The lack of Shelters in tornado prone areas needs to be heavily addressed by the government. Dunno How, But with the Death toll of this recent breakout of weather it is starting to look like a top priority these days.

Why the government? This is the sort of thing that market forces ought to handle rather well. If I were to live in tornado country (bloody unlikely) I would pay extra in order to get a basement, storm cellar, or safe room. If I couldn't do that, I would certainly have some kind of backup plan.

it is interesting to see some of the threads in disasters emerging once again...the immediate need for potable water, and any kind of makeshift shelter. Also the appearance of looting, although I would take these stories with a grain of salt until we hear a bit more.

We had a wave of construction of fallout shelters in the 50s and 60s - they are fabulous for tornado shelter, although most of them have fallen into disuse evidently.

The death toll is dramatic and shocking. But compare it to highway fatalities for a month for the same area... I don't know the answer, but the figures may be surprisingly close....

What will also be shocking is the number of fatalities resulting from cleanup from this event.

I live in the midwest and you can prepare for a tornado, even an F5. Being prepared never guarantees a safe outcome but it can sure tip the odds.

Situational awareness is the most help - Stay aware of weather conditions, NOAA is pretty on the ball with watches and warnings and the local TV weather teams are sometimes even better. Severe weather is usually forecast hours in advance and even the worst storms give at least several minutes of warning if you are paying attention. Use the TV, AM/FM, the internet, cell services (weather bug) and weather radios to stay connected to the local weather. On your home turf this is pretty easy but it can be a real challenge when in a different area of operations.

Sirens and Weather radios save lives - Make sure you know your communities tornado warning system and figure out if you can hear it in your home. I grew up in the country and we could not hear the sirens from inside our house. If the weather was questionable we stayed up and watched TV or listened to the radio. If it got too late we slept in the basement. Now I live in town and still can't hear the sirens through all the insulation so I have weather radios in my home and at work.

At home - know where the safest part of your house is - a small room or closet in the basement away from windows is about the best unless you are building a dedicated storm shelter. Keep you BOB in or on the way to your safe room. Be sure to have shoes, gloves, some prying tools, a light and a whistle with you.

If you don't have a basement and the house is tied to a solid foundation, get to a small interior room. If the house is not tied to a foundation or structurally suspect - get out and get low!!

In commercial buildings (work/shopping) get to the lowest floor possible, stay away from windows and out of wide open spaces. Bathrooms and interior hallways are usually the best bets.

In a car - get out and get indoors or get low.

Preps can help you dig out after the fact. Tornados have a relatively small foot print so help can be available almost as fast as the storm passes so preps should be more focused on recovery instead of surviving for 3 or more days while waiting for help.

Not much to comment about in the news so far. My heart goes out to the families and I'll admit to a slightly morbid curiosity as to why there were so many casualties from this particular storm.

- Eric

We do not know why there were so many fatalities so it is premature to suggest the government needs to do something like provide or even worse, mandate, shelters.

People make choices every day and with the freedom to choose comes the acceptance of the consequences. If you chose to live somewhere and not prepare for a well known destructive phenomena then you are responsible, not the government. That goes for tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes or any other natural disasters.

If NOAA or the local authorities failed in their duty to warn people, that would be something worth getting worked up about.

The role of the government should not be to smooth off all the rough edges in life.

- Eric

hello all; i'm still alive as far as i know. actually, our immediate area was largely untouched, just a few days without power and a few more without cable/phone/internet(we're unbundling our phone service when the next renewal comes around). extreme good fortune.

Longtime lurker, first time posting--am checking in from north central Alabama. My county has (last I heard)239 homes destroyed, and at least 6 dead (dunno about injury count). Power came on about an hour ago, largely because my neighborhood was spared major infrastructure damage--power and phone lines stayed up (I'm an old fogy, who kept the land line). I confess, I was thinking about all I'd learned on this forum about risk assessment and preps for sheltering in place--and as time went on, I started making lists of what preps to amend/gaps to remedy, etc. While I'm an experienced listmaker, my disaster prep listmaking has certainly been honed thanks to you all!
I was talking about lessons learned w/ my neighbors, and I hope that we can pool our collective knowledge/experience...after we all indulge in a little laundry and bathing. NB: when your morale is in the pits, semi-warm bathing helps immensely :-)

Storm cellars are terrific, but useless unless people are home to use them or aware they are in the path of an approaching tornado. Cannot begin to imagine the terror of being on the road and seeing a funnel cloud coming my way. Let alone some of those F4/F5 monsters that tore across the South last week.

And as has been mentioned, its imperative to have situational awareness when conditions are ripe for tornadoes. But God help you if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. There just isn't a lot of notice.

A few of my friends will be getting weather alert radios for Christmas this year. People east of the Rockies should have them -- at home, office and in vehicles. Around here, the tornado alerts started during the evening rush.

One of these friends had no idea she was driving toward two tornadic cells when I got her on the phone last Wednesday afternoon as she was going home to Annapolis. Another on the other side of the Beltway went to sleep early that night and did not know until the next morning that she very nearly got a call from me at 11:00p because a tornadic cell was headed for her house (it weakened a bit and went a bit west of her just before I was going to call. She was awakened by severe thunder and lightning. Another stood in his backyard Thursday morning and watched a tornadic cell go by just north, a funnel dropped a few miles east.

Meanwhile, when the outbreak began around here I had retrieved my $20 Midland pocket weather radio from a camping gear bag and stayed tune to TV and two weather websites. When I went to bed I had the weather radio on my nightstand set for "Alert" -- sure enough it went off when a flood warning was issued early in the morning.

Here's the $20 weather radio that I've been using for the past couple years (up $2 in the past week, to $22):

http://www.amazon.com/MIDLAND-HH50-Pocke...2036&sr=8-6

Of course, I can buy this and extra batteries for friends but I'm not optimistic they'd use it when they needed to. You can lead a horse to water....

The morning of last Wednesday's tornado outbreak, the Washington Post "Weather Gang" had posted an article on the five most destructive tornadoes that have hit in and around DC. I watched the September 2001 tornado approach the Mall before it jumped the city and landed at the University of Maryland in College Park, where it picked up a car occupied by two sisters and hurled it over an eight-story building. That certainly impressed upon me that cities aren't immune to tornadoes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capi...1BAyE_blog.html

"Cannot begin to imagine the terror of being on the road and seeing a funnel cloud coming my way."

Worse: NOT being able to see the funnel cloud coming at you in the dark.

Sue

Dagny,

Good points on the radios but lots of the available units don't require much from the user once they are programmed with the correct SAME codes and preferences.

My personal favorite is one I picked up quite awhile ago from radio shack but they have nothing equivalent now. Set the SAME codes, select alarm modes for each type of NOAA alert (watch, warn, special) and weather conditions (Tornado, Flood, Amber alert etc.) then ignore it until the alarm goes off. My other units are a portable radio shack and a portable Oregon Scientific which I suspect were designed and build by the same company.

Here in Iowa you can buy decent low cost radios in several of the major grocery and department stores and they will install the batteries and program the radio for you. Our local TV stations have been sort of pushing the following, I don't own any of these but have used them at work and at a volunteer organization and have had good luck with them.

Desktop units
Midland WR100 (about $29) Amazon Link
Midland WR300 (about $49) Amazon Link

Portable units
Midland HH550 (about $17) Amazon Link
Midland HH54VP (about $34) Amazon Link

Prices may vary outside of this area since I think our TV stations and local stores have worked a deal with Midland. It is worth noting that a couple of these can work with external antennas for improved reception and I think they also support an optional strobe light attachment if aural alerts don't work for you.

- Eric

No affiliation with any of the above - just an advocate for improving situational awareness.

There is a cheap, but labor intensive, shelter that was created by architect Nader Khalili that could be the answer for many people, and without government intervention.

The tools and materials needed: a shovel, a roll of barbed wire, a bunch of empty sandbags (standard size), a stick and a string, something to make a heavy door with a frame, and some concrete.

The dome-shaped shelter is designed to be partly below ground and partly above.

Pound the stick into the ground in the center of where you want to build the shelter. Form a loop in the string and put the loop over the stick, measure out the length to half the diameter you want the shelter to be (8 10' is suitable). Measure out the circle with the string, marking the circle with flour, dolomite or agricultural lime, or rocks.

Start digging inside the circle. With the dirt you dig out, fill the sandbags. Lay the sandbags end to end just outside the circle, leaving a gap for a door. When the first layer of sandbags are in position, hook two circles of barbed wire into the tops of the sandbags, spaced a few inches apart.

Set the next layer of sandbags on top of the first, on top of the barbed wire that will keep them in position without sliding, but set them over the joint of the previous layer. Go up a few layers, laying the barbed wire between every layer, then start gradually moving the sandbags inward with each layer to form the dome.

Install the door. I think he had some rebar or something joining the door frame to the wall of the dome. Dig out a couple of steps for access into the shelter.

Apply a relatively thin layer of concrete over the entire dome, maybe an inch or so, just for waterproofing. (If used in non-tornado country, such as for a wildfire shelter, you could probably get away with using heavy-duty plastic in place of the concrete.)

A sandbag, adobe or concrete block dogleg in front of the door would deflect a certain amount of wind, or radiant heat if it was used for a wildfire shelter.

Then mound at least a foot of soil (thicker would be better) over the whole thing (except for the door, of course), melding the shape into the landscape, avoiding any projections that the wind could grab. Plant the soil over the mound with a type of plant that has an intensive root system (not tap roots), like clover.

I cannot find a photo of this shelter online.

You can go to http://calearth.org/, Khalili's website (before he died, anyway) and look at the 'modern' ones, but they sit on top of the ground, use a specialized running sandbag (that looks like a pain to fill), requires trucked-in sand (you've got sand or dirt right at the site, use that), and needs more height (more cost, more labor, more soil over the top), but they give you an idea of what a shelter would look like. Just visualize it shorter, over a hole in the ground, and covered with soil and growing clover.

But this is for the people who don't expect the government to do it for them.

Sue