIL minions in the republican-taliban party will prevent this from ever coming to pass"
There, Better?
Thanks. My fat ass is safe. lol... BMI 29.5 (almost obese).
Actually when this thing hit I was working at home and the power went off. I was trying to figure out why (I live in Norman which is about 5-10 miles south of where the tornado touched down in Moore) so I turned on the TV (it was sunny and clear in Norman). The cable recycled and of course I turn on local channels and they are showing a tornado just north of where I live. Crazy ass weather. The alarms didn't even sound in my town (which they shouldn't have) so I was oblivious.
I drove by it today on the way to work and it isn't 1/5th as bad as the one in 1999. That one looked like a fucking bomb went off (it was 1 to 1.5 miles wide). Nothing stranger than driving by where an entire housing area used to be and all you see is a few pieces of lumber and red dirt. The 99 tornado stripped all the grass too! The things that were scary/cool were the pieces of hay embedded in telephone poles (or what was left of them) and the cars that were folded like a piece of paper around powerlines and no longer had any paint because the flying debris stripped it all off.
Tornado Alley still feels safer to me because unless you've seen the weather here and been able to compare it to other places, it's difficult to understand how well the weathermen/women do in these storms.
My best friend lives in San Fran and I'm pretty sure I could live through a tornado, I hope he lives through the big one if it ever does hit san fran.
Boomer Sooner
we now have much better tornado information and prediction technology.
You have Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to thank for that.
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
Other than the relative lack of water, there's not much here to worry about. And even then, it's not that much of a big deal. We'll just get our food and drink from the saps dealing with the tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes leaving enough for all the rest of the stuff we need it for like water skiing, chip manufacturing, and watering the golf course.
End of Line.
... mean ol' tornado
come on fhqwhgads
Tulsa is smaller than large cities, our metro area is around 500,000. We have most of the advantages of a larger city, with a lot less crime. We average about 50 murders per year.
Tulsa used to be a great place to be if you were in telecom. Worldcom has is largest headquarters here, and we had many many other smaller firms before the bust. Tulsa was built with oil money, and in the 20s, Tulsa was the "Oil Capital of the World." Because of that, we have some very nice museums (nothing earth shaking, though.)
The public schools are pretty good, and in my opinion, it is just beautiful here. Springs and falls are gorgeous, winters are not that cold, and the only really nasty weather is in late July through August. Unlike a lot of the state, Tulsa has lots of hills and trees. I have been camping around here for years.
Is it the most exciting place to live? No, probably not. It's home to me, so it will always have a place in my heart, even if I am relocated. This place has a lot to offer, but it is hard to quantify. The last time i was in southern California the things I noticed were: 1) People everywhere, lines everyplace, bad traffic and 2) I couldn't see the stars very well at night. We have light pollution here, but it isn't nearly to the extent of southern California.
We don't have beaches, but we have tons of lakes for fishing and boating. Here, you can drive 25 minutes in one direction (sometimes less) and hit farmland, and not be in the city anymore. I can get anywhere in town in less than 30 mins, maybe a little more during rush hour.
How do you explain home to someone? I am finding this difficult, but I gave it my best shot.
not a tornado.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
my pet machine
It takes a specially-trained meteorologist to draw those fine distinctions between mist, drizzle, showers, and rain.
Since we still have a_lot_to_learn about/from tornadoes and since the poster's ideas seemed well thought out, I gave it a chance. I found a link to the HAARP Project and its experiments effects on atmospheric ionization and motion. Here is an excerpt:
What Effects Are Produced By HAARP? A portion of the energy contained in the HF signal transmitted by HAARP can be transferred to existing electrons or ions making up the ionospheric plasma through a process called absorption, thus raising the local effective temperature. As an example, the electron temperature at a height of 275 km (the peak of the F2 region) is over 1400K. [2]. Work at other active ionospheric research facilities has shown that it is possible to raise this temperature by as much as 30% within a small, localized region during an experiment. The affected region would then temporarily display electrical characteristics different from neighboring regions of the layer. Sensitive scientific instruments on the ground can then be used to study the dynamic physical properties of this region in great detail. As the electrons (and ions) acquire additional energy, their temperature increases, their kinetic energy increases and they begin to move more rapidly. In the F layer, this increased movement or expansion results in a decrease in the electron density. Experience at other active ionospheric research facilities [3] has shown that electron densities in the small, affected region can be reduced by 10% to 20%.
Very, very interesting...
We have a similar fee in Tulsa. About 10 years ago, police were resonding to every house alarm and finding bogus alarms. They instituted several permit fees, low cost (5$ is pretty cheap) just to fund the police paperwork and infrastructure to support the alarms and communicate with the alarm companies.
They also have what is called a "first response" permit, which IIRC costs more than the standard fee. It tells the police to respond immediately rather than waiting for verification with the alarm company.
Also, if your alarm goes off too many times without you calling in to cancel it, you can be fined. Too many lazy people were not setting their alarms properly or bother8ing to call in to cancel it, and police were sent out on dummy trips, that waste their time and money on a crime that doesn't exist.
I know I'm headed for the "Troll of the day" award for this, but doesn't the midwest have a pretty good "goddist" density? I figure anyone with some "faith" should be doing any one or combination of the following:
1) Having lots of unprotected sex...after all it could be your last day on the planet and if the females survive and of child-bearing age it's a good start on rebuilding their numbers. Remember, the papists want you chugging out children, by the litter if possible.
2) Praying. Sure it's just a feel-good measure for those involved, but face it, the survivors who did pray then will feel superior to the others in having survived. Feeling superior gives one group the license to exclude the inferior, and that's a prime "faith-building" opportunity.
3) Telling plenty of stories about how they survived the last big storm and how much good sex and service to their gods they provided. And remember, long-lasting infections are often caused by having whatever rags you clothe your disgusting soft bodies with litter wounds. If you're naked then it's just the surface bacteria and easily located and removed bits of whatever has wounded you.
And in closing remember that the harder you make it for your supreme-being to cash your meaty asses in the more likely you are to actually prevent yourselves from being granted access to whatever paradise you're promised. Of course you feel free to interpret the lack of deaths as the divine equivalent of "The silent treatment", but it feels more like the apathy felt at the loss of the great cypress forests in Summeria.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
Texas Tech University (the folks that invented the 2x4 launcher for testing the strength of building siding and other fun games) and FEMI have put together a lot of Tornado survival info over the years.
Check out FEMA's website as well as Texas Tech's Wind Engineering site.
Does anyone know where I can purchase a print for framing of an F5 tornado?
Cool site, though I always thought the term "Wind Engineering" was a bit odd. I recall seeing the TxTech 2x4 gun on some discovery channel show many years ago, they were spearing thick steel doors with less than 150 MPH wind, pretty spooky stuff.
I'm off to build my shelter! =)
The bold font below is added by me:
Uh...looks like somebody dropped a zero there. 2000 km^2 is actually more like 800 mi^2.
Substituting in corrected numbers, we get a probability that's about 10 times higher. But then when you redistribute tornado damage to all of the states, your number is probably not so bad.
Babar
(With apologies to Krusty the Clown) Floppy shoes and rainbow wigs everywhere!! It was awful!!!
I've lived in Oklahoma all my life and take most of this for granted. It wasn't until I started traveling and found that most places across the nation had pathetic weather technology.
The thing that is most strange is that in some places I would bet the average Oklahoma/Texas/Kansas person would have more knowledge of weather and how to read radar. We know what a "hook echo" is, can point out a "wall cloud", and know that the green tint means hail.
Oklahoma isn't much for technology but if you want cutting edge radar tech, no place is better. They recently did a study near here to see if airborne particles (like would be released from a terrorist crop duster) could be detected on our radar. Never will know the results but.. We also have Tinker AFB, home of the AWACS (the ultimate flying radar).
You'll see a comment that is a little hard to believe, then an Anonymous coward, saying it is complete and utter bull, and then below that, a more complete explanation, with a reference to specific measurements.
But down't take my word for it. Get as far as the abstract in this paper, and you'll see that this is actually a valid theory.
Destructive tornados are electrically driven.
And mobile home parks, raising the ground level, really do draw em.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Would be kinda neat to see a wireless camera feed while the camera was sucked up in a tornado. Maybe a 802.11 cam or something. Finally a use for th X-10 cam!
Have you ever seen central Oklahoma? The land is very flat, and everything stays so beautifully green most of the year round. It rains very often and the water table is usually pretty close to the surface. That makes this area extraordinarily good for farming... and floating basements up out of the ground, or keeping leaky ones full of water, unfortunately. Backyard concrete storm shelters are usually small enough, thick-walled enough and hence dense enough to stay put in the ground, but once you build a concrete shell the size of a typical house basement, and usually with thinner concrete walls, the larger interior volume displaced makes the overall density of the substructure less than that of water. To make the basement thick and heavy enough not to float up out of the ground and crack walls, etc, just costs too much, except for the wealthiest home builders, and unfortunately the average homebuilder/owner in OKC ain't very rich.
"..and all I could think about was Carolyn still had my casserole dish..." --Jeff Foxworthy, talking about rednecks and tornadoes...
Between the forecasting of National Weather Service and real time spotting by trained SKYWARN spotters, there's a lot of information available to help the public know when to head to a sheltered location. The trick is in getting the information. TV and Radio are great if you're watching or listening, but by far the best solution is a quality weather radio.
Another option is to have severe weather warnings and watches sent to your pager or mobile phone so it can catch you when you're notin front of the TV. A lot of news and weather web sites offer these services. Another option is an open source program called StormSiren which scans the text data from the National Weather Service's Interactive Weather Information Network. The important thing is to be aware of severe weather so you'll know when to head to shelter.
That's pretty funny... one of the few Latin sigs that I can translate with the seven brain cells I still have that remember how to decline.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Arizona and New Mexico has very, very few natural disasters. Our rivers don't flood, no earthquakes, no hurricanes, and no volcanoes.
We do have a dust storm every year or so in Phoenix.
And it doesn't even rain here much. The last time it rained was in March.
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. I can't even remember the last time we had a serious natural disaster here.
New Jersey *IS* a serious disaster, albeit a manmade, political one... but still a disaster nevertheless.
I'll take a quake any day, because at least when I run outside I don't have to be worried about getting sucked into the sky or hit by something flying through the air. Plus, as a geologist who knows where the faultlines are, I can pick a place to live where my risk is reduced. I also know the geology of Oklahoma, and know a quake there of far less magnitude will have far more severe consequences. However, I didn't chose where to live because of the environmental risks; it was just my dream to live in Alaska.
Typing monkeys produce 5 pages of gibberish
Hm prediction is nice and all, but is there a way to *stop* tornadoes? E.g. you detect a class F5 heading for a very populated area, could it be possible to destabilise it or to divert it? Has there been any research on that subject?
There have been computer models done which show that there is such a HUGE amount of energy packed in a large tornado that not even a nuclear explosion detonated in the center of the tornado at the wall cloud would be able to disrupt the vortex.
... there isn't a possible way (using any of todays scientific means) to "break up" a tornado that has started before people are killed and/or homes destroyed?
Sure, we can't predict exact locations but could we have such a "break up" method on standby where it possibly may happen. Once a tornado forms use whatever device/means and it disipates...
Or is that too science fiction?
I have a plan to protect cities from tornadoes! Simply ring the city with fake cardboard trailer parks. Construct them in a ring pattern so that if the twister forms outside the city the fake trailer park is always closer than the city. In this way, the pattern lures the twister around the city missing populated areas!
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The Fujita scale categories are listed with both wind speed and typical damage produced. The 'official' Fujita rating of a given cyclone is still determined by damage assessment. With modern Doppler radar providing accurate wind speed measurements from a distance, the 'F' rating can be estimated for locations where damage measurements are problematic (open farmland, etc.).
Related note: the record-setting May 1999 Bridge Creek/Moore/Del City/Midwest City tornado had the most accurate wind speed measurement to date, thanks to special portable Doppler units.
Moore High School, Class of 1988 -- Go Lions!
Inbred families, sex on farms!
Steers, beers, and queers...
Eh? The OKC tornado of 3 May 1999 was tracked for nearly an hour before it reached the metro area. It was due to the outstanding "tornado information and prediction technology" in place at that time that a near-F5 tornado could sweep through a city during dinner-time, destroy 3,000 homes and damage (bignum) others, and still have only 47 fatalities. I live in OKC; believe me, we all knew it was coming and everyone who was anywhere near the projected path had taken shelter long before it arrived. Kudos to the outstanding weather forecasting in OKC - perhaps the best in the USA!
She lived in Plainfield at that time and her house was the only house for a quarter mile to not be leveled. The reason was was that the twister hit the highway embankment that was right behind her house and bounced over it. It then preceeded to utterly destroy everything else in the town. It was weird visiting her a few days afterward and seeing her house and nothing but debris for a quarter mile in every direction. Very weird.
I live a little east of Moore(Stella, Newalla, Little Axe area) and we barely got any rain, if it wasn't for my trusty Midland Model 74-210 Weather Radio I would have been totally oblivous to the whole storm. I really think it is something all Okies should have! You can program your County in and you get a siren followed by an anouncement about the weather.(Even wakes me up at 2:00 in the morning sometimes! Something the Local Siren does not do) I live in a Mobile home on 5 acres of Wilderness, but a relative down the street has a Storm Shelter that a lot of the "Neighborhood" goes to. Since the Radio has battery backup, I just pluck it from the wall and throw it in the car with a few essentials(and the kids :)
Dang Tornados! This is why I want to build an Earthship!
My heart goes out to those effected by these tornados. I used to live in Enid, Oklahoma. It can be very scary when these touch down in your town.
Pray to Jesus, that's what I allus does.
Dem bad ol' tornados allus blows away my
boozin' crack smokin' neighbors trailers
but I'm OK 'cause Jesus loves me.
Brick is cheap but bad. Nowadays it is almost never used as a primary construction material in the US. The brick that you see on the outsides of buildings made within the last 50 years is just decorative facing, and not a structural element.
Wood is flexible and able to bend under light stresses. Brick construction is not.
In a tornado, a wood frame home performs better than a brick home. It's better still to have a wood frame home with a masonry basement, or best of all is a tornado shelter, like in The Wizard of Oz.
In an earthquake, a wood frame home performs much better than a brick home. You don't see brick buildings much in earthquake zones these days, and this is precisely why.
Whereas in the 1906 San Francisco quake, there were loads of four- and five-story tenements with brick walls which basically became deathtraps. Nowadays if you were to build a similarly sized building, you would use steel construction.
Two days in a row, folks. I'm a resident of Norman, OK. We're not getting hit (somehow, Norman hasn't been bothered in fifty years or so), but OKC just got nailed. The latest series (at least two multiple-vortex tornadoes, both in the same supercell) tracked basically along I-40 to I-44, and, as of this posting, is still moving along I-44 toward Tulsa. Bethany, OK (on the northwest corner) was the worst hit. Wiley Post airport is in Bethany; I was flying up there not two hours before the shit (and everything else, including the kitchen sink and the roof) hit the fan. I was back in Norman by that time, but right now there are nearly 25K people without power. Damages are going to run into the dozens, if not hundreds of millions--there were about a dozen Beech 1900s parked on the ramp at PWA, right in the path of the tornado, along with a bunch of classic airplanes nearby. And that's just the airport.
In short, today looks like it's going to be a lot more damaging than yesterday. Anybody in the area, we're going to need a lot of help cleaning up.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Within the same zone would be a start.
Here or here
Those pages have the links and the explanation. But assuming you want to get straight to the links [the external data], try here and pan down to problem number 36.
Or go here and read again.
From all of this, you should walk away with the fact that tornados are inherently electrical events. They are not caused by warming. Yes, warming is integral to getting them started -- but pure warming does not have the power to make the tornado deadly.
Now, I don't know where you get the idea that a theory has merit or doesn't have merit. To me, merit comes from actual data, and matching physical reality. And no, I have never seen a tornado firsthand: the day a warming-style tornado (nondestructive) sat outside my apartment for 6 hours, I was out of the city. Another time, we saw a possible one forming behind us during severe storm on the superhighway, but it never touched down. But tornados are actually very rare and very small, even when you live where they often hit. So the chances are against seeing one.
However, as I said, I came from an area that had tornados, so I have been able to check out the tornado tracks firsthand. And I can testify that where the normal track of a tornado was this
ccccccTccc [Map key:]
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc (T=Tornado)
PccccTcccc
cPccTccccc
ccTccccccc
TccPcccccc (P=Powerlines)
ccccPccccc
cccccPccGc (G=well-grounded tower-style office building)
as based on the cloud motion during the hurricane, the actual path that the tornado took was this:
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc
ccccccTccc
PccccTcccc
cPccTccccc
ccPccTcccc
cccPccTccc
ccccPccTcc
cccccPccGc
This was the Colloseum Mall tornado in Hampton, VA. The tornado probably would have just damaged the tower building and gone on, if it hadn't already lost all its power. However, as it had already lost its power, it lifted up and did not touch down again.
There isn't anything that I can give you more than references to physical evidence. If you're going to believe this is bull, you're going to believe this is bull.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I live in Edmond (suburb of Oklahoma City) and we just got hit with tornados AGAIN!!!!! First yesterday, when it took out the GM plant. Tonight it took out the Xerox plant. I went right over my wife's parents house and both her grandparents' houses. It then turned and proceded over the houses of my grandmother, then my father, then my mother, and then made another turn and started heading for our house. Mother nature seems to dislike my family. It eventually started heading more east than north, and tracked just to the east of Edmond as it headed up the turnpike toward Tulsa. It's funny, but they have a tendency to follow major highways. This one literally took I-40, then crossed a little bit of town and moved up I-44 to I-35, then veered off from I-35 to the Turnpike. I don't think it paid any toll. Who should the highway patrol send the license plate photo to?
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I like your roads which clear themselves. Around here we have to pay the city to clear the highways sometime in the next several days, and if you have a driveway a quarter-mile long you should also hire a plow driver to let you get out to the road.
The wood fireplace keeps is warm and we can cook on it if the propane line for the stove freezes up. The snow also took out the power for the week, so if you want to read after sunset you snuggle up by the fireplace or light the kerosene lantern. The furnace isn't running without electricity, but the sun and fireplace keep the place from freezing. You can wear enough clothes to sleep in your bed, or sleep near the fireplace. If we didn't have the fireplace we'd have gotten a generator or a manual override on the furnace to fire it up without the thermostat (furnace uses fuel oil from an inside tank and does not depend on the propane which can freeze up outside).
We can manage until the next Ice Age. The 200-mph winds coming down the face of the glacier will make us move away before the ice is close enough to bother is directly.