Thanks!
There is a major railyard about two miles from this mobile home park. During the Vietnam War, there was a major explosion of ordnance in the railyard. We didn’t live here at the time, but people who did said that a lot of the homes were knocked off their foundations.
Wow, that’s something nobody plans for! How horrible for everyone! Do you know if the homes were attached, I don’t think that was common practice in the '70’s.
You mean attached to each other? No, they were stand-alone.
I think she meant attached to the foundations. That are often anchored down these days.
Yes, attached to the foundations or jacks?
On jacks, I think.
Yes. Though I live in the next city over,
One reason trailer parks get nailed by tornados is that they tend to be out on the outskirts of cities, and therefore more likely to get hit in the first place.
I was living in Edmonton in 1987 when we got a tornado that hit the Evergreen trailer park and killed a bunch of people. The tornado was heading for the city and then deflected around it, and right into the trailer park.
What?
There’s a commonly-held, but inaccurate, belief that big cities have features which keep tornadoes from hitting them.
Yes, what? Lived 60 years of my life in tornado land. Omaha was hit hard by a tornado in 1975.
Huh. I thought there was an effect that caused tornados to tend to move around large cities. If that’s incorrect, it’s my bad.
It makes no sense to assert that tornadoes are less likely to hit a city.
Cities occupy less land area than non-cities in most regions. That is the likely reason.
Exactly, and that’s pointed out in the articles I included. It’s simply a matter of odds.
I don’t know of any trailer parks that got taken out by wind but I can remember when the Deer Valley one got hit by a plane.
Just another example of the dice rolling badly for a residential area. While I did feel very badly for the residents of the park, I was really happy that the office building I worked at didn’t get hit because the landing strip was a block away.
You hear of tornado damage to trailer parks more often because of the poor construction of mobile homes. Plus it’s easier to shift the homes, especially if they’re on jacks instead of a foundation. A small tornado could devastate a mobile home park while only taking a few shingles off of the neighboring insta-subdivision.
I think we also underestimate just how many American neighborhoods are actually trailer parks.