Tornado Alley

Anyone here live in that region of the country?

Some pretty crappy weather they've been getting slammed with.

Yep. The weather's not too bad though. Just light rain now.

You guys doing okay there?

I used to live there. Does that count?

How well do basements protect against that kind of damage?

Depends on how strong the storm is, and if there's any flooding or heavy rains involved.

A flooded basement might keep you from getting torn apart by the wind, but won't do anything to keep you from frying when the wind knocks a power line into the water, for example. There's also been cases of debris getting knocked into basements and killing or trapping people.

But on average, a basement is far better than being above surface. Failing that, an interior room with no windows is your best bet.

^ Interior bathroom bathtub. Usually bolted to the floor so not easy to cart off via wind, and it has walls surrounding it so it protects from lateral winds and debris.

Ideally however you want a tornado shelter like you see in the movie Twister. (Those actually exist and are extremely common on the Great Plains. I've seen several of them myself near the town of Lamar in Colorado.)

Failing the bathroom, pick a closet on the inside of the house. Failing that...get under your bed. Failing that...damn, get a new house or something.

I was considering making this thread myself.

I do not live there, but do have a question—does the size of a tornado's funnel have much influence on how damaging it is?

I don't think so, I believe it can go either way, as Tornadoes can come in a variety of configurations.

^^ The rule of thumb is the wider the tornado the stronger the wind.

Ah, that makes sense to me; I may suck at climatology, but I am interested and have read a little, especially about hazards. I guess the big wedge tornadoes don't look like dusty eldritch abominations◊ for nothing.

edited 29th Apr '11 2:45:47 AM by SPACETRAVEL

Don't live there but I am going there specifically to stormchase in a few weeks. Though the weather where I live has given Tornado Alley a run for its money this spring. Dixie Alley at its finest/worst.

We had quite a few tornadoes here in the Midwest (Minnesota and North Dakota mainly) last year that wiped out a good third of the town of Wadena, Minnesota, along with its high school. No one got killed in town, but 3 people got killed elsewhere in Minnesota.

My heart goes out to those of you in the Southeast.

I live in tornadoe alley. Doing ok. No Nadoes in my state just yet.

I live in the Midwest. Although I hadn't been really near one, some of my family members had close calls. One was actually caught in the tornado (but not in the vortex) while another one had a tornado graze the top of her neighborhood.

Living in Macon. Got lot of warnings. Nothing happened. Unfortunately, where I live is RIGHT BESIDE THE TORNADO ALARM and thus I wanted to destroy it. With a bb gun. Or perhaps a MOAB. You must understand my hate when the thing makes a deafening sound thirty feet away.

Being somewhat of a recovered siren nerd (yes, we exist) and previously having spent about as much time on what is most likely the internet's only siren forum as I do here before I discovered this place...your statement still makes part of me cringe slightly. And want to know what kind of siren it is.

But never mind that. It sucks that you have to live that close to it. But you would concede that it's still better to have than to not, right?

edited 29th Apr '11 10:15:15 PM by frog753

Central Arkansas looks like crap right now, but it's not as bad as, say Katrina. Vilonia was hit particularly hard, and I could hear the warning sirens going off for about two hours or so. Apparently, we have a third set of storms coming in next week.

There's been some flooding over here and of course, Lambert Field three hours away got hit by a tornado. But today it was nice out.

The weather can be completely and utterly psychotic here (some years, there will be a really bad snow or ice storm and then a few months later the temperature will be in the triple digits).

Okay, I have to defend the tornado sirens. I know they can be aggravating, but they saved my life on May 22. I'm in Joplin, and we were slammed by an EF 5. I had no idea there was going to be any trouble until the sirens sounded. Then I turned on the TV to verify the threat. The cable went out, the power went out, and then we heard the roar. We got in our basement, hunkered down in a closet, and survived. We never saw a funnel cloud, because it was so wide it looked like a black wall or cloud and it was obscured by rain. I'd rather have a 100 false alarms than not be warned of what happened that night.

I'm in Omaha, which is in Tornado Alley, and I've never seen a tornado, though our weather is pretty intense in most of the other ways.