OT: Weather...

So being raised in California I am still in awe when I see some of the nasty weather.... I am no where near TX but saw this on the news tonight

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfjDR8XFFME

8,000lb 53ft trailer tossed like they were nothing, hard to see in the youtube video but about 20 and 30 sec in

Looks like its going to be bad spring this year

Tornado was nearsighted...mistook them for mobile homes...

I know it's not funny to joke about something so serious. Having been in the middle of tornado alley all my life, I have seen a handful of them in person, but none that massive. My Aunt in Moore had one fly over her house while I was there as a kid. It was extremely loud but did little damage. In 1999, her house was damaged by the F-5 that destroyed my grade school and hundreds of other buildings. I watched that one form north of Apache with binoculars and watched it on TV as it rolled along for hours getting bigger and bigger. Luckily, here, we have the most advanced warning possible and rarely get caught by surprise...Usually you have at least a half hour to get underground.

Those California earthquakes on the other hand...that's skeery stuff.

Those tornados that hit Henryville IN a month ago where close enough to my place I went to the basement with the kids. This year is looking crazy.

the weather is still not as bad as some of the operators i work around . and im just happy to see rain in any form!!!

Its funny, we were supposed to have a bad winter, and yet it was one of the mildest on record.

Guess its time to pay the pied piper.

Usually you have at least a half hour to get underground.

Click to expand...

Paul,

What types of tornado shelter are used there? I am concerned (having just sold my farm with a tornado-proof earth-sheltered concrete home and moved into a spindly box (commonly called a conventional US home)!

Mine (already here when I bought the house) is a small concrete shelter with a steel door. It looks like a pre-built unit that was just buried on site.

A lot of people are having safe rooms put into their homes (above ground). I think they are just steel reinforcements added to the walls and ceilings and anchored down.

Mine looks like this:
http://www.nwmissourishelters.us/original.html

Thanks. I need to do something about this problem. From all indications, storms are going to become more frequent and with higher winds.

While it does look impressive (or nasty) a van (especially empty) in a tornado is a projectile waiting to happen. By my calculation the standard van has a side surface area of almost 70,000 square inches. It doesn't take much pressure to come up with 8,000 lb. I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Keith

I am not worried about vans so much as I am about my body being propelled through the air, or being hit by some propelled objects (after my house blows away).

A few weeks ago, the Cincinnati/NKY tornado's hit the village right next door to my power plant.
The village is a mess. 2 people lost their lives.
The plant lost a lot of roofs, and one of our warehouses was unuseable (safely...) for 2 or 3 weeks. We also lost a few of the HV towers that give and take power from our site. Now we are back in full swing and...and....well into our spring outage

No one at the plant was hurt, the air-horn alarm system (that I designed last year...) worked and everyone was safely in one of our many concrete structures when the violence hit. The plant was running at the time and while they lost some condenser vacuum (cooling tower effect?) they kept the plant up through the storm (go operations!)

Just seeing the volume of trees/large trees that were blown sideways - ripping them out by their roots....thats a lot of force.

Now I think about that in all my future projects - "what would happen if a tornado hit this ?"

-John

I live between Fort Worth and Denton and was close enough to see the small tornado that blew just west of us that day. The last one I saw was when I was a kid in San Angelo, Texas, 4 hours west of FW. That was over 35 years ago.

They haven't changed much....

About 5 years ago (maybe more, my mind ain't what it used to be) an F4 or F5 took dead aim at a manufacturing plant just up the road from where I live. It happened to hit just at shift change, meaning there were a very large number of people on site.

The tornado leveled everthing - except for the storm shelter the owner had built in the plant. Fortunately there was plenty of warning given and everyone was able to take shelter. Not one injury was reported. I don't remember the numbers, but I want to say there were over 300 souls on site at the time.

During reconstruction, which took several months, the owner kept as many of the people employed as he could. He didn't have to, he could have just layed everyone off and let them collect unemployment. Not everyone could stay, that just wasn't possible, but he did make great efforts to support his employees.

The owner is now somewhat of minor local hero for saving his employee's lives and the efforts he made to save their livelihoods. His business is now booming. All in all a fairly happy ending to a story that could have been a serious tragedy.

Liquid Sun Shine, dude!

Maybe that's why we have so many micro-brewers in the Northwest.

OkiePC said:

Tornado was nearsighted...mistook them for mobile homes...

Click to expand...

I've always referred to the little steel sheds that homeowners use to store their lawnmowers, etc, as "tornado decoys".

When Jackson, TN, got hit years ago, part of my roof in Spring Hill, TN, (80 miles away) got blown off as well. The next morning, I was in the yard cleaning up and I found receipts from a lumber yard in Jackson that had landed in my yard.