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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.
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.
We had Tornado shelters in South Dakota.
Storm cellers, basements, crawl spaces. It's all good.
Bathtubs are good not because of the material, but because it's one piece, they usually survive and it's a place you can get down and cover your vital organs and noggin while having some side protection.
Tubs usually were cast iron with a porcelain coating over them, now they are usually fiberglass.
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!
--
I would think you wouldn't want to be near porcelain at a time like that...
I'd be wishing I was near porcelain, since the alternatives involve begging rescue-workers for a clean pair of pants...
Mod early, mod often.
These things can survive just about anything short of a direct hit with a nuke.
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.
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.
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.
Really now. In spite of nasty natural phenomena, people continue to build homes in California and Florida without a second thought. By comparison to the widespread damage caused by earthquakes and hurricanes, tornadoes tend to be localized affairs that are much more likely to happen to somebody else. For most people, the dangers are (pardon the pun) overblown.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
First: I live in the NE (upstate NY) as much as I bitch about the cold, the snow, and shoveling my damn driveway, everytime I see something like this (or a hurricane, or an earthquake, or a tidle wave, or flooding) I thank my lucky stars I am where I am.
That said....
People live where they do for many reasons. Number one is economic. *something* drew enough people to the area (this is "any" area", not jsut tonado alley) for it to be "profitable" to live there... either a scarce resource (like gold, which drew folks to eathquake ridden cali) or an environment... the flood ridden mississipi (-sp?) delta is sure as hell prone to floods.. but that's how it got it's amazing soil, which is why farming there is "worth" the risks.
Once a sufficient population has developed in said areas, willing to take those risks, then another population grows to support them... those running the stores, restaraunts.. etc.
Then a strange thing happens.. a "community" forms.. and people have family ties, etc. to the area. This makes it hard to leave. How many times have you packed up an moved to a new part of the country? It's not easy. Esp with [insert rant about GW here] today's economy. It COSTS to move.. both financially and personally.
Do yourself a favor, and trace every product you buy, and where it came from. If *none* of them come from areas that have natural disaters "regularly" then bitch and moan. Until then, pay your taxes and pray for the folks who's lives are ruined by this and other events.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
...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.
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.
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?
Wow... callous isn't quite the word I'd use...
a ts.html )
a do.html ) Just take a look at the map of the data (which is over an entire century, I remind you) and tell me that people are "expect{ing} taxpayers to buy them new trailers every few years"...
Let's do a little estimation, shall we? Let's call the "average" tornado as about 200 meters wide with a 10 kilometer path. That's actually a pretty big average, but let's take it for argument's sake. There are 1000 tornadoes in a year, on average. So, that's 2000 km^2 of damage per year. That translates roughly into a square patch of damage 9 miles on a side (80 mi^2).
Let's then further assume that all this damage happens in only Oklahoma proper. Again, a limiting and fanciful assumption, but one useful for these purposes. The area of Oklahoma is nearly 70,000 mi^2. So, the chances that your house will fall in tornado damage will be 80/70000, or 0.11% per year.
Of course, that percentage drops dramatically once you add in Kansas, northern and western Texas, western Missouri, and Nebraska (i.e. the rest of the traditional "Tornado Alley"). Think on the order of 0.01% chance per year.
Now take the Gulf and Atlantic coasts where hurricanes can be prevalent. I'd be willing to bet that the probabilities are higher since hurricanes are much bigger. Or how about damages related to massive snow and ice storms that can plague the northern states? (You live in Colorado... you surely saw the damages that the blizzard there this year caused.) How about those massive forest fires in the western states driven by weather also? Or maybe the floods that happen in the US every few years or so? Gods, how can we live anywhere in this country?
The point is that extreme and dangerous weather is not limited to the central US. What happened there this week was an astonishing and record-setting week in terms of tornadoes. Just put it this way... according to the preliminary tornado data, the US has had, in the first 8 days of May, the climatological average for tornadoes in the entire month of May. Yes, we've reached (and surpassed) the long-term average for a month in the first 8 days. (http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/torn/monthlytornst
Oklahoma City is the most hit metropolitan area, and even that is underwhelming when you examine the data for it all. (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/tornadodata/okc_torn
The southern plains are not as bad as you think. What has happened there is a pure fluke of weather... the same area of a city gets hit by a significant tornado twice in five years... and the same area of the nation gets hit by two or three batches of tornadoes in the same week. Set your integer random number generator to pop out random integers between 1 and 100 and tell me that you wouldn't expect a number to be repeated three or more times in a row in a sample size of 3 million. Streaks happen in randomness or even psuedo-randomness. The OKC area has probably the similar chance of not being hit for ten or more years than they do being hit again in the next three. Do some research into independent probabilities and such before going off on your stupid and inane rant.
Besides, as a storm chaser, I find that area of the country quite pleasant. Granted, I wouldn't want to live out there since, well, it's a little dull outside of storm chase season, but it's still a nice place to live. It's no worse weather-wise than the subtropical southeastern US with the hurricanes, or the northern states with their ice and snow storms, or the western states with the forest fires and flash floods. It's just different phenomena.
-Jellisky
My next house will certainly have one of these.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
This tornado is the 5th that I've helped clean up after. I grew up 2.5 hours west of here, south of Wichita. I cleaned up from 4 different tornado incidents back home, including my grandfathers farm/ranch. Back home those families that weren't hit help those that were. That very night or early the following morning the community decends on the destruction in mass to help clean up. I was surprised by what happened in Franklin. I went up there expecting to help people dig out like I'd done before. I couldn't get into the town. The police were guarding all the entrances to the town and only permitting entrance to those people with photo ID that proved they lived in the affected area. As it turns out, within 30 minutes of the tornado city folks swamped the city streets looking for damage. They were rubbernecking. They couldn't stay home and watch it on TV. They had to get in their cars and drive through the affected areas looking for death and destruction. This prevented emergency vehicles from being able to gain access to those areas. Hence, the city was shut down. Damned city folk. In the end I donated some clothing and rode an Red Cross IRV and served food all day. I would have felt more useful doing something else but someone had to feed the people and workers.
Back on topic. There is no such thing as a tornado proof building. NOAA has done hundreds of studies into building material. They have yet to find anything that can withstand the winds of even a strong F3 tornado. A F3 tornado damaged reinforced concrete. A F4 ripped reinforced concrete apart. A F5 crumbles it into little bits. What needs to be focused on is tornado shelters and getting people into them. Homes and possessions can be replaced. People can not.
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.
-Max
Yes. Lawn gnomes are good for blocking very small tornadoes.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
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?
hey, welcome to the party. i'm here in lawrence, kansas and we got hit thursday. no deaths and only minor injuries, thank goodness.
:/
o ry /131328
we had the rubberneck syndrome last night really badly. i'm an emergency service volunteer, and traffic just started -pouring- into the area. people were on foot just walking around, taking pictures, blocking traffic, you name it. if nothing else, i'd beg people to please, for the love of god, stay clear of the disaster area if you don't live there.
http://www.ljworld.com/section/severeweather/st
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
But, then you look up, see Dorthy's house falling towards you, and you can't get the chains off in time!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
not a tornado.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
my pet machine
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.
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).
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!
Maybe a 802.11 cam or something.
Tornadoes generate a tremendous amount of EM radiation. Nearby twisters are known to jam low-VHF frequencies (i.e. the infamous "white channel two" warning). Of course, they may not affect WiFi frequencies at all, but I also wonder if the rotating iron in a tornado forms something of a faraday cage.