Oklahoma…
…disaster.
This tornado looks very bad, but reports of casualties are just coming in.
Much of the town of Moore has been destroyed, including the hospital. One possible consolation is that, according to Fox (which I’m watching on TV right now), there was a 16-minute warning. People in this area live in tornado alley, and most homes probably have cellars, and residents know the tornado protocol. But still, it looks horrific.
I lived near the tornado back in the 1990’s and most the homes do not have basements. Some have added tornado shelters, poured concrete walls just larger than a closet, but most don’t. Some areas have neighborhood shelters. If these are unavailable, you are told to go to an inside room without a window or lay down in a bathtub and cover yourself with blankets.
And there is one of the main reasons I will never willingly live in “Tornado Alley” again. I’ll gladly risk the rare effects of SoCal’s earthquakes over this sweeping devastation.
Many of the older houses in my grandmother’s neighborhood in rural Oklahoma had tornado cellars. Her house, which was constructed in 1947, did not have a tornado cellar.
As it is easy to dig out a cellar in most of Oklahoma, and a cellar is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, more houses in Oklahoma should have them.
Okies are tough. They will surmount this obstacle.
I also used to live in Tornado Alley in Arkansas and I second what eeyore says. No one I know had a basement or storm shelter. My plan was to lie in the bathtub if the sirens went off.
I stood tonight and wept as I watched people running from all directions to hunt for children in the rubble of the elementary school. I can only imagine the terror of those parents.
Fox is reporting that children who were sheltering in a hallway were killed in one of the schools. If true, with 16 minutes warning, a hallway must have been the safest place available — no shelter, no basement. Why, why, why would a school be built in Tornado Alley without a shelter?
Actually the hallway is considered the shelter area in a school. It is supposed to be built strong to withstand most major tornadoes. I remember hearing on the OKC news during the 1999 tornado (F5), the weatherman Gary England saying you had to be below ground level to survive. I don’t know what the rating is for this tornado.
KWTV in Oklahoma City has a donation link you can use. It also has a way to donate through a text.
But the hallway is the safest place to be only because a safer underground space wasn’t constructed. I’m asking, why not? Maybe it’s my East Coast perspective, coming from a place where basements are routine parts of many, if not most structures, even though we don’t have much of a safety need for them. I don’t understand why — at least in public buildings where other safety precautions like fire exits are routine — they’re uncommon in just the place where they’re needed.
Most school hallways were reinforced as well as the bathrooms. Most Oklahoma soil is heavy clay and does not drain well. This causes leaks, sagging walls then bad foundations.
I heard on the news that after a ’99 tornado hit the area, there was a push to build a lot more basement and/or storm shelters, and so there are more than usual in the town.
This company installs retrofit rooms but they start at $3000 which may be too much for some people.
The pundits are saying definitely EF4, maybe EF5.
At least this one gave me a wider berth than did its predecessor in ’99, which — through Moore, anyway — followed almost the same track.
If i lived in a tornado prone area I would require everybody in my family to have their own football helmet. I was watching weather channel when the Texas twister was being covered, the weather man in studio who was advising on it said, “take shelter immediately ( to the areas under the gun ) & protect your head !”
Yahoo News says 51 dead; 20 of them children.
Dreadful.
Makes sense about the soil. Thanks, eeyore.
Got a relation in the Dallas area. Very few homes have basements. Even building on a slab is a problem. If the soil’s moisture changes substantially, the soil volume changes and can damage even a slab-built home. So you have to water consistently, even if all you’ve got is weeds, or some kind of native plants that don’t need it.
Fox is reporting that children who were sheltering in a hallway were killed in one of the schools.
In a hallway? that’s not a good choice. It’s better than a gym, but that’s not saying much: once the doors are compromised, you’re attempting to shelter in a wind tunnel.
A wind tunnel with debris being shot thru it. Must have been a desperation move, after the bathrooms and janitor’s closets were filled.
The only “soil” which makes basement construction impossible is solid rock. In every other soil a concrete basement, monolithic or from concrete slabs, will prevent deformation of house walls better than anything else. And any underground shelter will withstand tornado better than even much stronger above ground construction. Tornado creates reduced pressure in the vortex, and all enclosed rooms explode because the pressure inwards them is higher than the pressure outward. Underground shelters are free from this defect, soil does not allow them to bent outward.
The problem with clay soils is that they often times have Bentonite-like swelling when wet and shrinking when dry. This cycling of wet (swelling) and dry (shrinking) conditons can often destroy a basement. This is a problenm in many places in Colorado. Maybe also in Oklahoma. There are steps that can be taken to overcome this issue, but they make the building more expensive. In such cases a concrete reinforced closet or room within the house is the least expensive way to provide a shelter. I would think that the price could be added onto the mortgage and would result in a lower hazard insurance rate.
Mobile homes should be discouraged or even illegal in all tornado prone areas. Even the best cannot withstand a tornado.
Well, today’s reports are that the school did in fact have a basement and some of the dead children drowned while sheltering there. Much as I wish we knew a way to protect schoolchildren infallibly from such a disaster I am forced to acknowledge that Nature is greater and more terrible than any of us.
Something the Ancient Chinese always believed was that when a ruler lost the acceptance of Heaven, natural disasters or death from the heavens and earth, will begin occurring on a frequent disasters.
Superstitious villagers perhaps, but their civilization was often times more advanced and more well run than ours right now.
JJ formerly Jimmy J
The problem with clay soils is that they often times have Bentonite-like swelling when wet and shrinking when dry. This cycling of wet (swelling) and dry (shrinking) conditons can often destroy a basement
When I first thought of the problems of water infiltrating a basement, I thought that a layer of bentonite – which I knew from my time in the oil field- could be placed on the outside of a foundation to absorb water and thus prevent water infiltration into the basement. Googling bentonite basement waterproofing confirmed my supposition.
Can be useful, and can be harmful, depending on how it is used.
[IIRC, back in the day Bentonite sold for a penny a pound to oil drilling rigs. I have seen it as a skin conditioner @ $8-$15 per pound. Bit of a price difference.]
After the last round of very bad tornadoes about a decade ago, I remember hearing an interview (NPR, when I still listened to it) with an inventer (structural engineer, IIRC) who had developed a design element to be included when the concrete slab for a house was poured; a small reinforced concrete room, the size of a walk-in closet. A frame house would be built on the slab and around the closet, which would be fitted out with a strong door – and serve as a safer shelter than an interior bathroom. The door would open inward (so it wouldn’t be sucked open), and the concrete walls and roof would be sturdy enough to take the weight of the house collapsing on top of it. It seemed like a very sensible idea for new construction in that part of cyclone alley. Perhaps it was too expensive to put into new houses, or there was a reason that it wouldn’t work, but it seemed pretty sensible to me.
Gringo, you’re right about Bentonite being used in the oil industry and cosmetics. It has some amazing properties. One of them is that it can absorb a lot of water and turn into a slurry, but when it dries out it shrinks and cracks open up in it. The soils in eastern Colorado are formed mostly of weathered Pierre Shale. It has layers of Bentonite in it. Many houses built where there was Bentonite in the subsoil were cracked and deformed by the wetting/drying of the Bentonite around the basement walls. It’s now standard practice to test the soil for Bentonite. If any is found, it has to be removed before construction can be done. The nice thing is that there is a market for the Bentonite.
Here’s the link to some information on that:
http://www.betterwaterproofing.com/basement_construction_clay_soils/
Here is an Atlantic article on central Oklahoma soil and basements.