Obligatory Ron White quote in response to IIRC someone who wanted to be a storm chaser:
"It’s not that the wind is blowin’ … it’s what the wind is blowin.’ "
When the tornadoes blew through Tuscaloosa last month, I heard an interview with a man (from the hospital) whose house had essentially been ripped apart and blown away from around his family. He and his wife were holding two of their children but the third child was sucked up into the tornado when the wall of the house blew away. A few minutes later, the son came walking back, and said later the wind had just set him down gently in the neighbor’s yard.
People in interior rooms and basements have often survived extremely strong tornadoes. It certainly does matter where you hide. Though if your point is that in an EF-4 or EF-5 tornado it doesn’t much matter where you hide outside, you may have a point.
Tornadoes destroy only that upon which they exert force. They have these solid-construction “tornado bunkers” that you can buy that you then have sunk several feet under the earth in your yard. The reason you are virtually guaranteed survival inside of it is because it is 100% below the plain of the earth and thus none of the immense force of the tornado’s winds act upon it, and because it is underground you will not be susceptible to debris.
Such a solution is safer than a basement because the extensive damage to the house above a basement can cause things like the house to collapse down into the basement and kill anyone underneath. Although basements seem to typically be safest if you have to stay inside a house proper.
No. No human can hold onto a tree trunk with 200+ mph winds trying to rip him off of it. People have tried holding onto doors and such to avoid being sucked out of a building hit by a tornado–it doesn’t work. You would have to be superhuman.
Not that it makes it a good idea, but it seems possible to me.
Terminal velocity for a person is around 120mph. Following that the force of 200mph winds would be no more than 2gs which a person should be able overcome while clinging to a tree trunk.
Flying debris would still be deadly and I imagine grabbing on to a tree would only increase your exposure to it versus lying flat.
Curiosity question.
If you were in your car, and couldn’t get to safety, would you be better off staying in the car, and hoping to ride it out, or exiting the car and hiding in a low spot besides the road?
Get out of the car to reduce your wind exposure.
This agrees with the advice given by the NWS in the slide show linked up-thread.
Do tornadoes backtrack?
Tornadoes travel around 30-40 MPH; keep driving at right angles to its’ path. If it comes down to a matter of seconds, get out of the car and get as low as possible.
Rarely, but yes, sometimes.
From http://www.wunderground.com/resources/education/tornadoFAQ.asp:
Also, regarding driving at 90 degrees to the tornado, there’s some more info on that here. (In a nutshell: Can be done, but be careful.)
What do g’s have to do with wind force? They involve two different circumstances (force/area vs. acceleration). The force of wind increases as a square of velocity as opposed to linearly. Let’s try something conventional: Stick your hand out of a car window at 60 mph, assume five pounds of force. At 200 mph, that would now be 55 pounds–a ten fold increase. So assume assume you hold onto a tree with winds of 60 mph with a force of 20 pounds…@200 mph? Nope.
The real issue with trying to hold onto a tree is that you’ll be upright. As such you’ll be in the debris field.
Even assuming you’ve magically got the strength to hold onto this wildly bucking tree, you’ll be doing it while being pummelled with 150-200mph pieces of roof, cars, tree limbs, dirt, rocks & stuff. In short, you’ll be impaled by something big and then sand-blasted into just a messy hunk-o-meat in a few seconds.
Laying in the fairly narrow drainage ditch alongside the road, 2 or 3 feet below the surrounding surface, virtually all the debris will pass over you. As will most of the wind strength while it’s not parallel to the ditch.
The key thing to understand is that you’re *not *trying to avoid being “sucked up”. You’re trying to avoid being blown away horizontally and also trying to avoid being hit by horizontally-blowing debris. The vast majority of the footprint of a tornado is horizontal flow, not vertical.
If the rotating tornadic circulation passes over you, then it doesn’t matter which side of something you try to hide behind, it’ll be the wrong side for at least part of the encounter. And if the rotating tornadic circulation doesn’t pass over you, then all you’re dealing with is a plain old thunderstorm with rain & wind & probably hail. The poor guy 200 yards away may be dealing with a tornado, but you aren’t.
It is possible to go all the way up into the clouds. A bit unlikely, but certainly possible.
Over the past few days I have read a variety of stories on the tornado and seen video. After (an admittedly) brief search I cannot find cites but will try again if people want.
After the Joplin tornado some guys were driving through the blasted area and the guy video taping noted in awe, more than once, that the trees were stripped of their bark (no leaves or anything else either). Here is a blurry picture as an example (not sure what tornado did this).
Here is another picture of a chair embedded in (what looks to me) a concrete wall (this is supposedly from the Joplin tornado).
Another account from a recent (not Joplin) tornado had a guy describing hiding in his closet in his apartment (University of Alabama) when the wall was torn off his apartment and he was flung outside. In a moment of calm in the middle of the tornado he spots a mother trying to protect her young child and he runs over and covers them with his body when the eye of the tornado moves away and they are in the wind again. I wish I could find his write up from his hospital bed as it is very compelling. Apparently he got all manner of stuff embedded in his back including a Bic pen in his side. His clothes were completely (or near enough) torn off.
That said, as mentioned above, there are the occasional stories of someone getting scooped up by a tornado and deposited some distance away unharmed. I do not believe in miracles but that is miraculous. IIRC some woman lost her small dog to a tornado. Apparently the dog was found 15 miles away unharmed. Once in awhile tornadoes will “skip” and lift off the ground momentarily. I have seen pictures of subdivisions devastated like a bomb went off with one house left standing and looking almost untouched.
Tornadoes are weird and fickle things but they are exceptionally dangerous. Get underground or to the lowest spot possible. I would not want to be hanging onto a tree like the one in the picture above. You could be sandblasted alive.
I think this is it.