Hey, remember that scene in TWOO where Dorothy gets home just as Auntie Em and Uncle Henry have gone into the storm cellar and closed and locked the hatch?
Why is that hatch outside the house? (Seems to be a typical design, too, from other pictures I’ve seen.) If the entrance to the storm cellar were inside the house, they wouldn’t need to lock it right away – not until they hear the house coming apart – and a latecomer could still get to safety.
That’s a very interesting question, Brain Glutton. I’ve also seen storm shelters with doors like that one, that did go under the house, but you had to leave the house to get to them.
I wonder if some historian can come up with the rationale behind those seperate shelters.
If the house falls down on top of your shelter hatch, your tornado shelter becomes a means to shelter you from food, water, and medical assistance.
How come the media never talks about the eight million self-defense uses of tornadoes in the past six months?
How is the movie’s “cyclone cellar” different from a standard old-fashioned cellar with an external door but no internal entrance? The house I lived in for all of my childhood had one of those: near-horizontal wooden double doors covering a staircase from outdoors into the cellar, but no cellar entrance from inside the house.
Anyway, the book version says that Dorothy’s family’s cyclone cellar entrance is inside the house:
Times like this is when you find Americans at their most emotional. Its not necessarily when they make the best decisions, remember 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq?
And would you be willing to violate some constitutional rights to achieve that goal? Lets say that we have a study and we decide that the best way to prevent more tornado deaths is to just confiscate the homes in tornado alley and prohibit people from stepping foot inside tornado alley. Would you be OK with that if I could prove that it would reduce tornado deaths?
The OP is just a silly comparison.
Are you under the impression that people were buying assault weapons because they wanted to have a gun just like the one that killed all those kids? Then you really don’t understand very much about the gun debate and your approach seems more geared towards vilifying your opponents than applying logic.
When we banned assault weapons the first time around, I know people that made hundreds of thousands of dollars by owning some of the banned weapons. The supply of these weapons suddenly became limited and prices skyrocketed
It was the centerpeice.
Did you make your senators aware of this? Did you call Obama and Feinstein and your state senators to let them know how stupid the AWB is?
I did. I called my senators, I called my congressman, I call Feinstein, I called the white house and told them I was a democrat, that I had voted for all of them (I voted for Feinstein back when she ran for governor) and that they were making a mistake with the AWB. Did you do do this or were you perfectly willing to go along with this stupid idea?
Some, not all. Remember that the Manchin Toomey bill were sponsored by two senators that by all accounts are gun nuts.
Why is everyone blaming this on climate change, when its clearly a reaction to the AWB?
The conspiracy nuts were blaming the government (“obviously HAARP related”) almost immediately after the news broke.
The real problem is laws that prevent law-abiding citizens from owning guns that protect them from tornadoes. By shooting them to death in self-defense.
Which is why we need the extra-capacity magazines! If you think just one bullet is gonna stop a tornado, you’re crazy!
Ok, we need to ban water from basements too.
Only two things come from Oklahoma: steers and queers. I don’t know about cattle, but the meteorological effects of queers are well established.
Probably because if you put the entrance and staircase in the house, you take up valuable floor space. It’s like garages and carriage houses were always built as detached buildings-- they weren’t meant to be accessed from inside the house. And if they’re just dirt floor, unfinished walls, you’d get all kinds of critters having access to your house, too.
Bill Kurtis is great and heading for godhood playing backup quarterback for Carl Kassell on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. [/hijack]
I blame the Storm Chasers.
Maybe, just maybe, if every yahoo with a SUV and [del]a 100 Grand of electronic equipment[/del]a laptop and a wireless connection wasn’t chasing these Godless storms, they wouldn’t feel the need to attack defenseless Elementary Schools.
Sheriff Arpaio just shoved an entire tornado up his ass and he liked it.
No, it was just an accident while he was playing Twister.
I’m convinced Dianne Feinstein is to blame here somehow.
I would think crumbly, shifting soils would make houses and larger buildings in general difficult to build.
FWIW, my aunt and late uncle’s house, which is about a Frisbee throw* from the OK line in south central Kansas, has a basement.
*OK, maybe an Aerobie throw.
He’s right, you know! Because Oklahoma is filled with God-fearing Republicans who don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. (There’s your earworm for the day. :)) And the NY/NJ area is filled with liberals, atheists, college professors, druggies, and people with the wrong color of skin.
Totally different.