When you live in a place with a lot of tornadoes you learn when you need to be scared and when you don’t. Tornado watch? Go about your day. Tornado warning? Get in a building, check the news. Sky is turning green? Shit is about to get real. They happen a lot and the vast majority don’t do any significant damage. I imagine it’s how people near fault zones react to most earthquakes or people in tropical areas react to heavy rain
As of my writing this comment, the last EF-5 was the Moore tornado in 2013. It was one of the biggest tornadoes in history. It was 1⅓ miles wide, had winds of 210 mph, and tracked for about 17 miles. It hit a school and a hospital in a populated suburban area. You can get on Google Earth Pro and look at the damage yourself. It’s like precision annihilation. Blank slabs were left behind in the worst cases.
And while it’s tragic that 24 people died, consider how many people were in its track and survived.
The thing is when a tornado passes through a populated area, it’s gonna hit someone. But the odds of it hitting you specifically are low. The odds of it being big enough that sheltering in place is not enough are low. The absolute vast majority of them are extremely survivable. I’d rather live in Oklahoma where tornadoes often start and end in unpopulated fields than in the southeast where they also get lots of tornadoes and hurricanes that inflict equal devastation over vast swathes of land. You can hide from a tornado most of the time, but in a hurricane, the hidey hole is about to be full of water. If it’s bad enough, the only thing you can do is run away with a million other people or ride it out and end up on The Weather Channel.
I have a brother who moved to Moore a few years after the tornado. His house was two houses away from a house that was leveled by it. Half of the neighborhood was rebuilt, but the house he rented was perfectly fine. It’s funny how a tornado can do that.
Yeah a lot of people don’t seem to understand that a tornado is a very violent storm but it covers a very small fraction of the storm’s total area. For the overwhelming majority of space in the path of the storm, it just experiences a severe thunderstorm, and every single one of us has experienced that. Only a slim percentage are going to get the funnel.
The reason you’re supposed to take shelter during a tornado is because oftentimes you don’t have visibility on it, have no idea where it’s going to go, and you might not have enough time to get into shelter by the time you realize it’s on top of you. And just because it’s always good to play it safe.
But realistically, if you could see the thing, you actually have a pretty good idea of how safe you are from it.
Tornadoes don’t rip you off the ground from half a mile away, and the vast majority of them don’t throw debris that far either. They’re also not teleporters, and many are short-lived. You can look at them from a distance, just don’t go chasing them, and be within 30 seconds of shelter.
People that don’t actually live in these areas don’t seem to appreciate that tornadoes don’t sneak up on you or drop out of the sky fast as lightning. If shits about to go crazy, there is a very notable build up to it. Seeing as how most people stand out and watch these things in a yard or something, not in the middle of a field, they’re always at least within 10-30 seconds of shelter.
It really is not that perilous. It’s effectively the same thing as fucking around on train tracks. No, it’s technically not safe or smart, but the danger is very telegraphed 9/10 times and it’s avoided with such ease that the overwhelming majority of people that have ever done it are alive and well.
Yeah, you can be uncomfortably close to tornados and still be okay. If I saw one coming at my house, I’d probably get my pets and documents secured in the basement, and then film it until shit starts landing near me, then I’d duck in my hole and shit my pants for the next few minutes.
I imagine it’s how people near fault zones react to most earthquakes
Earthquakes only happen every few decades, so most people in California don’t think about them at all. Even when the big ones hit, they typically only hit up in the bay area, or down on southern California. So when a big earthquake hits, most Californians feel it, run under a door frame, wait 10 seconds until it’s over, and then talk about how crazy it felt for the rest of the day. Unfortunately the people near the epicenter usually have major damage to deal with, but like I said, they’re a rarity. After the SF earthquake that hit in the 80’s the State issued new seismic building standards, and all of the old buildings were retrofitted. So the damage from the next major earthquake should be quite a bit less than previous earthquakes.
Every few decades? Washington state has around a dozen noticeable quakes every year (out of about a thousand measureable events) They cause damage every six years or so. I’d be surprised if coastal California was statistically very different.
Yeah, when I lived near the Sierra Nevada we had 3 earthquakes in the year I was there. Granted I slept through all 3 and the worst thing that happened was a picture fell off the wall. Which is why I drew the comparison
Last time there was a tornado warning my wife’s entire family was just sending snapchats to one another from their respective front porches. Midwesterners are a different breed.
It’s the only exciting thing that happens all year!
Yeah, their front porches. Shelter is literally 5 steps away.
Okay but thats what a lot of people do. American or not. Honestly if I see one I wanna watch it a bit too. ts fascinating. Though of course I would run to the cellar if it comes for me
I live in Southern California, and we were having crazy weather for the region. I think Hawaii had a hurricane or something iirc, and we were getting the tail end of it.
I was at work, and suddenly everyone phone started screeching alerts.
⚠️ Tornado Warning ⚠️
Everyone froze for a couple seconds, then crowded the floor to ceiling office windows, then ran down stairs to go outside for a better look.
We all laughed at how incredibly stupid we were being, but hell, a Tornado in Cali was too rare to miss.
No Tornado ever materialized.
It’s not like you have a basement or storm shelter to flee to. Might as well have front row seats to your destruction.
I used to live in Wisconsin. I remember a tornado warning and people, including me, were standing in the intersections and streets to get a better view. I had spotted something odd in the clouds and to this day swear I saw a tornado second guess itself. I heard the next day that one had touched down a few miles North in a field.
“Why were you running back to the house last night? haha”
“I, uh…don’t like heights…”
Seattlite turned Chicagoan checking in:
When the sirens go off, we don’t give AF. Nothing enters the city.
When I moved here, I remember working on a highrise in the loop when all these air raid sirens went off. I looked around and no one seemed to even acknowledge it. I said “is anyone… Hearing this? Shouldn’t we like… Do something?” And then someone said “oh yea those just do that. First Tuesday of the month or when there’s a tornado that we also don’t care about.”
I was floored, then went back to cold calling.
Chicago is called the Windy City because a lot of square architecture has led to wind tunnels, but they also serve as an extra purpose of breaking up big winds and not allowing room for tornadoes to bloom.
In fact, many tornados also don’t occur towards the south suburbs sometimes because Chicago just blocks all the lake Michigan wind.
It’s windy here alright, but I can’t not make the correction that it was called the windy city because our politicians are all a buncha windbags!
I expect that almost makes up for living in a dystopian shitehole
When I lived with my parents, their house was on the outer edge of a microburst. It was so cool watching the wild wind. We just stood on the sheltered porch like dumbasses, watching it all in awe. It’s by far one of the coolest weather things I’ve ever seen. We had no idea it was a microburst. We just thought it was crazy wind. After everything calmed down, we drove around and found that the next town over was absolutely demolished and the beginning of my parents’ neighborhood had bad damage. That’s when we realized how dumb we were just hanging out outside during the storm. My parents’ house was totally fine btw, aside from the trashcans getting blown away.
Time to start a beer company called Shelter
Make sure to secure your pets somewhere safe before you head out to the porch.
The Australians are the same as us
That’s just a willy willy. Nothing like a tornado - note the clear sky
My bucket list includes seeing many natural disasters, phenomena, and wonders in person. Tornado is among them of course
We had those warnings relatively frequently when I lived in Texas. In school they had taught us to hide in the basement in case of a tornado, but no one actually had basements. So I never saw a tornado, but I did see spinning clouds high in the sky once.
At least in recent times, the news people acknowledge that ain’t nobody has a basement, so we are now officially supposed to do what I was planning on doing all along: if we hear the tornado ripping through our neighbors’ houses, we’re supposed to do the bodyguard style “NOOOOOO” leap, into the bathtub, while holding a bunch of pillows and shit to cover ourselves, so the roof beams don’t scrape us quite so much, while we’re being crushed to death.
EDIT: also, if I find myself 1,900 feet in the air, but I still have a pillow, I’ll stretch out and make like I’m still asleep. Maybe someone will be filming it in 8k resolution and it’ll be a hilarious fucking clip on the internet, forever.
Someone told me a story one time about using this technique. She was with her grandkids and a tornado was right there and closing fast. She got in the bathtub with her grandkids and all hell broke loose. When she eventually lifted the mattress, the house was gone.
Oh yeah, it totally CAN work. It’s definitely better than just standing in the middle of a random room of the house and very seriously asking Jesus if he can intervene on your behalf, with this already-in-progress wind event.
It’s just that, ya know, nobody ever knows how many times people were in their bathtubs, following that procedure, but they were in one of the houses where it’s like “WELP, THE WHOLE STRUCTURE WAS GONE, ALL THE WAY TO A CLEAN SLAB OF CONCRETE.”
Maybe those people were totally inside their bathtub, and they rode that motherfucker all the way to Oz.
And, once again, just for clarification: I still plan on doing that shit, if I have to. Last spring, we had a big thunderstorm pass super-duper close to my actual subdivision, and I got to the point where I was sitting on the toilet, watching the weather map on my phone, totally ready to move into the tub.
That must have been wild. And yeah, I’m sure being in a bathtub helps someone feel a little better, but at the end of the day it would e terrifying for good reason.
Yeah, it’s more than a little stressful, when the crazy shit gets close to you. I’ve had maybe ten or twelve of those events in my time, where the “if there’s a tornado, it will be SOMEWHERE IN HERE” red zone on the map is whipping right across my actual address, and the civil defense sirens start blasting outside the window.
If other natural disasters were like that, it would be even more fucking crazy, though. For example, if earthquake warnings worked the way tornado warnings work, absolutely NOBODY could handle that shit. Like, if there was a quake warning map with the potential earthquake zones weirdly sliding around on the local news, until the fault finally goes off somewhere.
That’s wild, I honestly can’t imagine. They do have earthquake warnings, but I think they’re just phone alerts just before the quake actually hits.
Exactly. I mean, I’m sure that’s creepy, also. Like, especially if you wake up, check your phone, and realize you’ve slept through a minor one. Like “huh, I guess I technically could have woken up right as I was being squished into paste by my neighbor’s chimney.”
I need to go back to bed. I read the title as a video about getting it on.
My favorite experience along these lines was watching a whole car dealership worth of sales drones with their nose all but up against the massive plate glass wall looking at the green sky.
My dad when he hears the weather siren.
