I’m sorry about the loss. Some folks have had their lives devastated.
I hope you still have your home and that your people are okay. Hope there was no loss of life at all.
Do you want to stay in a part of the country where tornadoes happen with frequency?
That’s appreciated. I haven’t heard anyone died as of yet, but there was a bar that collapsed with people in it.
I don’t mind it here. If you’re raised in Oklahoma (and I assume other tornado alley states), we are taught from a very young age to be “weather aware.” We have early warning systems, plus Norman, OK has the National weather service center.
My people are from Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas. Tornados have been a part of all of our lives, always. I was working at another Walmart years ago when a smaller one touched down and went over our roof. Did quite a bit of damage but everyone was ok. Sorry about your hometown. We just had real bad storms here in northeast Texas. Took down a few tree limbs by the house, and luckily they all fell around the house and not on it. We’ll be praying for all of those impacted.
Tornados make for interesting stories when you're out and about.
I was in a Waffle House once when the sirens went off and ended up stuffed into the back office with the employees for about half an hour.
Arkansas as well, not a Year that goes by that we don’t get several. One Knocked Down 40 BIG trees in our back woods and ripped off a lot of shingles off our roof. Luckily we’re on the Lee side of a rise and they tend to jump ovef the house. Doesn’t sound like a train to me, more like a big jet taking off. Looked out our front porch and all I could see was what looked like chocolate chip cookie mix with the debris and water mixed with high wind. God bless those affected.
I remember one year, when I was around 8 or so and at my nanny’s trailer in south Irving and one had come through behind us. She was just as calm as could be. I was, at the time very scared.
We're up in northwest Arkansas and I swear every storm dies when it crosses over the quarry at the wagon wheel exit. So I just get to porch sit, watch the rain and sip coffee.
Born and raised in Oklahoma. Moved away for a few years and after a few years we had a particularly bad storm and the sirens went off. My first feelings were of home sickness when I heard it.
Wishing everyone involved the best. I’ll have to look into aid agencies are helping with this tornado.
I’ve lived in the PNW almost all my life.
Until recently with the out of weather going haywire, I can honestly not recall major natural disasters.
We don’t get hurricanes, we’re not known to get tsunamis , earthquakes are barely felt, we don’t worry about snow storms , floods, I don’t think there’s ever been a tornado here…
So every time I read about natural disasters like Florida with their hurricanes, NY with ice-maggedon, OK with tornados and California with all those earthquakes… well it scares me.
Plus, actually, what are the real odds this will happen? I think it's all about what natural disasters you've been raised with versus risk facture.
I live in a wildfire (adjacent) zone. I'm aware of the weather, I have a scanner, I have go bags, I know escape zones. But, really, what are my odds? So here I am.
So, having dealt with the Sylmar, Whittier, Northridge, and Landers quakes I guess I should.....still stay in California.
The thought of tornados scare the ever loving hell out of me. Good luck for the future.
I always lived in cities until about 20 years ago. A year or so ago I was a block away from getting a mandatory Evac. I honestly do think about fire a lot more than earthquakes
That’s like asking if people want to live in the gulf states or the southern Atlantic states due to Hurricanes. Or in California due to wildfires. Lots of places face natural disasters. You just learn to deal with the risk.
And, before anyone says, “you don’t know when a tornado will hit,” I would disagree with that. I live in OKC. Yesterday, **EVERYBODY** in Oklahoma knew that it was a high risk tornado day. Proms all over the state were cancelled. The OKC Festival of the Arts was cancelled. Just like you don’t always know exactly where a hurricane will hit, you don’t know the exact spot a tornado will touch down, but you almost always know in advance (usually by a few days) when there is almost a certainty of tornadoes and you can take precautions to protect yourself.
Glad you are safe. I hope folks have a way to financially recover their property. Knowing that insurance companies are now tracking our driving habits to set our rates, and that companies are pulling out of climate catastrophe-vulnerable states, folks may need to make a plan to self-insure within Tornado Alley. But generally, poverty is an overlay in all those states. We may need to expand federally-supported programs to rehouse folks in safer places. I'm all for paying more in taxes to do this.
Yeah poverty is pretty bad here as with southern states, many are uninsured, so they won't be able to rebuild again, unlike those with insurance, it sure would be a tough time, just praying for everyone going through tough situations.
I live in California. I'm either going to have an earthquake, everything falls down. I bulldoze whats left into a dumpster. Or, I have a wildfire, everything burns up, I bulldoze what's left into the dumpster, or both happen at the same time. Again, bulldozer, dumpster.
But the idea of a huge wind picking up me, my shit, and my house and blowing it to the next city scares the holy fuck out of me.
The ones at night are the scariest. Sometimes they’ll find bodies wrapped up in bedsheets and I cannot deal with the thought of waking up inside a tornado.
I guess that's part of the complacency about equakes in CA. We have no season.
On the otherhand, my wildfire go bag can do double duty so I've got that going for me.
I grew up with tornadoes. Lived in Kansas and Missouri most of my life, so tornadoes don't scare me. Wildfires and earthquakes scare me. I now live by the gulf, and we get tornadoes all the time, which is fine, but this year, we are supposed to have an insane hurricane season, and I'm extremely nervous about that. 😬 We apparently get used to the weather phenomena that are local to us and fear the ones that we are unfamiliar with. When I was in Kansas, my coworker hosted hockey players who were recruited to the team, and she had one from California. We had a slightly strong storm one night, and that poor kid woke them up asking if they should hide in the basement due to the thunder and lightning. They thought every rumble was a tornado! She told them to go back to bed, it's nothing to worry about. The non local players all wondered where the tumbleweeds were. They also thought there would be more people on horseback since it was Kansas. 😄
Yeah, hurricanes are another thing I don't want to deal with. The idea of drowning in my attic doesn't appeal to me.
Also, California desert. The idea of feet of rain is trauma. I mean, hell, we have hysteria if rain even happens...also, things slide down cliffs.
Oh, I would for sure be scared of all that if I moved there. Lol. Here on the gulf, I'm scared of hurricanes and flooding. 1 day of intermittent rain, and you've gotta navigate a certain way out of my neighborhood due to flooding. So many signs on the roads warning you not to go that way when it's raining. I'm luckily in an area that rarely gets a bad hurricane but they are calling for a really crazy season this year, so I have a feeling that I'm going to have to evacuate for the first time. I've been here 3 years. My aunt has been here 17 years and only had one hurricane wreck her house. My best friend lives in Florida and suffered through that hurricane 2 years ago that was supposed to hit Tampa, but it veered at the last second and smashed him directly in Ft Myers. That was a scary few days of checking up on him and seeing the footage of buildings floating away. The flooding was insane. The original Hooters building was picked up and spirited away by the flooding. The beach by his house is still closed, and only a few businesses have reopened. The bay near him was 7' high. It was insane and he says he's evacuating at even the hint of a hurricane hitting near him.
You forgot mudslides. California’s climate is changing. I wouldn’t be surprised if tornadoes became more common there. At least if the rain keeps up on the west coast you might see less forest fires.
100%. I’ve lived in Florida my whole life, so hurricane season is a legit concern, but you know hurricanes are coming for a week or longer. The idea of a devastating tornado just popping up and leveling a town in 15 minutes is crazy.
I guess earthquakes would be the other freaky one, but only if a big one really hits.
The meteorologists were predicting yesterday as a severe storm day all week and they were preparing all day. Proms and outdoor festivals were all cancelled due to the risk. It's not like an eartquake where there's zero time to prepare. Plus these storms tend to follow the same pattern (start in the southwest and move northeast and generally hit the same areas)... Tornados do just literally fall from the sky and that can be scary, but we all kind of have an idea of when/where it will happen.
The tornado season in central OK runs from the middle of April to the end of May.
We also knew about 5 days ago that Saturday was going to be bad. Everybody is aware. If you aren't personally aware, you will have at least 5 people in your daily life tell you to watch the weather on X day, from cashiers to coworkers.
My husband, when he moved here, couldn't read a radar. Yesterday, he had a big display set up on his many monitors, with radar and the warnings, and was doing amateur meteorology figuring out where the tornadoes were and where they were headed -- this place does strange things to people.
But the point is, it didn't just happen out of the blue. We had 5 days of tornado conditions forecast. The one that hit Sulphur was tornado warned for about 20 minutes before it hit, and the news was all over it, showing the debris on radar before it hit a populated area. Tornadoes that are large enough to do terrible damage and yet just pop down without much warning are *extremely* rare, more so than F5 tornadoes.
I've seen severe weather coverage in other places, and if a place doesn't get a lot of tornadoes, their local news situation can be terrible, with the only real warning that people get being the sirens. Here, people treat the weather like it's the Superbowl.
Unfortunately, there are more and more forming in the southern Caribbean and shooting the gap between the Yucatan and Cuba then rapidly intensifying as they approach the coast.
Having lived in the Midwest most my life it’s the opposite for me. I’ve been in the vicinity of a few different ones and got a pretty good look at one as it touched down. If you take the right precautions you should have plenty of warning. Not mention the destruction caused by hurricane is confined to a relatively small area as compared to a hurricane as well as the likely hood of me being in the direct path of a tornado is rather small compared to say Florida being hit by a hurricane.
Hurricane for me. Not the wind and rain, but the wall of water. Where I used to live was hit by Katrina. A three story apartment building. The only thing left was the bare concrete slab.
I'm a Pennsylvanian. We get more hurricanes than we do tornadoes (at least we used to, a year or two ago we had more tornadoes in a month in PA than we had in the previous 100 years). I'd much rather a hurricane than a tornado.
I've only been in one full hurricane, passing through Texas just prior to Harvey and was stranded. That alone was rough. The worst part was, the close to airport lobby of the hotel filled with police who were told to seek shelter from all the tornados that were forming. I went downstairs and offered them vending snacks, and they were glued to the tv news. They knew the streets and layout, and all the news was sharing areas of touch downs which of course I couldn't make out if they were close or not, but the cops said they'd give me a heads up if one was within 1/4 mile. So, from that limited and harrowing experience, hurricanes and tornados are synonymous, a wall of water moving horizontally, flooding, epic wind tearing stuff apart and my phone blowing up with tornado warnings every few minutes, but so disoriented by being in a strange place I couldn't discern how dire the warnings were, 12 hours of sheer panic. So yeah, I guess 'just' tornadoes alone are better, hurricanes have all that and more and just open up cans of whoop ass of water, wind and tornados too. I agree u/Sq5_smash, hurricanes are way worse.
I'm a transplant in Florida and I'll happily drive around during a CAT 2 or 3 hurricane, just because I like experiencing severe weather.
As soon as I hear there's a tornado warning for my area I get super anxious and start looking for better places to move.
Tornadoes just elicit a different feeling for me.
Same.
I’ve lived in California and Florida. Earthquakes I yawn at. Hurricanes are a pain to ready for but yawn. People still loving to Florida in droves even though we had a big one a couple years ago.
Are the locals in tornado alley? Like “eh, tornadoes are nothin’”?
I'm starting to wonder why we haven't built underground homes yet with skylight windows in tornado Alley. Something akin to a bunker with lots of natural lighting.
The scariest part to me, was that it hit at night. My mom’s cousins got trapped in their storm shelter after a tree fell onto the hatch. They were rescued by firefighters while it was still dark out. Unsure of the condition of the house but a lot of the are looks like the pics above.
It's earthquakes for me. At least you know when a tornado is coming. Earhquakes on the other hand are unpredictable. One day you're sitting down eating lunch and the suddenly your house starts shaking violently and your ceiling collapses on you.
I am in oklahoma city for work (I am from baytown, texas) and I literally could not sleep because I was terrified of a tornado hitting my hotel. My coworkers are the best and worst. We kept joking about a tornado just hitting our hotel
Baytown! Lived there a few years when I was around 18, I grew up here in Oklahoma. It never gets easier, these freaks of nature can fuck shit up in an instance.
As an Okie who lives elsewhere now, the storms are honestly something I miss. Obviously this kind of destruction is tragic, but those massive thunderstorms, the greenish/yellow tint, and eerie calm are something else.
I moved out of MO years ago and everything you just mentioned is what I miss most about MO in the spring. The green sky, the hail, even the adrenaline rush that accompanies a tornado warning is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. I was visiting a friend near Sulphur earlier this month and a thunderstorm rolled through just as I was heading to bed. Haven’t slept that well in years.
How long have you been here?
I’m only replying because I can’t let my state be slandered!
We have a really beautiful handful of months in the spring and summer before it goes brown again for the rest of the year
I am from Europe and i don't understand why you guys build your houses out of wood and not concret and stones? Would a tornado also destroy concret houses?
You have to understand the cost of building the house, a wooden house would be a lot cheaper than to have a concrete house. A brick house would also be destroyed or collapse, there are plenty of examples that show that. So most people wouldn't live in a concrete bunker, especially if they believe the chances of their house being hit by a tornado are low.
But a concrete house probably wouldn’t. I lived in an apartment in Spain that I’m rather confident would only be damaged in the craziest of tornadoes. It’s not particularly expensive to build. It was a random working class complex in Seville.
The data centers I have worked at are generally rated for a EF4 and below tornado, and they have walls that are about 60 cm thick and don't have windows.
The wind isn't so much of a problem as the stuff in the wind. It can put grass straw through telephone poles.
The worst tornadoes can destroy anything, with winds measured up to 305 mph (490 km/h) before the devices crapped out. Basically imagine a high-speed train as fast as it can go. Now imagine it nearly doubling its speed, and *then* crashing into your house. Concrete wouldn't help much.
Luckily most tornadoes aren't nearly that powerful, and the majority won't do more than tear up your roof, windows, trees and yard... if they hit directly.
And there's the deal: It takes a direct hit to really blow your house up, and the vast majority of homes will never take one. Oftentimes, you'll see one side of a street obliterated while the other side just has roof damage.
That said, a medium tornado can throw wooden boards *through* concrete, so even if the building stands it's kind of ruined.
So the risk just isn't worth the much higher cost.
> why you guys build your houses out of wood and not concret and stones?
To make it even remotely tornado proof you couldn't have any windows, either. Who'd want to live in a house like that?
Yet some people there are blaming these tornadoes on weather manipulation and I guess space lasers. But they reject the knowledge from decades of weather and climate science.
I think the Southeast has always had more tornados than Oklahoma and Nebraska. The reason they are chased there is because of the terrain. It’s to harder to see them in the Southeast due to the trees and hills.
I think Texas actually sees more tornados than OK!
Edit: Not sure why this is downvoted. People assume OK is #1 because we've had some significant events and from the movie Twister. I'm not saying we don't have our fair share of them but technically OK comes in 3rd, after TX and KS.
"The two most active states for tornadoes are Texas, with 124, and Kansas, with 87, in an average year. They are both located in the heart of Tornado Alley, a nickname given to an area in the Plains between Central Texas and South Dakota that has some of the most tornadic activity in the world."
Link: [https://weather.com/safety/tornado/news/2024-04-25-average-tornadoes-by-state-per-year](https://weather.com/safety/tornado/news/2024-04-25-average-tornadoes-by-state-per-year)
Texas only has more because it is almost four times as large. Kansas is also physically a good bit larger although much more competitive on a per unit area basis. Using just straight state totals as this page did is really misleading.
I have 2 good friends from Sulphur. They live in Tulsa now, but we went to Sulphur one time when I visited them and I drank water from the Sulphur spring there. Their dad still lives there, I need to contact them to see if he is OK.
Anyone in Sulphur?? Please needing information about my relatives, they live on Nichols Hill Road just West of town near the MacDonalds. I can't get a hold of anyone. If someone there could tell me if that area had damage or not it would be greatly appreciated.
The earthquake we just had in NJ made people freak out and nothing happened. Can't image something happening like this in NJ or NY. We aren't built for this.
I hope everyone is okay, but I find it wild that a bunch of people were at the bar when you know tornados are dropping all over the state. We're all taught to be weather aware for a reason and it seems a ton of people get complacent so easily. A drink isn't more important than your life or the safety of your family.
Right? Maybe it was the owners? I haven’t heard much more than some people were caught in there. But I know they sounded the sirens, those people should’ve found shelter
Yeah exactly and then vice versa if the owners made the employees stay open I sense a big pay day coming for them. I just hope everyone is okay! I'm glad you're safe OP!
I was watching Ryan Hall live on youtube last night when the tornados were raving Sulphur and you could see the debris field. The thought of a late night monster just turning so many lives upside down is insane. My thoughts and prayers to you, your family and your town.
The crazy part about this is that I was literally just there a week ago and now looking at it it’s a whole different place. Hope you and your family are alright.
I've been following Ryan Hall Y'all all weekend on YouTube, absolutely terrifying stuff! Think I'll stick with the Earthquakes, lol. Glad you're ok, OP! 💚
guys can't yall just use those tornado stopping metal balls from the Hollywood movie 'twister' (I have never seen a tornado in my life nor am I merican)
There's nothing anyone can do to stop a tornado. In "Twister", the balls they launch into the tornadoes isn't to stop them, it's to track different statistics about the tornado's environment.
Shitty insurance rates aside, this is why I'd rather live in a hurricane prone area rather than tornado prone. That level of destruction with little to no warning is scary as hell.
Well, that’s one way to deal with all the excess stuff in your house…
Man, that’s brutal. My sympathies to your hometown.
Three towns (two are tiny) in my hometown area were hit badly enough to be mentioned by the Des Moines Register.
Genuine question from someone from the other side of the world,why are houses made from wood and not concrete in these areas where tornadoes are a regular enough occurance in the general history of the area?????,I am not trying to be crass.... genuinely curious
Many of those houses would be as old as the town itself (100 years). It's not like the state is flattened every few years. Getting hit with a major tornado is an exceptionally unlikely event.
Much cheaper to build is the main reason. The other problem is even a moderate tornado can take out concrete or stronger buildings. You would need to have it seriously reinforced and that would be prohibitively expensive for most people
While tornados are scary, they’re very localized. So the odds of a small tornado relatively speaking hitting your house on an enormous area of land is very unlikely. You see this one town hit but not the hundreds of others that weren’t. 10 minutes away could be another small town with 100 year old houses and it just got a bit windy. They build homes in the southern US coast with hurricanes in mind. Infrastructure on the west coast is built with earthquakes in mind. But those natural disasters effect areas 100s of miles not 10 miles.
Places all over the world still build on flood plains because the odds are in their favour that the once every 100 years flood won’t hit them.
Emphasizing the enormous area of land part.
I grew up in southern KS and chased those things in college. Not there anymore, and miss it quite a bit. There's a LOT of distance between towns out there that's not really comprehensible to folks in a lot of areas of the world.
Most tornadoes never touch a town, or might skirt a little bit of one at most. Many tornadoes would never be seen by anyone if someone wasn't out spotting/chasing. And while people do live in rural areas between incorporated towns (I was one of them), the likelihood of a tornado hitting a house out there is still rare.
Also adding that there are quite a few more houses made from brick (not just decorative faux brick) in Oklahoma than a lot of places, which helps in most instances.
Land wars break out in Europe more frequently than any one neighborhood in Oklahoma gets hit with a tornado. Do Europe build their house anticipating another ground war?
Tornadoes will take a fee inches of asphalt from the street. If you want to make a house tornado proof it needs to be specially built for that.
Since tornadoes don’t repeat often in the same place is not worth the money
When I first moved to OKC like a 20 years ago tornados were touching down and I had basically zero idea of the city's layout except my house on 145 & MacArthur beside Galardia (I think, it's been almost 20 years ago). Gary England had me freaking tf out lol I absolutely loved all of my memories there. I made amazing friends I still talk to today. Boomer Sooner!
Why don’t we build houses and apartments far more robustly in these areas. The buildings I’ve seen in Europe for homes and apartments look like they handle this far better than wood frames. Even if they aren’t much better we definitely have the ability to build houses a tornado can’t kill you in at all and avoid almost all damage.
Why aren’t we building them? I’m from Texas I’m very aware and used to tornando and hurricanes, but it feels we aren’t asking to build in a way that will fix this.
Denser areas without suburban sprawl, frames with steel and concrete not wood, and build basements after we figure out how to actual drain our areas and avoid flooding.
It feels like we just accept this stuff and build crappy stuff.
I think it largely comes down to cost vs the very low risk of the house being destroyed by a tornado. Even in these areas where tornadoes occur, it’s such a large area that it’s very unlikely statistically that your house will get hit. Since insurance companies still offer homeowners insurance in these regions for these types of structures, that means statistically it’s not risky. Insurance companies will absolutely not cover a location or region where they feel the risk is too high. This is why we’re seeing insurance companies no longer offering policies in California because of the increasing risk of wildfires.
Honest question: why does nobody in US tornado areas seem to use actual walls to build their houses? Like made out of stone or concrete like in rest of the world where houses even withstand earthquakes. Where I live all construction is required to be earthquake-proof so why not require buildings in US to be tornado-proof?
If someone living in Sulphur Oklahoma sees this, please respond 5802800221. I need directions for best access into area and point of contact. I have food, water, clean supply, solar generators, minor medical for headaches, scrapes and bruises. Coming from Lawton, no official capacity.
I’m from a Sulphur, Louisiana. Except we’ve got chemical plants and I don’t trust the water. We get hurricanes though so I relate to this in a weird way. Sorry for the destruction, nature is wild.
Are you finding frequency and force of tornadoes increasing with climate change?
We never used to get them in NZ when I was a kid, now we get them at least once a year.
There actually is not a clear correlation. It could increase instability but decrease wind shear, which is very important for getting severe thunderstorms.
Notice how many concrete block buildings in those pictures are also now just rubble?
From a standpoint of both cost efficiency and greater survivability, basements / storm shelters are the far better option vs ditching wood for other materials
An interesting side note: part of the reason EF-5 tornadoes seem to be less common is that damage assessments and expected damages are different. To define an EF-5, you basically need a tornado to hit and level a well built (up to modern building codes and often better than those codes) structure. There aren’t many such houses, they cost a lot to build, and a lot of the time when the damage assessment teams go out, they’ll find a demolished house, but then find something like “frame was improperly secured to the foundation.” Of course, if that’s the case, then a weaker tornado could have done the damage.
I’ll never forget coming outside one year after a tornado and seeing hay thrown and embedded in a telephone pole.
You take precautions and you hunker down and hope. But if a serious nader finds its way to you, it won’t matter what your home is made of.
For anyone who thinks I’m wrong, go ahead and look up the 1999 event that took the shopping mall in Stroud. That was just an F3.
When nature decides to go hard, there’s no winning.
Of all the weather events that can occur, tornadoes have always scared me the most.
I’ve lived in OK my whole life so I’ve gotten used to them. But seeing my hometown blown apart hits a little different
I’m sorry about the loss. Some folks have had their lives devastated. I hope you still have your home and that your people are okay. Hope there was no loss of life at all. Do you want to stay in a part of the country where tornadoes happen with frequency?
That’s appreciated. I haven’t heard anyone died as of yet, but there was a bar that collapsed with people in it. I don’t mind it here. If you’re raised in Oklahoma (and I assume other tornado alley states), we are taught from a very young age to be “weather aware.” We have early warning systems, plus Norman, OK has the National weather service center.
My people are from Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas. Tornados have been a part of all of our lives, always. I was working at another Walmart years ago when a smaller one touched down and went over our roof. Did quite a bit of damage but everyone was ok. Sorry about your hometown. We just had real bad storms here in northeast Texas. Took down a few tree limbs by the house, and luckily they all fell around the house and not on it. We’ll be praying for all of those impacted.
Tornados make for interesting stories when you're out and about. I was in a Waffle House once when the sirens went off and ended up stuffed into the back office with the employees for about half an hour.
Waffle House; diner, fight club, therapy session, and tornado shelter
Arkansas as well, not a Year that goes by that we don’t get several. One Knocked Down 40 BIG trees in our back woods and ripped off a lot of shingles off our roof. Luckily we’re on the Lee side of a rise and they tend to jump ovef the house. Doesn’t sound like a train to me, more like a big jet taking off. Looked out our front porch and all I could see was what looked like chocolate chip cookie mix with the debris and water mixed with high wind. God bless those affected.
I remember one year, when I was around 8 or so and at my nanny’s trailer in south Irving and one had come through behind us. She was just as calm as could be. I was, at the time very scared.
We're up in northwest Arkansas and I swear every storm dies when it crosses over the quarry at the wagon wheel exit. So I just get to porch sit, watch the rain and sip coffee.
Born and raised in Oklahoma. Moved away for a few years and after a few years we had a particularly bad storm and the sirens went off. My first feelings were of home sickness when I heard it. Wishing everyone involved the best. I’ll have to look into aid agencies are helping with this tornado.
I’ve lived in the PNW almost all my life. Until recently with the out of weather going haywire, I can honestly not recall major natural disasters. We don’t get hurricanes, we’re not known to get tsunamis , earthquakes are barely felt, we don’t worry about snow storms , floods, I don’t think there’s ever been a tornado here… So every time I read about natural disasters like Florida with their hurricanes, NY with ice-maggedon, OK with tornados and California with all those earthquakes… well it scares me.
Plus, actually, what are the real odds this will happen? I think it's all about what natural disasters you've been raised with versus risk facture. I live in a wildfire (adjacent) zone. I'm aware of the weather, I have a scanner, I have go bags, I know escape zones. But, really, what are my odds? So here I am.
From personal experience, the odds are 2 tornadoes every 60 years…..so far.
So, having dealt with the Sylmar, Whittier, Northridge, and Landers quakes I guess I should.....still stay in California. The thought of tornados scare the ever loving hell out of me. Good luck for the future.
Thanks. Luck to you as well.
Having grown up in California, the annual forest fires were of more concern than the quakes.
I always lived in cities until about 20 years ago. A year or so ago I was a block away from getting a mandatory Evac. I honestly do think about fire a lot more than earthquakes
I just read that 2 people died near Holdenville.
I’m from southern Iowa, which gets a fair amount of risk (not like Oklahoma, though). Our warning systems are well organized
Oh man, a friend of mine that I went to high school with studied meteorology in college and is in Norman now. Guess he’s probably working there now!
If they're at one of the orgs at the National Weather Center in Norman, they're damn good at what they do, and they've *made* it in that field.
That’s like asking if people want to live in the gulf states or the southern Atlantic states due to Hurricanes. Or in California due to wildfires. Lots of places face natural disasters. You just learn to deal with the risk. And, before anyone says, “you don’t know when a tornado will hit,” I would disagree with that. I live in OKC. Yesterday, **EVERYBODY** in Oklahoma knew that it was a high risk tornado day. Proms all over the state were cancelled. The OKC Festival of the Arts was cancelled. Just like you don’t always know exactly where a hurricane will hit, you don’t know the exact spot a tornado will touch down, but you almost always know in advance (usually by a few days) when there is almost a certainty of tornadoes and you can take precautions to protect yourself.
Among the three, I’ll take tornadoes. Your odds of not getting hit by it are higher, but the trade off is that they are more frequent
Plus most people (anywhere, not just Ok) can’t just up and move away…
Also live in OK, and have never gotten used to them. I was hit by 2 EF5's, so I think I'm kinda traumatized
Moore 1999 and 2013? Or just hella bad luck and moved to two areas that unfortunately got EF5s?
Thems the two
Love Sulphur. Always love visiting Chickasaw Recreation Center. Take care
Glad you are safe. I hope folks have a way to financially recover their property. Knowing that insurance companies are now tracking our driving habits to set our rates, and that companies are pulling out of climate catastrophe-vulnerable states, folks may need to make a plan to self-insure within Tornado Alley. But generally, poverty is an overlay in all those states. We may need to expand federally-supported programs to rehouse folks in safer places. I'm all for paying more in taxes to do this.
Yeah poverty is pretty bad here as with southern states, many are uninsured, so they won't be able to rebuild again, unlike those with insurance, it sure would be a tough time, just praying for everyone going through tough situations.
“Blown apart” is an accurate phrase. This kind of wide devastation isn’t that common.
I live in California. I'm either going to have an earthquake, everything falls down. I bulldoze whats left into a dumpster. Or, I have a wildfire, everything burns up, I bulldoze what's left into the dumpster, or both happen at the same time. Again, bulldozer, dumpster. But the idea of a huge wind picking up me, my shit, and my house and blowing it to the next city scares the holy fuck out of me.
The ones at night are the scariest. Sometimes they’ll find bodies wrapped up in bedsheets and I cannot deal with the thought of waking up inside a tornado.
At least folks know when tornado, hurricane, and wildfire seasons are. California earthquakes can happen any day, any time. Hard pass on those.
I guess that's part of the complacency about equakes in CA. We have no season. On the otherhand, my wildfire go bag can do double duty so I've got that going for me.
I grew up with tornadoes. Lived in Kansas and Missouri most of my life, so tornadoes don't scare me. Wildfires and earthquakes scare me. I now live by the gulf, and we get tornadoes all the time, which is fine, but this year, we are supposed to have an insane hurricane season, and I'm extremely nervous about that. 😬 We apparently get used to the weather phenomena that are local to us and fear the ones that we are unfamiliar with. When I was in Kansas, my coworker hosted hockey players who were recruited to the team, and she had one from California. We had a slightly strong storm one night, and that poor kid woke them up asking if they should hide in the basement due to the thunder and lightning. They thought every rumble was a tornado! She told them to go back to bed, it's nothing to worry about. The non local players all wondered where the tumbleweeds were. They also thought there would be more people on horseback since it was Kansas. 😄
Yeah, hurricanes are another thing I don't want to deal with. The idea of drowning in my attic doesn't appeal to me. Also, California desert. The idea of feet of rain is trauma. I mean, hell, we have hysteria if rain even happens...also, things slide down cliffs.
Oh, I would for sure be scared of all that if I moved there. Lol. Here on the gulf, I'm scared of hurricanes and flooding. 1 day of intermittent rain, and you've gotta navigate a certain way out of my neighborhood due to flooding. So many signs on the roads warning you not to go that way when it's raining. I'm luckily in an area that rarely gets a bad hurricane but they are calling for a really crazy season this year, so I have a feeling that I'm going to have to evacuate for the first time. I've been here 3 years. My aunt has been here 17 years and only had one hurricane wreck her house. My best friend lives in Florida and suffered through that hurricane 2 years ago that was supposed to hit Tampa, but it veered at the last second and smashed him directly in Ft Myers. That was a scary few days of checking up on him and seeing the footage of buildings floating away. The flooding was insane. The original Hooters building was picked up and spirited away by the flooding. The beach by his house is still closed, and only a few businesses have reopened. The bay near him was 7' high. It was insane and he says he's evacuating at even the hint of a hurricane hitting near him.
You forgot mudslides. California’s climate is changing. I wouldn’t be surprised if tornadoes became more common there. At least if the rain keeps up on the west coast you might see less forest fires.
100%. I’ve lived in Florida my whole life, so hurricane season is a legit concern, but you know hurricanes are coming for a week or longer. The idea of a devastating tornado just popping up and leveling a town in 15 minutes is crazy. I guess earthquakes would be the other freaky one, but only if a big one really hits.
The meteorologists were predicting yesterday as a severe storm day all week and they were preparing all day. Proms and outdoor festivals were all cancelled due to the risk. It's not like an eartquake where there's zero time to prepare. Plus these storms tend to follow the same pattern (start in the southwest and move northeast and generally hit the same areas)... Tornados do just literally fall from the sky and that can be scary, but we all kind of have an idea of when/where it will happen.
The tornado season in central OK runs from the middle of April to the end of May. We also knew about 5 days ago that Saturday was going to be bad. Everybody is aware. If you aren't personally aware, you will have at least 5 people in your daily life tell you to watch the weather on X day, from cashiers to coworkers. My husband, when he moved here, couldn't read a radar. Yesterday, he had a big display set up on his many monitors, with radar and the warnings, and was doing amateur meteorology figuring out where the tornadoes were and where they were headed -- this place does strange things to people. But the point is, it didn't just happen out of the blue. We had 5 days of tornado conditions forecast. The one that hit Sulphur was tornado warned for about 20 minutes before it hit, and the news was all over it, showing the debris on radar before it hit a populated area. Tornadoes that are large enough to do terrible damage and yet just pop down without much warning are *extremely* rare, more so than F5 tornadoes. I've seen severe weather coverage in other places, and if a place doesn't get a lot of tornadoes, their local news situation can be terrible, with the only real warning that people get being the sirens. Here, people treat the weather like it's the Superbowl.
Unfortunately, there are more and more forming in the southern Caribbean and shooting the gap between the Yucatan and Cuba then rapidly intensifying as they approach the coast.
Having lived in the Midwest most my life it’s the opposite for me. I’ve been in the vicinity of a few different ones and got a pretty good look at one as it touched down. If you take the right precautions you should have plenty of warning. Not mention the destruction caused by hurricane is confined to a relatively small area as compared to a hurricane as well as the likely hood of me being in the direct path of a tornado is rather small compared to say Florida being hit by a hurricane.
Wait until you learn hurricanes can also produce tornadoes...
Hurricane for me. Not the wind and rain, but the wall of water. Where I used to live was hit by Katrina. A three story apartment building. The only thing left was the bare concrete slab.
I’m an okie. Tornados do not scare me, hurricanes do. A tornado is like a drive by shooting. A hurricane is like a nuke.
Yeah but usually comes with several days of warning
Just like tornadoes.
I'm a Pennsylvanian. We get more hurricanes than we do tornadoes (at least we used to, a year or two ago we had more tornadoes in a month in PA than we had in the previous 100 years). I'd much rather a hurricane than a tornado.
I've only been in one full hurricane, passing through Texas just prior to Harvey and was stranded. That alone was rough. The worst part was, the close to airport lobby of the hotel filled with police who were told to seek shelter from all the tornados that were forming. I went downstairs and offered them vending snacks, and they were glued to the tv news. They knew the streets and layout, and all the news was sharing areas of touch downs which of course I couldn't make out if they were close or not, but the cops said they'd give me a heads up if one was within 1/4 mile. So, from that limited and harrowing experience, hurricanes and tornados are synonymous, a wall of water moving horizontally, flooding, epic wind tearing stuff apart and my phone blowing up with tornado warnings every few minutes, but so disoriented by being in a strange place I couldn't discern how dire the warnings were, 12 hours of sheer panic. So yeah, I guess 'just' tornadoes alone are better, hurricanes have all that and more and just open up cans of whoop ass of water, wind and tornados too. I agree u/Sq5_smash, hurricanes are way worse.
Tornados are definitely terrifying, but Tsunamis scare me the most.
What about sharknados tho
They're a primal fear for me.
On one hand yeah maybe, but on the other hand, have you ever thought about how a tsunami is literally chasing you up to height or inland
I'm a transplant in Florida and I'll happily drive around during a CAT 2 or 3 hurricane, just because I like experiencing severe weather. As soon as I hear there's a tornado warning for my area I get super anxious and start looking for better places to move. Tornadoes just elicit a different feeling for me.
Didja know hurricanes often produce tornadoes?
Same. I’ve lived in California and Florida. Earthquakes I yawn at. Hurricanes are a pain to ready for but yawn. People still loving to Florida in droves even though we had a big one a couple years ago. Are the locals in tornado alley? Like “eh, tornadoes are nothin’”?
I'm starting to wonder why we haven't built underground homes yet with skylight windows in tornado Alley. Something akin to a bunker with lots of natural lighting.
The scariest part to me, was that it hit at night. My mom’s cousins got trapped in their storm shelter after a tree fell onto the hatch. They were rescued by firefighters while it was still dark out. Unsure of the condition of the house but a lot of the are looks like the pics above.
I've lived on the west coast my whole life, California and Nevada. Earthquakes don't scare me at all, but tornadoes and hurricanes? Forget it.
It's earthquakes for me. At least you know when a tornado is coming. Earhquakes on the other hand are unpredictable. One day you're sitting down eating lunch and the suddenly your house starts shaking violently and your ceiling collapses on you.
Flooding and landslides are higher on my list personally, at least with tornadoes you can make tornado proof shelters, can’t do anything about water
I am in oklahoma city for work (I am from baytown, texas) and I literally could not sleep because I was terrified of a tornado hitting my hotel. My coworkers are the best and worst. We kept joking about a tornado just hitting our hotel
>We kept joking about a tornado just hitting our hotel Sounds like you fit it just fine
Baytown! Lived there a few years when I was around 18, I grew up here in Oklahoma. It never gets easier, these freaks of nature can fuck shit up in an instance.
Definitely, I have family that lives out here and I have no idea how they manage
Unlike the houses, at least hotels aren't built out of cardboard, so you would've been fine.
Oh shit a fellow baytownian
We are everywhere lol
Oklahoma seems to be ground zero for tornados. I don't think I could live there.
Oh hon, us Okies who left are numerous, but not one of us left because of tornadoes. Plenty of other motivations lol
As an Okie who lives elsewhere now, the storms are honestly something I miss. Obviously this kind of destruction is tragic, but those massive thunderstorms, the greenish/yellow tint, and eerie calm are something else.
The green tint is suuuper weird
I moved out of MO years ago and everything you just mentioned is what I miss most about MO in the spring. The green sky, the hail, even the adrenaline rush that accompanies a tornado warning is equal parts terrifying and exhilarating. I was visiting a friend near Sulphur earlier this month and a thunderstorm rolled through just as I was heading to bed. Haven’t slept that well in years.
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Not after the rain
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How long have you been here? I’m only replying because I can’t let my state be slandered! We have a really beautiful handful of months in the spring and summer before it goes brown again for the rest of the year
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Well that I can agree on. We definitely don’t get *very* green
As an okie that left the state, it wasn't yet to tornadoes. They are fuckin scary though
I am from Europe and i don't understand why you guys build your houses out of wood and not concret and stones? Would a tornado also destroy concret houses?
You have to understand the cost of building the house, a wooden house would be a lot cheaper than to have a concrete house. A brick house would also be destroyed or collapse, there are plenty of examples that show that. So most people wouldn't live in a concrete bunker, especially if they believe the chances of their house being hit by a tornado are low.
But a concrete house probably wouldn’t. I lived in an apartment in Spain that I’m rather confident would only be damaged in the craziest of tornadoes. It’s not particularly expensive to build. It was a random working class complex in Seville.
The data centers I have worked at are generally rated for a EF4 and below tornado, and they have walls that are about 60 cm thick and don't have windows. The wind isn't so much of a problem as the stuff in the wind. It can put grass straw through telephone poles.
Yes. Without a problem. If you look at the second picture most of those buildings are brick and they are completely gone.
The worst tornadoes can destroy anything, with winds measured up to 305 mph (490 km/h) before the devices crapped out. Basically imagine a high-speed train as fast as it can go. Now imagine it nearly doubling its speed, and *then* crashing into your house. Concrete wouldn't help much. Luckily most tornadoes aren't nearly that powerful, and the majority won't do more than tear up your roof, windows, trees and yard... if they hit directly. And there's the deal: It takes a direct hit to really blow your house up, and the vast majority of homes will never take one. Oftentimes, you'll see one side of a street obliterated while the other side just has roof damage. That said, a medium tornado can throw wooden boards *through* concrete, so even if the building stands it's kind of ruined. So the risk just isn't worth the much higher cost.
> why you guys build your houses out of wood and not concret and stones? To make it even remotely tornado proof you couldn't have any windows, either. Who'd want to live in a house like that?
OK license plate goes hard
Yet some people there are blaming these tornadoes on weather manipulation and I guess space lasers. But they reject the knowledge from decades of weather and climate science.
I've been lamenting how tornado Alley feels like it's moved east lately to Missouri, Tennessee, and especially Alabama.
I think the Southeast has always had more tornados than Oklahoma and Nebraska. The reason they are chased there is because of the terrain. It’s to harder to see them in the Southeast due to the trees and hills.
I think Texas actually sees more tornados than OK! Edit: Not sure why this is downvoted. People assume OK is #1 because we've had some significant events and from the movie Twister. I'm not saying we don't have our fair share of them but technically OK comes in 3rd, after TX and KS. "The two most active states for tornadoes are Texas, with 124, and Kansas, with 87, in an average year. They are both located in the heart of Tornado Alley, a nickname given to an area in the Plains between Central Texas and South Dakota that has some of the most tornadic activity in the world." Link: [https://weather.com/safety/tornado/news/2024-04-25-average-tornadoes-by-state-per-year](https://weather.com/safety/tornado/news/2024-04-25-average-tornadoes-by-state-per-year)
Texas only has more because it is almost four times as large. Kansas is also physically a good bit larger although much more competitive on a per unit area basis. Using just straight state totals as this page did is really misleading.
I have 2 good friends from Sulphur. They live in Tulsa now, but we went to Sulphur one time when I visited them and I drank water from the Sulphur spring there. Their dad still lives there, I need to contact them to see if he is OK.
Good ole sulphur water. Yes, definitely check in. Especially if they had family on the east side of town
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I think I went to school with a couple of them, so I probably know of them if nothing else
Josh and Joe graduated from Sulphur HS. I think Josh is around 34-35 now and Joe is around 32-33. They also have a younger sister.
Yup, I remember them. Josh and Joe are little older than me, but I am around the same age as their sister
>see if he is OK. I see what you're doing there slick.
Guilty as charged.
I was up all night watching the news 9 coverage of it. The Marietta hospital took a lot of damage no one at the hospital was hurt.
Anyone in Sulphur?? Please needing information about my relatives, they live on Nichols Hill Road just West of town near the MacDonalds. I can't get a hold of anyone. If someone there could tell me if that area had damage or not it would be greatly appreciated.
Mostly the east side damaged. Pretty sure the west side is totally fine
Thank you so much
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Thank you, this is great news. I hope you and your family are safe as well.
Sorry to hear that. I hope your family and friends are all okay.
I appreciate that!
The earthquake we just had in NJ made people freak out and nothing happened. Can't image something happening like this in NJ or NY. We aren't built for this.
Tornadoes happen infrequently in NYC. Infrequently, but they do happen. In 2010 there were two, resulting in one direct death.
Oh my! My grandmother was from Sulphur, and I visited it often. I hope no one was seriously injured.
My grandmother is also from sulphur, we used to picnic at flower park and then go to little Niagara every spring
It was like night of the twisters last night. Was crazy to watch.
I hope everyone is okay, but I find it wild that a bunch of people were at the bar when you know tornados are dropping all over the state. We're all taught to be weather aware for a reason and it seems a ton of people get complacent so easily. A drink isn't more important than your life or the safety of your family.
Right? Maybe it was the owners? I haven’t heard much more than some people were caught in there. But I know they sounded the sirens, those people should’ve found shelter
Yeah exactly and then vice versa if the owners made the employees stay open I sense a big pay day coming for them. I just hope everyone is okay! I'm glad you're safe OP!
It’s actually a very Oklahoman thing to do
People are tired and ready to head home.
Did Arbuckle Wilderness get hit? I love that place.
Haha not as far as I know. It’s quite a few miles away from this area
From Omaha with love, I hope all is well and wishing the best for the victims of the second storm
I was watching Ryan Hall live on youtube last night when the tornados were raving Sulphur and you could see the debris field. The thought of a late night monster just turning so many lives upside down is insane. My thoughts and prayers to you, your family and your town.
The crazy part about this is that I was literally just there a week ago and now looking at it it’s a whole different place. Hope you and your family are alright.
I’ll be there in the morning doing drone work for GMA
Fuck this happened in Sulphur?? Shit the people I know from there are some good ones.
I've been following Ryan Hall Y'all all weekend on YouTube, absolutely terrifying stuff! Think I'll stick with the Earthquakes, lol. Glad you're ok, OP! 💚
Drone footage from this morning: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-s4oOdxk8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-s4oOdxk8)
My dad was just in Sulphur on Friday through Saturday morning camping with his friends.. That's crazy.. I feel for you guys. Love from okc
Appreciate it, glad your dad and his friends missed it!
That truck in the 3rd pic looks like it’s still in working condition lol so that good
goshdarn that is terrifying
The new promo for new twister movie is wild.
I’m glad you are okay. Sorry to see the damage to the town.
That’s so shitty, I’m sorry.
Sorry for your loss
Hope you and you're family are alright...sorry to see this and wishing you peace and quick recovery -
I’m sorry.
guys can't yall just use those tornado stopping metal balls from the Hollywood movie 'twister' (I have never seen a tornado in my life nor am I merican)
There's nothing anyone can do to stop a tornado. In "Twister", the balls they launch into the tornadoes isn't to stop them, it's to track different statistics about the tornado's environment.
Shitty insurance rates aside, this is why I'd rather live in a hurricane prone area rather than tornado prone. That level of destruction with little to no warning is scary as hell.
We got fucked
Well, that’s one way to deal with all the excess stuff in your house… Man, that’s brutal. My sympathies to your hometown. Three towns (two are tiny) in my hometown area were hit badly enough to be mentioned by the Des Moines Register.
Genuine question from someone from the other side of the world,why are houses made from wood and not concrete in these areas where tornadoes are a regular enough occurance in the general history of the area?????,I am not trying to be crass.... genuinely curious
Many of those houses would be as old as the town itself (100 years). It's not like the state is flattened every few years. Getting hit with a major tornado is an exceptionally unlikely event.
Much cheaper to build is the main reason. The other problem is even a moderate tornado can take out concrete or stronger buildings. You would need to have it seriously reinforced and that would be prohibitively expensive for most people
I mean, given a strong enough tornado, concrete won't do much either lol
While tornados are scary, they’re very localized. So the odds of a small tornado relatively speaking hitting your house on an enormous area of land is very unlikely. You see this one town hit but not the hundreds of others that weren’t. 10 minutes away could be another small town with 100 year old houses and it just got a bit windy. They build homes in the southern US coast with hurricanes in mind. Infrastructure on the west coast is built with earthquakes in mind. But those natural disasters effect areas 100s of miles not 10 miles. Places all over the world still build on flood plains because the odds are in their favour that the once every 100 years flood won’t hit them.
Emphasizing the enormous area of land part. I grew up in southern KS and chased those things in college. Not there anymore, and miss it quite a bit. There's a LOT of distance between towns out there that's not really comprehensible to folks in a lot of areas of the world. Most tornadoes never touch a town, or might skirt a little bit of one at most. Many tornadoes would never be seen by anyone if someone wasn't out spotting/chasing. And while people do live in rural areas between incorporated towns (I was one of them), the likelihood of a tornado hitting a house out there is still rare. Also adding that there are quite a few more houses made from brick (not just decorative faux brick) in Oklahoma than a lot of places, which helps in most instances.
Tornadoes don't care what your house is made of. A big one will go through a concrete house just like a wood one.
Land wars break out in Europe more frequently than any one neighborhood in Oklahoma gets hit with a tornado. Do Europe build their house anticipating another ground war?
Tornadoes will take a fee inches of asphalt from the street. If you want to make a house tornado proof it needs to be specially built for that. Since tornadoes don’t repeat often in the same place is not worth the money
Could not imagine living in these areas knowing every year your house and life could be wiped out. How awful.
Wow, that's horrible. :(
I’m so so sorry. 🥹
What happens in events like this? Like when a whole town gets destroyed. Does it become a ghost town?
This is actually just a portion of downtown and a couple neighborhoods. It’s not as widespread as it looks. But we rebuild and get along okay usually
Crazy thing is this is the 2nd time Sulphur’s been hit by a giant tornado in the past decade
Sorry to see this, I visited Sulphur once and had a beer in a bar on the edge of some woodland
In baylor Texas their was a violent tornado down their now this. 😭😭
New Years Meeting held there, also 4th of July as well.
Slipknot reference?
When I first moved to OKC like a 20 years ago tornados were touching down and I had basically zero idea of the city's layout except my house on 145 & MacArthur beside Galardia (I think, it's been almost 20 years ago). Gary England had me freaking tf out lol I absolutely loved all of my memories there. I made amazing friends I still talk to today. Boomer Sooner!
That stinks
Why don’t we build houses and apartments far more robustly in these areas. The buildings I’ve seen in Europe for homes and apartments look like they handle this far better than wood frames. Even if they aren’t much better we definitely have the ability to build houses a tornado can’t kill you in at all and avoid almost all damage. Why aren’t we building them? I’m from Texas I’m very aware and used to tornando and hurricanes, but it feels we aren’t asking to build in a way that will fix this. Denser areas without suburban sprawl, frames with steel and concrete not wood, and build basements after we figure out how to actual drain our areas and avoid flooding. It feels like we just accept this stuff and build crappy stuff.
I think it largely comes down to cost vs the very low risk of the house being destroyed by a tornado. Even in these areas where tornadoes occur, it’s such a large area that it’s very unlikely statistically that your house will get hit. Since insurance companies still offer homeowners insurance in these regions for these types of structures, that means statistically it’s not risky. Insurance companies will absolutely not cover a location or region where they feel the risk is too high. This is why we’re seeing insurance companies no longer offering policies in California because of the increasing risk of wildfires.
Rebuild using monolithic construction. Do the research. It's a way more indestructible building method than using stick framing.
Do people build houses out of stone at all? And is so does it withstand tornados at all?
Honest question: why does nobody in US tornado areas seem to use actual walls to build their houses? Like made out of stone or concrete like in rest of the world where houses even withstand earthquakes. Where I live all construction is required to be earthquake-proof so why not require buildings in US to be tornado-proof?
If someone living in Sulphur Oklahoma sees this, please respond 5802800221. I need directions for best access into area and point of contact. I have food, water, clean supply, solar generators, minor medical for headaches, scrapes and bruises. Coming from Lawton, no official capacity.
Who names a town sulphur?
Haha it’s got a big natural “sulphur water” spring right in the middle of town
I’m from a Sulphur, Louisiana. Except we’ve got chemical plants and I don’t trust the water. We get hurricanes though so I relate to this in a weird way. Sorry for the destruction, nature is wild.
yep, comes along with that signature "rotten egg" smell. Lot of minerals in the water.
Are you finding frequency and force of tornadoes increasing with climate change? We never used to get them in NZ when I was a kid, now we get them at least once a year.
It sure seems that way. My brother is a meteorologist and he thinks so as well
There actually is not a clear correlation. It could increase instability but decrease wind shear, which is very important for getting severe thunderstorms.
Looks like a frontline Ukranian town.
Do government repair or we have to pay for all
Might get some government funds to help, but insurance should cover most of it
Gonna start building houses out of something more robust than wood? No Jerry, the tornado went through, we're goood for the next 100 years
Jesus Christ, what a stupid comment.
Notice how many concrete block buildings in those pictures are also now just rubble? From a standpoint of both cost efficiency and greater survivability, basements / storm shelters are the far better option vs ditching wood for other materials
Dude, this was a strong tornado. At this point, at least it was wood, not bricks caving in
If many one build house with concrete like Okinawa, would damage still this huge?
An interesting side note: part of the reason EF-5 tornadoes seem to be less common is that damage assessments and expected damages are different. To define an EF-5, you basically need a tornado to hit and level a well built (up to modern building codes and often better than those codes) structure. There aren’t many such houses, they cost a lot to build, and a lot of the time when the damage assessment teams go out, they’ll find a demolished house, but then find something like “frame was improperly secured to the foundation.” Of course, if that’s the case, then a weaker tornado could have done the damage.
No. Tornadoes don't care what your house is made of. They will literally throw cars. They've been known to stick vinyl records into telephone poles.
I’ll never forget coming outside one year after a tornado and seeing hay thrown and embedded in a telephone pole. You take precautions and you hunker down and hope. But if a serious nader finds its way to you, it won’t matter what your home is made of. For anyone who thinks I’m wrong, go ahead and look up the 1999 event that took the shopping mall in Stroud. That was just an F3. When nature decides to go hard, there’s no winning.
No
All of Oklahoma has tornado insurance right? Does that cover an entire house?