for those of you that are educators... get your school district engineers to evaluate the blueprints of your facility to identify the strongest interior, load bearing walls...orientation of roof support beams...locations of roof mounted air conditioning units... have your custodial teams mark the baseboards with a distinct "tornado funnel" stencil and direction providing arrow marking which wall to use to take shelter near...especially important if you are out of your home classroom...

Tornadoes scare me spitless. Unless you are 100% sure of the direction they are heading, which way do you run? Not many here where I live, but we had some not too long ago.

I can deal with hurricanes, lightning storms, blizzards, zombies, floods, fires and other natural events. Poop on tornadoes. I try to live where they have very few.

Before the 13-minute warning, your area probably has been under tornado watch for hours, which just means the weather conditions are favorable for producing tornadoes. This is when you should get your "tornado" gear together if they're not in one place already. In other words, you execute step one of the plan. So if you hear the siren, you execute the rest of the plan.

In my case, as soon as I get a watch, I get everything ready -- in addition to my survival kit, I also have my laptop (can't live without it). Then as soon as I get a warning, I head to the shelter area right away as I continue to monitor the weather radio.

There was a segment in the coverage yesterday where a reporter was interviewing a lady whose husband was part of a local recovery effort for an individual who left his car to take shelter in a building (which appeared to have been a gas station). The victim's SUV looked intact, sitting in the midst of twisted gas station.

There are few rules that can't be broken by a tornado.

Ditto. Tornados are rare around here, and not huge when they do happen, but, geesh! We've had perfect conditions for the past 24 hours of so, but I don't usually give it much thought. Don't have to in these parts and I like that.

When it comes to stuff to put in your kid's school backpack, I'd spend a little time trying to make sure your school actually let's your kid have that pack while in class. All the elementary schools I've been in have a desperate cloak room or hallway where coats and packs are kept. If we were in tornado or earthquake territory, I'd want my kids to keep the packs, and emergency stuff, on their chair backs.

That said, I'm still working on getting our schools to let the kids keep a sweater or jacket in their chairs AND let them grab those in a fire alarm situation. Most schools don't even seem to have a blankets to keep the kids warm and dry I've seen fire drills in the fall and winter, where the kids are standing around in a cold rain waiting for the all clear. In a real situation, emergency services might show up with stuff if the event was on a small scale, but I prefer my kid to be a less dependant than that.

The only times I remember these were in high school. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have refused to stand out there freezing.

High school kids seems to have the advantage of carrying their backpacks from class to class. I was one of those goody goodies who always waited it out. Hated getting in trouble so skipping never occurred to me until it was too late.

If you want to live where very few tornadoes happen, you'd better head west. Or north.

See a map of all killer tornadoes since 1950.

I think the sage advice of the late Jim Croche "...don't spit into the wind" might also apply here.