Tornado Proof?

[Redoverfarm]

I was looking at some of the photographs of the recent tornado in TN, MS,AL.AR and the south and it doesn't seem like any particular style or materials faired very well when it came to being in the path of the devistation. There were concrete block buildings, steel, framed and everything got destroyed. Yes some faired better than others as far as just having the roof taken off  (still completely gutted the interior) but you would consider them a total loss.  But I guess apart from Glenn & Sassy home nothing could really withstand a direct hit from a  207 mph wind in a Cat #4 storm.  That just gets me to thinking on exactly what style house (underground exception) would be the best choice if you lived in a storm prone area.  Would Post and peir hold up or would a foundation fair better.  I guess that would depend on the building practices to tie-downs and etc..  But as a stated earlier if you are in the thick of things just hope you have homeowners insurance and call your agent. If you are lucky you can build 1/2 of what you had with the money you would get,

[MountainDon]

That would be a thin shell monolithic concrete steel reinforced dome. Of course the windows and doorways are then the problem.

http://www.domebiz.com/
http://www.monolithic.com/thedome/index.html

[glenn kangiser]

The way I look at it, a foundation on any above ground home, even well attached , is just a bit more weight for a tornado to pick up.  Git them there shovels out, boys.

[John_C]

When I built my house in the FL Keys I gave a lot of thought and research to it's ability to survive a hurricane.  I don't thinks it's that difficult to design a house that will survive a hurricane intact given the warning we usually get.

The research buildings in Antarctica are mostly prefab structures that are delivered a deck cargo by support ships.  They regularly endure hurricane force winds without damage.  Other than the storm surge it's the wind borne debris that can' be dealt with.  200 mph winds.. ok, 200 mph Winnebago ... big problem.  Travel trailers, Hobie Cats, washing machines, circular saw blades, loose lumber, coconuts ...  I've seen all of them do unbelievable damage when driven by 200+ mph winds.

A friend of mine helped do clean up in the farm areas west of Homestead Fl after hurricane Andrew.  One house in the middle of an avocado grove was bombarded by flying avocados for several hours.  Think of your wall being covered with guacamole.

Tornadoes are different.  There is often not much warning so you can't put up storm shutters, move loose objects, etc.. The winds swirl much more and set up vibrations and resonance in structures. Even in the 200 + mph winds of Andrew isolated tornadoes within the storm winds caused a great deal of damage. 

About 5 miles from where Andrew made landfall a community of upscale homes called Country Walk built by Arvida was almost completely destroyed. Virtually every house was damaged or destroyed. In some cases only the slab was left.  Across the street there were several modest homes that had survived with little to no damage, a few missing shingles if I remember correctly.  The common thread among those building was that they had been built by Habitat for Humanity.  Mostly unskilled labor but rigid compliance with the building code and common sense.

[ScottA]

Use plenty of nails and tie everything to the ground from the roof down with proper fasteners and your house will survive most storm.

[zion-diy]

Guy's... having just rode out this tornado I'll have to say nothing but pure luck will allow you to survive a direct hit. We were lucky to get away with minimal damage, while my neighbors were completly wiped off the planet. no telling where their homes ended up. we dug our neighbor out of his earth sheltered home which was destroyed. multiple trailers were gone, old stone houses, stick built, brick built, all gone. My God, words can't describe the destruction. surprisingly, a couple of old, (pre WWII) houses escaped with little damage. Go figure. Looks like only one fatality in our area.

[glenn kangiser]

That's pretty bad.  I'm sure we can't even imagine.

I do not even consider an underground home with windows as safe as the wind could come right up underneath and remove the top.  Maybe safer but not totally safe.

When that giant vacuum nozzle hits the roof not much will stay inside.

[zion-diy]

That's true, this tornado sucked the front out of the earth shelter and the rest collapsed. when you look at the damage you can see where the center was cause it created a huge vacuum and the outer perimiter was wind damage. people in the ozarks are a tough bunch. allready most places here have power back and the cleanup is in full force. looks like this monster was anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 mile wide. and no zig zag. areial view shows about a hundred mile straight path. and another odd thing. for the most part, it never left the ground. not much skipping.

[Jared Drake]

I'm not wanting to hijack this thread, but since I live in Arkansas, I was giving this a few thoughts the other day at work while watching Fox news. I want a cabin on 5 acres. Just some place to get away to and I was thinking how expensive a small cabin would be to build. So my thoughts turned to travel trailers. Then my thoughts turned (no pun intended) to tornados and how much time I would have to get to a metal storm shelter if I had one installed next to the trailer. Then..Eureka! Why install an underground shelter to protect me from dying in the trailer when I could just make the storm shelter a cabin? I have a few questions about that, so if it needs its own thread, just let me know and I'll start one.
As far as tornado proofing something, move to where there's no tornados. I'm not trying to be a smart aleck, but I'm not sure there is a way to tornado proof something. All you can do is pray.
Jared

[Willy]

I'm not wanting to hijack this thread, but since I live in Arkansas, I was giving this a few thoughts the other day at work while watching Fox news. I want a cabin on 5 acres. Just some place to get away to and I was thinking how expensive a small cabin would be to build. So my thoughts turned to travel trailers. Then my thoughts turned (no pun intended) to tornados and how much time I would have to get to a metal storm shelter if I had one installed next to the trailer. Then..Eureka! Why install an underground shelter to protect me from dying in the trailer when I could just make the storm shelter a cabin? I have a few questions about that, so if it needs its own thread, just let me know and I'll start one.
As far as tornado proofing something, move to where there's no tornados. I'm not trying to be a smart aleck, but I'm not sure there is a way to tornado proof something. All you can do is pray.
Jared

To me a good cheap shelter for a tornado would be a 1500 gal concrete septic tank instaled underground. I had one that was put in for a water storage tank and they cracked the bottom putting it in. The tank was $500.00 and just put into a hole and covered up. Since the tank would not hold water I dug a entrance down to it and drilled a series of hole 3/8" in dia to knock out a larger opening into it. It was used for root celler and I installed 2 vent pipes thru the inlet/outlet holes to circulate air. One high and one low in the tank to cause a thermo effect and pull air off the top and put new in the bottom. These were just 4" PVC pipes with Screened J-Shaped Vent Caps on them to keep rain and bugs out. They were aimed in oppisite directions to give a vacume effect on one and pressure on the other. It never was intened to be a tornado shelter so I used a 3 ft dia aluimin culvert to go from the top of the tank to above grond level. I sealed the culvert to the top with morter and made a lift off lid and ladder down into it. Worked great and I would post a picture except it was at my old place I lived at. If I was to use it for a shelter I would dig the entrance down and into the side and make it further away with a steel hinged door in concrete. That way it would have a smooth earth top for the tornado to slide over and not hit any part of it. You would not need any special long term living things in it just a place to get into for the big one and wait it out. Heck of a lot better than laying down in a bath tub or closet! Mark

[zion-diy]

Willy, funny you should mention septic tanks. That is exactly what they are now selling here as storm shelters. They install a small door and inside a few cement molded benches. One ole boy in town bought one last year. Alot of people laughed about it, but now... most are seeing it in a different light. Looks like money well spent. I'm already deciding where to put one.

[MountainDon]

I saw on the news the other night that a woman and a couple kids survived the tornado in a small concrete box, barely large enough for the three of them. It wasn't even underground.

[stricsm]

FEMA has plans for an above ground safe room fabricated from doubled 2X4's or 4X4's studs sheathed with 2 layers of 3/4" plywood (alternated 90 deg) and covered with steel plate (from memory it was ~14 gauge).  All assembly is done with screws and concrete fasteners.  Structure must be isolated from foundation preferably tied to an 8" concrete slab.  This has been tested at the wind engineering research center at Texas Tech and will withstand a category 4 without death.  The plans are free from FEMA.  The plans also include details for constructing from concrete masonry units.  More info at:  http://www.fema.gov/library/viewRecord.do?id=1536

[NM_Shooter]

OK.. I am hijacking with anecdotes.

I grew up in Mountain Home Arkansas, which is just to the East of where the major tornado damage was located (Gassville).  Tornados were really just a way of life there, and happened all the time.  I remember as a kid we used to open up all the windows in the house, and one storm blew the Sears Spring / Summer catalog accross the inside of our our house.  We used to be terrified of storms (to this day I still am).  It was routine to drive across the state and see pieces of metal roofing wrapped around trees, and to see trenches dug through the ground by these tornadoes. 

A F4 tornado can suck pavement off of the ground, dig a 3' deep trench, and pull all the water out of a pond from 200 feet away.  In ascending order for doing the BEST tornado prep:

3)  Tie anything near and dear to you down using a very long, bright colored rope.  It won't help it stay in place, but it will make it easier to find later.

2)  Mark everything with a return address, and put prepaid postage on it. 

1)  Good insurance.

I love living in New Mexico now.  The air is too skinny here to support a real tornado, even though we get these cute itsy-bitsy barely F1s here that get the natives in a tizzy.

Seriously, your only defense for life is to get below ground in a hidey-hole.  There are no practical residential alternatives for a direct hit.  You really just want to be out of the way of flying debris. 

If you can build in a hollow, you are better off.  Terrain plays a huge role.  We had routine areas that were contantly getting property damage.  I suspect that the phrase "tornado alley" is based on this sort of thing.

[Okie_Bob]

The F-5 that hit Moore, OK back in 2000 ( I believe) not only totally removed houses off their slabs, there were slabs
torn out of the ground! Can you imagine that? I saw one area after another tornado that broke off a long line of
power poles running down a street breaking everyone off at the ground. They didn't fall to the ground as the wiring
held them up.
I've seen straw blown into telephone poles and there is a video out of Texas A&M that shows often on the Discovery Channel where they shoot 2x4's out of an air gun into and through a concrete block wall. The force of these things is
hard to imagine.
We always had a storm cellar. That saved my family years ago when my aunt's house took a direct hit and just evaporated as best we could tell, nothing was left.
Okie Bob

[southernsis]

We live just about a mile from the path of the F4 tornado that went through Arkansas. The only safe place from that kind of destruction is in an in ground storm shelter. We also bought us one of the weather alert radios as there are no warning sirens where we live. We were very lucky not to have been hit, but neighbors didn't fair as well.
We are now taking a trip to find us property in New Mexico as my husband wants away from here.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Growing up in Oklahoma (Pottawatomie county, in the heart of tornado alley) tornadoes were a way of life.  I don't fear them, but I respect the amount of damage they can do.  The May 3, 2000 tornadoes took out my sister's house in Moore.  They had the only house on the block with ANY walls still standing, and the storm destroyed all the rooms of their house except the baby's room.  The tornado took the telephone, but left the answering machine intact and still plugged in and sitting on a little table.  It was a sturdy, single-story brick home.  My dad lived in Bridge Creek, also hard hit by that tornado, and in a mobil home at that... the kitchen window blew out, as did the back door.  Their tool shed was picked up and set down on top of their outdoor hot tub.  There wasn't a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass left in their whole five acres after the storm passed... nothing but red mud.  They lost 11 neighbors in that storm.  The same storm system blew down a hackberry tree across the door of my rent house in Stillwater;  my roommate and I had the upstairs apartment, and the only way to get out was for me to climb down the balcony railing on the front of the house and go around and cut up the tree so that my roommate could get out.    Still, after three years in Wisconsin, I'd take my tornadoes over the cold up here anyday.  Granted, your insurance will never pay what your house and belongings were worth if you are hit, but I look at it as involuntary decluttering....  A lot of people are building safe rooms these days... we had some friends who had a safe room that doubled as a storage room.   It was built in the center of their house and had 2' thick reinforced concrete walls and a steel door.  They'd had shelves built all around in it to hold quart canning jars and all their canning supplies.  My dad builds safe rooms nowdays pretty often...again concrete reinforced with steel.  Some are outside the houses and some inside.  I don't think there is any such thing as a "tornado proof" house.  And as far as moving somewhere where there aren't tornadoes, it is possible to go where they are less common, but IMO, in those places, you'll only have less warning and less accurate warning in the event there is a tornado (WI is a prime example... when we had those tornadoes in early January, the weather men were freaking out and throwing warnings out left and right.... but they weren't nearly as much in advance or nearly as accurate as the forecasts we could get back home.)  Tornadoes can happen anywhere, in any state.  I'd like to be in one of the states with good weather predicting capabilities and take my chances.  C'mon, guys, don't you think that there's at least a little bit of awe inspired by a really good storm?

[MountainDon]

Neither my wife or I want to live anywhere tornadoes are more a norm than an very rare weather phenomenon (plains of NM have experienced mild tornadoes, but not near home or our mountains).

Ditto the coasts with possible hurricane weather.

Ditto winter blizzards with their common sub zero temperatures (been there done that).

Ditto flood prone areas (been there done that) be they from spring snow melt or extreme rainfall.

Ditto earthquake prone areas.

Ditto areas with extreme high humidity.

[Redoverfarm]

I wondered why you located where you did. Now I know. There is no "ditto's" there.

[ScottA]

Sounds boring Don. A good disaster now and then keeps things interesting. 

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I'm with Scott on that one...  I can remember even as a kid being fascinated with the sheer power of the storms we'd get.  I think I'd like to be a storm chaser.  Maybe I'm a bit of a repressed adrenaline junkie, perhaps?  I don't know.  I still like storms.  Rain just for the sake of a dreary, drizzly day is boring, but a good storm is worth sticking around for...

[desimulacra]

I agree somewhat with the tone of this thread which I loosely interpret as " if a tornado wants you (direct strike by a monster) there is not much you can do" However I feel I can speak to the reality of Tornadoes as I've been in 5 in my life (close enough to have damage/see loss of life). Most tornadoes are not F5 monsters and most don't hit directly. If you are prepared and have reasonable shelter you stand a very good chance of surviving even a direct strike by MOST tornado's. . I also have seen the effects of different construction with some being resistant to major damage. To that end I've been researching SIPS homes and wonder what the forum thinks of a SIP  small home on a pad with a safe room built into it? While there are not any reasonable tornado proof homes, just as there is no bullet proof glass, you can build to be more resistant. I think SIPS could be much more resistant, based on limited research. I don't want to overlook anything obvious and we are getting closer to construction time but have not pulled the trigger yet. So any opinions are welcome

Anyone remember the Weather Rock? A rock hanging on a string. The one I remember went something like this

a dry rock means fair weather.
a wet rock means it's raining.
a dusty rock means a dust storm.
a swaying rock means it's windy
a horizontal rock means a Hurricane
a missing rock means a tornado

Have a Grate Day 

[glenn kangiser]

Depends on fastening I guess.  SIP sections present a larger sectional area to get sucked out.

[MountainDon]

I believe keeping the roof on is #1.

Trying to keep projectiles from piercing the walls is another.

[Okie_Bob]

There is an ad running on tv right now about tornado proofing your house. This guy shows how he has roof rafters with hurricane clips and says this will keep the roof from blowing away!!! Yeah right! Hope noone buys into that deal if they live around here. On second thought, maybe it would keep the roof in one piece as it sails across the state?
Okie Bob