Joplin

[Joe]

Joplin got hammered by a tornado yesterday. I grew up there but don't live there anymore, nor does anyone in my family. A lot of friends still live there (so far no one I know is dead), including one of my two best-friends-known-since-kindergarten. His house was flattened and his dentist office is a shambles. What's left of his house is depicted in #1401.

jzl.notepadhax.com/pix/Joplin

I wanted to take more pictures but that's not why I was there; in fact picture-taking and rubbernecking were understandably frowned upon. I was there to deliver supplies, help, and help look for some friends.

I've seen plenty of post-tornado damage during my lifetime-- none of it anywhere close to what I saw today. There was one place that looked more like ground zero at Hiroshima than any of the previous tornado damaged I've seen. If you were an alien who just landed there and looked around as far as you could see, you'd conclude nothing on Earth grew over 3 ft. high.

This is the deadliest tornado in half a century or more, 116 and counting. They probably won't know for sure for days and possibly weeks. Whole swaths of town were simply flattened or blown away and one of the two major hospitals took a direct hit (the other, a scant four blocks away, was untouched). Another friend of mine who lives in a glorified shoebox miraculously survived even though one of his flimsy walls fell on him. He thought for sure he'd be sucked away.

What's also sad is that there are volunteers who haven't even been put to work yet. And by volunteers, I don't mean just "civilians" like me. First Responder types (firemen, cops, EMT's, etc.) from nearby areas were also sitting around undirected, grumbling for nothing to do. Such are disasters, I guess. I'd rather think the people around here are so bighearted maybe there were just too many volunteers for the authorities to handle.

While I'm at it, let me take the opportunity to debunk some tornado safety myths, because one almost cost another friend his life.
DO NOT waste time opening windows. The winds of a tornado do the damage, not any pressure change (which is only about 10 millibars anyway). My friend dinked around opening windows when he should have been diving for his basement, and he made it by a matter of seconds. If a tornado is shrouded in rain and hail and debris as was this one, you may not really know how much time you do have. Don't waste precious time to equalize 10 friggin' millibars of pressure differential.
DO NOT take shelter up under highway overpasses. The people in the video everyone saw were incredibly lucky as that tornado was very very weak, an F1. You want to be as close to underground as possible, even if it's just lying face-down in a ditch.
DO NOT go to the SW (most tornadoes approach from the SW) corner of your house or basement thinking the tornado will blow the debris or rubble over you. A tornado is almost as likely to shift the whole house (right on top of you if you do that). It's unclear but the best "direction" to be is the north side. All things being equal you're better off being as close to the center of a structure as possible even if underground, but being away from glass or being out from beneath heavy stuff upstairs are more important factors.

Anyone willing to donate can look here: www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/23/joplin.how.to.help/ Joplin itself is only about 50K people, but it's a metro area as over 200,000 (400,000?) live within a 40 mile radius. It's the fourth largest city in the state.

And lastly, the house where I grew up still stands.

[louross]

Just read your post, and most interesting!
lr.

[flaminghotsauce]

I just read there are still 1,500 missing, unaccounted for.... ouch. This is devastation.

[Tom Goodrick]

That was one F5 tornado. On Apr 27 we had 4 F4 tornadoes and one that was on the border of an F5. One Tornado hit the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and killed about 40 people. That was one of the F4's. It then moved northeast doing more damage for 60 miles, mostly in rural country. Limestone county is a narrow north-south county just west of Madison County where I live. One or two large tornadoes went through there ripping out the tall power towers from the atomic power plant west of us on the Tennessee River. That was the cause of our major four-day power outage.

We had warnings of tornadoes from 7 am to 8 pm on that day. There were about two dozen tornadoes of F3 or smaller. Some people who went looking for friends or relative's houses in Limestone County report body parts hanging from trees as though an airplane came apart at altitude.

These storms are so severe it is very hard to imagine unless you see the damage. The worst thing about it from my perspective is that there are thousands of families like us in the South that have no shelters to go into when these storms come. Our houses have slab foundations or crawlspaces - no basements. All we can do is sit and watch radar plots with morbid curiosity wondering which tornado signature will turn into an actual tornado near us.

What ever happens, happens. My stockpile of liquor has been too light recently to provide much comfort.

Today I looked up tornado occurrences on a NOAA map. Most places I'd move to have hurricanes, earthquakes or blizzards.

[flaminghotsauce]

That's interesting that you thought about that, Tom. Where to move if one could live anywhere?

I'm not likely to move from where I'm at, but I never say never. Our weather has been blessedly forgiving as long as I've been here. The closest tornado to my house in the fifteen years has been over ten miles away. This year's blizzard was the first real snow like that. We had 12" of snow once before, but never was much of an issue. The blizzard was only an issue this year because I drive for a living. There is talk around town of 1985 or '87 when a hail storm blasted through, which caused a synchronization of everyones roofwork.

Overall, the weather here has been sort of safe. All the rugged storms seem to go around us, no earth quake danger, hurricanes are rain events here, and we're on high ground so no flooding.

I feel compelled to donate to those folks in Joplin. There's a truck collection site today, and we've rounded up some bags of things like toothbrushes, soaps, and other normal everyday things to pass along from our wild and crazy coupon shopping stockup. It's a small way to help but hopefully enough people are doing this to help everyone out down there. I may donate cash to one of those "Joplin Tornado" relief sites.

Now this morning I hear another town down in Arkansas that got a direct hit by an F4 or F5. Tough year.

[Joe]

Thanks, flaminghotsauce!

Tom, I was aware of those tornadoes and had been reading your blog accounts, ironically, Sunday afternoon right before my wife called to tell me about Joplin.

You can modify an above-ground room to be anti-storm reinforced (I hesitate to use the term "stormproofed") It probably costs a ton, though.

After having walked through ground zero in Joplin, I now have serious concerns about my house because our basement is only a partial walkout basement that opens near the SW corner of the house. The laundry room, the current "shelter", is part of this basement and it's toward the center of the house, has no windows, and is somewhat reinforced by plumbing and ducting (the heater/AC unit is in there too. I just don't know if that's enough anymore. The garage-accessed crawlspace under the north half of the house might be safer.

[flaminghotsauce]

There's a lady here in my town that built a new house. In this single level house built upon a slab, there is a concrete safe room. I thought it strange when I first saw it, but thought, well, overkill is fine for a safe room. After these tornadoes and the pics and videos, I see that safe room isn't overbuilt in the least.

[Tom Goodrick]

To see the data on tornado frequency, go to www.nssl.noaa.gov/edu/safety/tornadoguide.html

This site also gives a lot of information about tornados. The distribution of tornadoes across the US is very uneven and highly dependent on a confluence of causal factors, namely mixing of air temperatures, moisture and winds.

The parameter that best indicates the liklihood you will experience a tornado is the average annual number per 10,000 sq miles. That's a 100x100 mile square centered on your house. The average for all states between 1961 and 1990 was 3.06 according to my calculations. (Perhaps it wouild be best to say 3.0 because I made some approximations involving states where the value was a decimal below 1.0.) The value for Missouri is 3.95 while the value for Alabama is 4.53 - not a big difference. The two states with the worst frequency are Florida (8.58) and Indiana (8.48). Just the other day I heard someone say Florida does not have many tornado deaths but they have a lot of deaths from lightning. The frequency of tornadoes does not agree with the probability of deaths from tornadoes because most of the tornadoes are F0 or F1 in strength which are not strong enough to cause death except in very strange circumstances such as being hit by flying debris while outside.

The "experts" in atmospheric science typically organize tornado hunts starting in Oklahoma (6.85) and Kansas (4.65).

To get away from tornadoes, you'd want to go to a place where the ferequency is less than 1. The only place in the eastern US is West Virginia (0.83). Otherwise all the western states except Colorado qualify: MT, ID, WA, OR, CA, NV, UT, WY, AZ, NM. Colorado is at 2.32, just a tad worse than Pennsylvania (2.23) and better than Minnesota (2.39). (Sunday, Minneapolis also had a small tornado killing one person. My wife's brother had a little mess to clean with his chainsaw.)

I might consider moving to New Mexico. (I like the area around Albuquerque.) They have an occasional blizzard but not many earthquakes (that I have heard of). I have been looking at the earthquake weekly occurance on Google Earth.

[pterodactyl (George)]

Tom:
My heart and prayers go out to you, yours and all your friends and all the people in Joplin and the area. While we live in the northern tip of Tornado alley we learned a few years back what an F5 can do (Elie Manitoba, 20 miles west of home). I understand the charities I donate to are either sending aid or needed personel to the area. At least all we are dealing with is water right now, which after several floods of the century (boy is that getting to be a tired term) our province seems to be getting good at taking care of.
Good Luck and prayers to all.