I know. I’ve often wondered that myself. Even an small tornado can destroy a trailer. Some of the “upscale?” mobile home parks here have a central shelter since the 99 F5 (OKC), but most parks or stand alone trailer homes aren’t that well provided for, if at all.
I wouldn’t live in one in this state. I’m not sure how much could be done, tho.
Rather than moving every person out of a trailer, you could just ban further trailer sales/ set ups. Grandfather in the ones who are there and leave it at that.
Didn’t CA do something similar with earthquakes? New houses had to meet the new requirements for safety, old stuff didn’t.
In some areas there aren’t enough options for people who currently live in mobile homes. In very small towns without major employers, there isn’t any incentive to build affordable rental housing. Mobile homes in parks are usually cheap enough for somebody who supports a family by working at the Kwik-E-Mart.
I guess we could ban mobile homes in tornado country, but then we’d just have to build more homeless shelters.
I lived in a trailer in tornado ally (Oklahoma) for almost 5 years. We spent a bit extra for superb tie-downs and although my neighbors lost theirs on both sides of mine, we were fine. A direct hit of course could take out anything.
This is the heart of the problem. Most people live in a mobile home because they can’t afford a house. Banning mobile homes in’t going to make their inhabitants magically wealthier. We’d have to subsidize more low-cost housing if we banned mobile homes, and in our current economic and political climate I don’t see that happening.
And mobile homes aren’t the only problem. A lot of our public building (especially shopping malls and big-box stores) are built out of cinder block with large, free spanning roofs. Those buildings fall to pieces in a tornado every bit as much as mobile homes do - and most of them don’t have basements or reinforced rooms for shelter.
Maybe we need to think about mandating more public tornado shelters (including in mobile home parks)?
Yes, in much of the country mobile/manufactured homes are the one affordable alternative for something other than an actual shack.
The mobile home is adequate except when the tornado hits, which is not every day. And past a certain wind speed anything short of structural concrete construction (not merely cinderblock on top of cinderblock and a light trussed roof – I mean steel-reinforced poured concrete load-bearing elements and roofs that are concrete slabs themselves, or built like bridge decking) is inadequate. Not even here in the Hurricane Belt is that a universal requirement.
The latest Scientific American suggested stopping Federally-assisted flood insurance for low-lying coastal regions, to persuade people to move away from them, to reduce the harm done by rising sea levels.
The problem is that such a move would only lower the value of such property…making it more attractive to the poor, not less! Poor people live in crummy places because they can’t afford not to.
You could also changing zoning laws so that mobile homes had to be a certain distance apart, so a tornado would do less damage per square mile. But, again, who’s going to pay the land-owners for the huge drop in the value of their property?
So long as every neighborhood has a shelter where everyone can retreat, mobile homes are at least easier to replace than frame houses or large apartment buildings. The lives are more important than the property!
This. Modern mobile homes are probably safer than a modern stick-built house. they are made with internal cables which can be attached to ground anchors.
Well, you could tell people in Malibu to stop planting vegetation near their homes so their house will not be burned when fires move through.
You could also ban houses from being built on hillsides (floods/earthquakes).
No more wooden homes on tropical islands/coastal areas - only solid concrete (hurricanes), although not much protection from tsunamis.
I was just telling a student the other day how homes and high rise buildings are being built that are somewhat earthquake proof (depends on how strong the earthquake). However, back when I was working on the 27th floor of a building in LA, an engineer said, “The good news is that this building can withstand a really strong earthquake. The bad news is that the shock might send your desk flying towards the wall and then flying back at you at 35 MPH.” In other words, the building will be fine - I will be a pancake.
So, unless you spend your life in a bunker, wearing a crash helmet and thick padding, you are pretty much doomed to perhaps someday being caught in the midst of some natural disaster that is very difficult to prepare for.
In 2004, in Utica, Illinois, there was a tornado. People from nearby mobile homes went to the basement of a local building made of brick that had been standing there for almost a hundred years. When the tornado hit, that building collapsed - killing many - and the nearby mobile homes they ran from were untouched by the tornadoes.
below ground shelters are the only real protection for most residential quality structures of any sort. small shelters can be used for dwellings without basements. there are manufactured ones.
There’s also the option of incorporating an above-ground tornado shelter in the middle of the house (which can be designed to serve as a storage or laundry area). Those aren’t too expensive if they’re added at the time of home construction. (And steel models can be retrofitted into garage space as well.)
There are options. The trouble is convincing people to pay the money to install them.
As best I can tell, that’s just west of the Plaza Towers Elementary school- that big rd. is Santa Fe Ave, and the little rd. running parallel to it across the top left is S. Brent Rd.
The long roads running roughly right to left are from bottom, 15th, 14th, 13th, 12th and 11th.
It’s tough to engineer a 300+ mph room in a regular above ground house. It’s not just the wind force that has to be dealt with but the objects caught up in that wind like a telephone pole or 2x4 from another house. Get one of them moving at 300 mph and it will punch through cinder block like it’s pudding. Best to pour a basement with bomb shelter (8 sides of concrete). schools and other buildings that require a safe room need a steel reinforced poured concrete room.
