Someone may have already mentioned this and I missed it (I swear I read the whole thread) but whatever you do, stay out of cars when tornadoes are near! We had a warning a couple of weeks ago and my friend’s neighbor wanted to get in a car and try to drive away from the storm. :eek: That’s the worst possible thing you could do, but he wasn’t used to that type of weather and had no idea what to do. She kindly advised him that they would go to the basement instead (their apartment building has a basement) and would be much safer there.
Incidentally, that weekend my husband was out of town and the same friend I mentioned above and I were planning on having a girls’ night out. It was about 6:30 and I was having a bite to eat and watching some random movie on TV before getting ready to do. Suddenly the sirens went off and it totally caught me off guard. There had been no tornado watch so it was completely unexpected. Idiot that I am, I thought, “Is it Wednesday?” (Our town tests every Wednesday at 1 p.m.) Then the warning scrawled across the TV screen and my reaction was, “… the hell!!!” I spent the next few minutes herding cats into the basement, bringing my hanging plants indoors, running out to the alley to see what I could see, and answering the phone. That’s the best part of tornado sirens: everyone calls to ask if you’re in the basement yet. My answer is always, “I’m trying, but I have to keep answering this damn phone!” I never did make it to the basement; turns out they were just cold air funnels and never got close to touching down. It did amaze me how unprepared I felt because there was no watch. Normally I’m very level-headed in those situations. I’ve been meaning to start a “Tell me your tornado stories” thread since but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Actually, I bet the worst possible thing you could do is run toward the tornado carrying a hang glider, but your point is taken. 
I’d say that depends. In '95 an F4 tornado formed about 1/4 mile away from our office and was headed straight for us. I hopped in my car and drove a little way away from it and watched it do $30 million damage. It missed our office by about 100 yards, but when it started out it looked like there was no way it would miss us. My car was parked about 20 feet from where I was watching the tornado form and can do more than 100 mph. Most tornados don’t travel across the ground at 100 mph. You’ll never convince me that driving away from an approaching tornado is “the worst possible thing you could do”, and we get plenty of the damn things around here.
Despite doing heavy damage to the industrial park section of town, in the middle of the afternoon, there were no fatalities. The reason? People got in their cars and left the area in the path of the tornado. Many businesses were reduced to bare slabs, no building left at all. I saw it, close up, and hunkering down in a bathtub with a mattress on you would have offered absolutely zero chance of survival. None.
ETA: My advice if you see a tornado coming? Get pics/vids. We had a video camera in the office and I could have taken some amazing tornado footage. Never crossed my mind, I was getting the hell out of there. Oh, and get the hell out of there.
Missed the time with one parting thought. Obviously if the roads are packed, you don’t want to get in a car. This is not a heavily populated place, getting away is pretty easy. If you have a shelter, that’s better of course. One guy that survived a direct hit from this tornado was in his cellar. It sucked the door off his cellar and sucked his dog out of the cellar, but he did survive. There was nothing left on his entire property. No house, no business, no trace of either. He had a motorhome that was crushed like a beer can and was not found on his property.
When I was very young, my family moved to a part of MO where there were a lot of warnings. At first my mother used to take us all down to the basement. I remember eating dinner in front of a little TV, so we could watch the weather.
By the time I was a little older, we pretty much ignored them. Unless the weather was really bad, in which case we might go outside to see if we could spot a funnel cloud.
I did see one, once, but it didn’t touch the ground.
WhyNot’s advice of “Go out on the front porch and watch!” really isn’t that bad - just don’t be stupid about it.
I compare tornado warnings to west coast earthquakes: A tremble occurs and long-time residents continue drinking their coffee while visitors scramble under the table.
A tornado watch means that the weather is conducive to tornado formation. That’s it.
Unfortunately, a tornado warning does NOT mean that a tornado is bearing down on your home, and I doubt we’ll ever have the technology to predict that. In years past a tornado warning meant that someone saw a funnel cloud and called up the local radio station… These days it means that Doppler radar has seen a particular weather pattern - a hook - which indicates TORNADO HERE NOW but rarely indicates an actual tornado on the ground.
If you are new to a tornado area you’ll do what the locals do - you’ll have some flashlights on hand (with dead batteries) or candles (but no matches) and, when the warning is issued, you’ll hover between the the television and the windows (searching for funnel clouds) and the basement door.
I don’t by any stretch mean to downplay the severity of bad weather and the necessity of taking practical precautions to protect yourself but, frankly, the odds of you dying of congestive heart failure are significantly higher.
Yeah, it works much better to use a semi-tractor. A guy I know at work did that during the Nov. 12 tornado. He had just finished a trip hauling stuff in a semi and was putting his stuff in his pick up when the tornado showed up. He didn’t think he could get away, so he got into the cab of the semi, belted up and held on. When it was over he was uninjured, the cab was sideways on the ground, and his pickup was kind of wrapped up in the trailer of the semi. He was parked behind the flattened building on the left in this picture.
Anecdote: I lived in an apartment when an extremely sudden and violent storm hit. The air pressure dropped so fast that the hallway had a totally different air pressure than inside the apartment - the result was that the suction was so strong that I couldn’t open the door to get to safer parts of the building, even putting my whole weight into it.
I can’t remember, though, if I had windows open at the time or not - the door opened inwards, and the hall was sucking against the door - meaning either the pressure in the apartment was raised very quickly, or the pressure in the hallway dropped very quickly. Which is more likely?