Front page CNN right now:
more than one can drop from the same cell. So, kinda.
I know all the current advice is to avoid bridges but I rode out a fairly aggressive thunderstorm under a coal rail car and then a bridge. This was a serious hail flinging straight line wind storm. I wouldn’t park under a bridge but I found protection on the windward side steel “I” beam way up in the corner. Granted winds were in the 50 to 80 mph range but the bridge did a nice job. Thispicture shows a ton of mud thrown under the bridge but it doesn’t show the reverse side of the “I” beam. Hard for me to say it was protection in this instance.
i’ve a feeling a tornado in the open prairie will be a little more pleasant that one in a town or even a block of houses. one survivor (reader’s digest.) went up in the funnel. he woke up on the ground wrapped in barbed wire and punctured all over with glass and wood splinters.
The power of these things is amazing. Here’s a video of a tornado derailing a moving train (and trains cars are much heavier than automobiles): - YouTube
Mark Bridges, the county coroner quoted in the article, was interviewed on CNN today. He talked about how bodies aren’t all in morgues – they’re in body bags in trucks. He said that was making it difficult for people searching for their loved ones, and that they were asking family members for descriptive information, tattoos and the like.
The guy looked like he was barely holding it together. I felt so sorry for him. They interviewed another emergency worker (fire or police, not sure) who had the same wild look in his eyes. They both looked shell-shocked. How do people recover from something like this?
If you notice the train stopped on a bridge. I think it was the wall of the bridge that kept the first car close to the cab.
What freaked me out was after the derailment (of what looks like a few cars in the middle), the engine stops and you can see something murky rapidly approaching the engine…and its the rest of the train, careening towards the stopped engine with a tanker car in front!
I was like :eek:
I have a related question WRT trains and tornadoes: what is the SOP when a train is approaching a tornado? Just keep going like the one in the video and hope for the best? Try to stop? Its not like the train can take evasive action.
Most windows aren’t big enough to let a cadillac through and anything else would smash through the glass, so isn’t that advice more about not getting hit by flying glass? Boarding up the windows or having strong shutters on them would be better than either, but failing that?
stopping would seem the logical solution. Better to have part of a train pushed over rather than a 50 mph pile up.
In the video the train must have been in the process of stopping when all this happened. If not the tanker that hit the engine would probably have ruptured.