4 ms·

Have you ever lived in Tornado Alley? These warnings are ubiquitous several months out of the year, year after year. I must've received at least a hundred of th

Have you ever lived in Tornado Alley? These warnings are ubiquitous several months out of the year, year after year. I must've received at least a hundred of those. In the entire time I lived in that part of the world, I saw a single tornado, and that is because I was lucky -- most people that live there decades don't see them. The false positive rate for the average person is extremely high, so it is no wonder people stop paying attention. Honestly, we had worse problems with severe lightning; your house might get hit once a year. A "very high likelihood of tornadoes" is their Tuesday. That likelihood manifesting as an actual tornado that is a material risk to them is a once in a lifetime situation. You get used to it, like earthquakes on the West Coast. Nobody on the West Coast spends their days obsessing over the big earthquake that will inevitably hit them sometime in the next several decades. Warnings like you are talking about are effectively useless because they virtually never materialize as a real threat to most of the people they are sent to.

makeitdouble 5y ago
If I understand correctly, tornadoes are a part of the weather there, with any structure having a set probability to get hit once or more by a tornado in its lifetime. So perhaps the issue would be on why the warehouse crumbled, if Amazon was aware of the structural risks, and how they reacted if there were any warnings on that front ? > like earthquakes on the West Coast. If it’s really so, earthquake zones have building codes and constructions have rating on what they can withstand. If for instance your workplace was to go down on M2 shake, there would clearly be an issue with the building and the contracting process, or maintenance.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  The engineering challenges aren't equivalent. There is no practical engineering that will allow a building to survive an extreme tornado event unless you want to build everything as an underground bunker. We are literally talking serious nuclear weapon energy equivalents, delivered in the way tornados deliver it. That they erase towns is not a surprise. However, these events are relatively rare and, unlike a M8+ earthquake, the effects are extremely localized. For example, if there was another New Madrid fault zone event at the same scale as happened in the 19th century, which happened in the same region, the damage would dwarf extreme tornado events. We know how to build practical buildings that can survive severe seismic events, within limits. We do not know how to build practical ordinary buildings that can survive an EF5 tornado, same way we don't know how to survive a direct nuclear strike. Those weather systems are a serious force of nature.
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makeitdouble 5y ago

If I understand correctly, tornadoes are a part of the weather there, with any structure having a set probability to get hit once or more by a tornado in its lifetime. So perhaps the issue would be on why the warehouse crumbled, if Amazon was aware of the structural risks, and how they reacted if there were any warnings on that front ? > like earthquakes on the West Coast. If it’s really so, earthquake zones have building codes and constructions have rating on what they can withstand. If for instance your workplace was to go down on M2 shake, there would clearly be an issue with the building and the contracting process, or maintenance.

jandrewrogers 5y ago
The engineering challenges aren't equivalent. There is no practical engineering that will allow a building to survive an extreme tornado event unless you want to build everything as an underground bunker. We are literally talking serious nuclear weapon energy equivalents, delivered in the way tornados deliver it. That they erase towns is not a surprise. However, these events are relatively rare and, unlike a M8+ earthquake, the effects are extremely localized. For example, if there was another New Madrid fault zone event at the same scale as happened in the 19th century, which happened in the same region, the damage would dwarf extreme tornado events. We know how to build practical buildings that can survive severe seismic events, within limits. We do not know how to build practical ordinary buildings that can survive an EF5 tornado, same way we don't know how to survive a direct nuclear strike. Those weather systems are a serious force of nature.

deleted 5y ago

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