chaos
Buzzfeed Editor
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CNN is saying 51 confirmed, still only the 7 kids in the school. But it's CNN so... you know.
Weather
- Thread starter etoille
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Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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I live in Ft. Lauderdale, FL and about a month ago a small tornado touched down in my backyard and ripped the door off my shed and moved a 150 lb bench across the porch. It was rather awesome, as you almost never see any tornadoes, but that's about as epic as they get here. The pictures from OK today are terrible. Body count just keeps rising.
OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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Missed my house (SE Moore) by less than a half mile. Neighborhoods to the North of mine are levelled. Park that I run at completely destroyed.
LiquidDeath
Magnus Deadlift the Fucktiger
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Missed my house by about a mile and a half to the south. The only way to survive tornadoes like this are to be underground if it goes over you. Or get extremely lucky.
Posting on your cellphone or did you luck out with power/internet too?
Edit: same question to liquiddeath
Fuse
Silver Knight of the Realm
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Sounds like you pretty much need to be underground to survive a direct hit from this strong of a tornado.
Also sounds like 7 of the kids that died at the school might have drowned in a basement, so I don't know.
I wasn't aware that Oklahoma was built on bedrock and that's why there aren't many basements there. Growing up in Wisconsin I remember eating plenty of meals in our basement during tornado warnings. Was lucky enough to never find out what happens if our house got hit.
Also sounds like 7 of the kids that died at the school might have drowned in a basement, so I don't know.
I wasn't aware that Oklahoma was built on bedrock and that's why there aren't many basements there. Growing up in Wisconsin I remember eating plenty of meals in our basement during tornado warnings. Was lucky enough to never find out what happens if our house got hit.
LiquidDeath
Magnus Deadlift the Fucktiger
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Funny shit here. My house is in a neighborhood that was demolished by the 2003 tornado. During the rebuild they buried all the utility lines to weather-proof them. I haven't lost power for more than a half hour during a single major weather event since I've lived here. I had a single power blip today but nothing major even though I could see the tornado from my house.
Go fuck yourself.
chaos
Buzzfeed Editor
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It's also a regional thing. That whole region, bedrock or not, basements are very rare. I was in a house in Lubbock as a kid that was hit, it even had a storm cellar, but of course we didn't have time and we ended up in the tub with a mattress over us. Crazy terrifying.
OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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LiquidDeath is my twin bro. It took me 3 hours to get 5 miles to my house, pick up my dogs and some clothes, and 2 more hours to get 4 miles to his place.
Qhue
Tranny Chaser
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Has anyone considered the correlation of the windspeed vectors for this storm in Moore (and hence relative helicity) with the local topography? A quick review of the topographical map of Oklahoma shows that it is relatively flat with the exception of a steady downward gradient from west to east coming down from the Rockies.
Could a near perfect alignment of gradually downsloping topography with the helicity axis be the root cause of tornadic activity that is very strong before it achieves significant net vertical vorticity? Thus allowing it to become a 'tornado' before the downdraft has tightened and focused the width of the base?
Is it possible that the width of a devastating funnel like this could come down to something as simple as a vector product between wind sheer and topographical vectors?
Could a near perfect alignment of gradually downsloping topography with the helicity axis be the root cause of tornadic activity that is very strong before it achieves significant net vertical vorticity? Thus allowing it to become a 'tornado' before the downdraft has tightened and focused the width of the base?
Is it possible that the width of a devastating funnel like this could come down to something as simple as a vector product between wind sheer and topographical vectors?
Borzak
Bronze Baron of the Realm
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Not sure about OK but not far away in North TX they have a soil type called "shrink swell clays" which is a clay soil that dries out in the summer and gets huge cracks in it up to a foot wide (most smaller) and it literally destroys slabs and anything put into the ground. Many houses have a soaker system around the outside of the slab to keep the clay wet. Then when it gets wet after being dry it swells up again and breaks everything all over again which is why they can't put anything like a basement in that part of the world.
OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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If you don't live here it is hard to explain the attitude about tornados. They are so fast, violent, and (usually) small that you go through 10+ of the warnings a spring that they tell you are going to be bad and they turn out to be duds. When one hits a town over everyone talks about getting an in-ground shelter but it doesn't seem like a priority because it never hits close to you. It sounds dumb but tornado season is only 8-10 weeks out of 52 so it just becomes out of sight, out of mind. Luckily my Canadian wife talked me into getting one last year.
Are you factoring in how elevation above sea level affects air pressures within a storm system Qhue?
OUAriakas and LiquidDeath, did either of you hear the local meteorologist tracking the storm tell people to get in their cars and drive away from the storm? The basis being given for the extreme advice is that there are few underground shelters and that the storm had built to an intensity above what the average shelter could take. Are the news stations making a hub-bub about this or is this semi normal advice due to no basements? I've lived in Kansas for 32 of my 37 years and have had my fair share of tornado fun ranging from "oh look, there goes a tornado" to "hope the 15 freight trains having a party 2 blocks over miss us." I don't know if it's the "normalcy" of tornado's or the fact that I can get underground when shit goes sideways, but if I heard the weather guy say get in your car and drive away instead of hunkering down the automatic sphincter lock would disengage.
OU Ariakas
Diet Dr. Pepper Enjoyer
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They are really good at giving the correct instructions for the intensity of the tornado. Today they repeatedly said that if you are not underground than you are dead and if you didn't have access to an in-ground shelter then your best bet was to drive either North or South away from it. When they say that you know shit just got real.
I really don't know how you people can live there and deal with that shit. The severity and randomness of it would kill me.
I'm down in FL, get 3-5 days notice on the hurricane, intensity, path and all that. Plenty of time to secure the house or get the fuck out of dodge should need be. Sure huge swath of lesser destruction if its a bad storm but few people die. Most years there is nothing.
Fuck me an f4 or f5 touches down and you're pretty much dead or fucked up if its near you. 2 miles wide of just pure destruction and its so random where it will be or what it will hit. Not sure I could handle that.
Earthquakes well shit, ground isn't supposed to shake. There are some really big faults long overdue in the NE as well. Cali might not be the next place there is a "big" one.
I'll stick with my hurricanes thank you.
I'm down in FL, get 3-5 days notice on the hurricane, intensity, path and all that. Plenty of time to secure the house or get the fuck out of dodge should need be. Sure huge swath of lesser destruction if its a bad storm but few people die. Most years there is nothing.
Fuck me an f4 or f5 touches down and you're pretty much dead or fucked up if its near you. 2 miles wide of just pure destruction and its so random where it will be or what it will hit. Not sure I could handle that.
Earthquakes well shit, ground isn't supposed to shake. There are some really big faults long overdue in the NE as well. Cali might not be the next place there is a "big" one.
I'll stick with my hurricanes thank you.
Wow, makes sense but hard to process, must be the "have a basement" mentality. Ya'll take care, hopefully the last couple days have been the main event for this season.
Alex
Still a Music Elitist
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Worst tornado I ever experienced was an F3. I remember leaving my grandparent's house and seeing a pickup truck wrapped around a tree across the street. I couldn't even imagine facing an F5. Hard to believe the same place has been hit like this three times in the past 15 years.