Storm Chaser: we gon get the upskirt picture of tornado 👌
We’re not close enough until I can feed it popcorn.
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
Yeah there’s no way the dude above you is right.
Seeing the inside of a tornado sounds way cooler than going to work for another 30-40 years anyway.
“Look, a cow! Look, another one!”
“I think that’s the same cow!”
Nah, cows can’t move that fast.
They can’t fly either…
I was referring to this scene:
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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!
There’s also the county fair.
And occasionally a tornado passes by the county fair.
Yeah, their front porches. Shelter is literally 5 steps away.
You guys just aren’t as fun as us
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…”
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
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.
I expect that almost makes up for living in a dystopian shitehole
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 lived through Hurricane Hugo. Before it came about, most people didn’t worry about tornadoes much in my area when there was a watch. More people took warnings seriously but a significant amount of people would “know the signs” and go about their day anyway. Hugo hit and devastated everything. Trees through houses and everything. It is hard to describe in a small sentence how much the wooded landscape changed for over a decade but it was common for trees to just be laying down everywhere in the woods. It was now common trails were cut through swathes of logs.
For a time after people would take tornadoes seriously again. Slowly but surely though, you’d see that neighbor that never mows their lawn think the best time to finally do it is when there’s a tornado that touched down near just to show they can defy it. Driving during warnings is one of the worst things you can do because the roads are static and traffic won’t just abide for only you. The road doesn’t just stay clear of obstructions from trees, powerline poles, fences, etc. You can very easily become trapped very quickly.
I think like anything else when people deal with tornadoes regularly, they become complacent. People think about them like they can just see them a bit off and have time but tornadoes will hop around or form just wherever very quickly. Some people’s attitudes become “this happens every year and I survive around 15 tornadoes a year and it doesn’t really effect me much personally, so it’s no big deal really. You just have to know what you’re doing.” when it was just luck all along.
Time to start a beer company called Shelter
As a siren enthusiast, I know several other enthusiasts who have deliberately gone out during tornado warnings to go film the sirens. I can’t imagine going out in such high winds and rain to do that, but some people are really, really dedicated. I prefer waiting for the weekly/monthly tests.
Tornado sirens are. The. Most. Unsettling. Noise humanity can make (while chewing with its mouth closed at least).
Chicago’s siren makes me feel like an inconsolably terrified and food-poisoned 4-year-old, kidnapped to another planet.
Ah yes, the good ol’ Chicago Modulators. Sadly they don’t use that creepy “alternate wail” signal anymore. They just use the regular “wail” signal which isn’t as haunting.
How do you film a siren? It’s not like it does anything besides make noise, couldn’t you just record the audio from a distance?
Point a camera with a good mic at it, and bam. And yes, you certainly can get audio recordings. Many enthusiasts will set down an audio recorder near a group of sirens in order to get ambience recordings of the system, along with filming a specific siren during a test.
No point taking shelter when your house is made of plywood.
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.
Make sure to secure your pets somewhere safe before you head out to the porch.
I’m laughing along, but I have also literally been given this exact advice as a reminder.
