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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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May 21, 2013 - 11:55pm PT
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Moore is a middle to middle upper class town with half the poverty rate of Reno. The aerial path shots are of high square footage homes in well-to-do neighborhoods of likely recently built homes. Most of the cars in the wreckage easily cost many times the installed cost of a storm shelter. There's certainly no affordability issue in the vast majority of those high-end homes. What's even more of a mystery is how the institutions failed to mandate a $2-3k storm shelter be built into every new home built since an F5 hit the town in '99.
So you are covered if hood blows it's top?
edit: not really arguing with you, but risk mitigation is a financial decision and how far do you go? If you are at work and your kids are at school, what does it matter if you have a shelter at home?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 22, 2013 - 12:06am PT
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I am here in Portland, but I specifically chose not to live in Seattle because of the myriad of potential issues should Ranier go off.
And let's distinguish between those events we can do something about and those we can't. Sure, some events like large scale flooding are about where you choose to buy a home. But, again, a below-ground storm shelter installed for $4,495 to someone living in the shadow of the worst US tornado since '71 and another bad one in 2003. But you'd by buy a $30k vehicle instead?
If I lived there and couldn't afford the $4.5k, I'd be out in the yard with a shovel digging a root cellar myself. And that $4.5k would be way cheaper had shelters been bought in volume by developers mandated to build them into all new homes by common sense building codes.
Again, would you live in a place known to be visited by deadly tornadoes on the same track every couple of years without a shelter?
If you are at work and your kids are at school, what does it matter if you have a shelter at home?
No new school, hospital or commercial building should have been built without a storm-rated shelter for the building's occupancy permit. Again, what's the thinking around the building codes that would have them ignore that? I mean, do they just rebuild the houses, school, and hospital as they were and just roll the dice yet again? Sorry, that just seems crazy to me.
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John M
climber
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May 22, 2013 - 12:21am PT
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I get what Joe is saying.
California has earthquake codes. Even just simple things like strapping the frame of your house to the foundation has saved a lot of homes. I can't imagine that they let them build schools without shelters.
And let's distinguish between those events we can do something about and those we can't.
Yep..
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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May 22, 2013 - 12:26am PT
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And, hey, I'm not without sympathy for the folks' loss and tragedy, I'm just trying to make sense out of it all. I was totally stunned when I saw they historical tracks for the town and that the '99 tornado was the worst F5 since '71.
Given they seem to be 'in the zone', I'm just trying to piece together the thinking, or lack of thinking, around the obvious risk proposition. It feels a lot like packing food, water, and a ledge for a four or five day go of aiding El Cap without ever considering taking ropes.
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goatboy smellz
climber
Nederland-GulfBreeze
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May 22, 2013 - 12:54am PT
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Joe, lack of thinking and civil engineering on a city scale have always been a joke. Look around and consider yourself lucky your life doesn't depend on society's lowest common denominator engineering. Technically, we are all one storm away from losing it all.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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May 22, 2013 - 06:45am PT
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A current article in the New York Times says that it's also culture. People there don't like government regulation, it says??? And both senators voted against aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy and one of them has already come out against aid for Oklahoma?????
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Bowser
Social climber
Durango CO
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May 22, 2013 - 08:09am PT
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We were informed 2 days ago via facebook that my sister in law and her husband and 7 y/o son lost everything. Their son was at the Briarwood school but was picked up early. They rode out the storm at his mothers home which had no basement.
They all got beat up pretty good but are ok and staying with friends.
I always wondered why more houses in Oklahoma did not have storm shelters. Our house did not but my grandmothers house had a basement. As I remember, most of the basements I saw either had major water problems or was stuffed full of junk. It seems like the smaller, tornado specific shelters just started showing up a few years ago.
My parents bought a 2 person steel shelter that is bolted to the slab. Neither one of them can go up and down stairs to get in a shelter so this was the next best affordable thing.
Tyler
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - May 24, 2013 - 06:38am PT
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hey there say,golsen/gary... as to this post:
May 21, 2013 - 09:33am PT
Tony Mayse? Are you alright buddy?
Tony is from Moore, wrote the OK guidebook. I remember eating pancakes at his house in Moore on our way to go climbing. Met him in 1992 or so at Quartz Mtn.
Post up when you get a chance! Thinking of you and Lori
Gary
from a note, i have heard that tony is okay... so i wanted to let you
know that... whewwww... :)
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - May 24, 2013 - 06:42am PT
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hey there say, healyje...
as to this quote of yours:
No new school, hospital or commercial building should have been built without a storm-rated shelter for the building's occupancy permit. Again, what's the thinking around the building codes that would have them ignore that? I mean, do they just rebuild the houses, school, and hospital as they were and just roll the dice yet again? Sorry, that just seems crazy to me.
wow, i surely understand what you mean... i thought that
there was some kind of safety codes, too, for weather issues that could hurt a public building--this is very strange, i would think... :(
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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May 31, 2013 - 10:15pm PT
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round two. big storm in the works.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - May 31, 2013 - 11:17pm PT
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hey there say, glanton...
sorry, saw this so late... did not mean to ignore you feelings on the
"ol' god blessers" :)
not sure if this may help you know-or-understand where some of us are coming from, as to your quote here:
To all of you "godblessers", did not your same god send them tornadoes to do what they did?
Not trying to be a dick on this one but this tired saying of yours really is stupid.
Thoughts and well wishes to the beraved.
well, it's kind of like a respectful way that some of us send those "thoughts and well wishes" in the way that we learned...
not sure if i can explain,
but to me, god, or the 'great whatever out there", to "so many, in many different ways" well,
he, like a picture of the father-figure in my/our homes, KNOWS that awful things go on out in the big world, and we all go through them, but as with any good father, a father sure wishes his "blessings" of "face the challenge, overcome the challenge, get well, and all the things that us humans, must do, after any event that is over human-simplicity to face...
so, hence, a father would say or give:
father's blessings... a mom, would, too, or sister, etc etc, ...
so to me, at least, even though the awful weather and accidents happen, i love my friends and wish and pray for them the "god bless" that i send out, as if i am A SISTER sending out what "i feel is from a god" in my life--that spiritual father, above and beyond what we on earth can comprehend...
:)
does help you understand just a bit, what i mean, by that?
sure am not trying to make you feel tired, :(
just think of it, at least in my case as this:
oh no, there goes neebee again... and just shrug it off... :)
it is my best sincere way of saying, i really want so very very much
for things to get well, for folks to overcome and have new hope in their
new hard trail:
weather as to accidents concerning families or loved ones, weather, or injury, or folks that pass on...
well, oh my, here i go again:
god bless... ;)
:) sincerely, i mean it...
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Topic Author's Reply - May 31, 2013 - 11:19pm PT
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hey there say, johntp... oh my, i just heard, too... and saw a weather report... :(
thanks for reminding us to:
pray, and hope and do anything else, that we feel we can or should do...
god bless.... :)
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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9 more dead; hundreds injured.
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Chappy5150
climber
Denver, CO
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Spent most of last night talking with my brother via text to let him know where the tornados were (lost power about 30 minutes before it hit). He either was hit by the tornado south of Tinker or it JUST missed him. Most of the damage in his neighborhood was fairly minor, but this is a picture three houses down...
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Clint Cummins
Trad climber
SF Bay area, CA
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While I don't like the exact title of this thread (i.e. I am not interested solely in climbers; maybe I am misinterpreting?), the latest news related to "risk taking people" (like climbers) is that 3 "storm chasers" died on Friday.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-storm-chasers-killed-oklahoma-20130602,0,7503065.story
Three storm chasers were among those killed by violent storms in the Oklahoma City area last week, family members said Sunday.
Tim Samaras, a veteran storm chaser considered a leader in tornado research and data collection, died along with his 24-year-old son, Paul Samaras, and partner, Carl Young, while tracking an EF-3 tornado that struck the Oklahoma City suburb of El Reno Friday evening.
All three were known from the Discovery Channel show “Storm Chasers,” which aired for five years, ending in the fall of 2011.
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Officials have not yet determined the circumstances of their deaths. The violent and erratic twister also swept up a Weather Channel truck, tossing it 200 yards and injuring members of the team inside.
Mike Bettes, an anchor and meteorologist for the Weather Channel who was in the truck, described the storm in an interview with CNN on Sunday.
"I think this was just an erratic tornado. I think the size of it and the speed of it changed very, very quickly," Bettes said. "I think the direction of movement changed quickly. And I think there were a lot of people out there that, you know, ended up getting stuck in positions we didn't want to be in."
More details in:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/02/storm-chasers-tornadoes-oklahoma-weather/2382175/
Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Betsy Randolph says she could hear the audio from storm chasers trapped on Oklahoma highways as a tornado bore down.
"They were screaming, 'We're going to die, we're going to die,' " she recalls. "There was just no place to go. There was no place to hide."
... killed by a tornado in El Reno that packed winds of up to 165 mph. They were among 10 killed in storms Friday in Oklahoma.
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Samaras' crushed vehicle was found along a road running south of and parallel to Highway 40 just outside El Reno, Okla., leading authorities to speculate he was tracking the tornado as it was heading east before suddenly turning south, says Canadian County Undersheriff Chris West. One body was found inside the wreckage, a second about quarter-mile east and a third a quarter-mile west, West says.
...
Forbes says GPS readings confirmed there were probably two dozen storm-chasing vehicles in the area at the time.
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S.Leeper
Social climber
somewhere that doesnt have anything over 90'
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Being a Texan, my thoughts go out to our neighbors.
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John M
climber
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I wonder if the storm chasers ended up in a traffic jam because fewer and fewer people have storm cellars, and cities, schools and churches are not building them either, so some people are trying to run away from the storms. Thus leading to more people on the road.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Hey,
I am down in Texas bringing a sailboat home.
Yeah, I don't talk about a lot of the stuff I've done because people don't believe it, but I worked on the spring 6 week long field experiments through the National Severe Storms lab. I never wanted to be out clogging roads if I wasn't helping science. I've done a couple of hurricanes as well, and I was really good at it. Supposedly Jerry (full professor at OU and leading numerical modeler of tornadoes and hurricanes) and mine's data was easy to pick out, because we know storm structure very well. I gave it up about ten years ago. I got tired of driving from Lubbock to South Dakota every day.
It is actually pretty hard to see a tornado. The vast majority are weak and last only a couple of minutes. Until the Moore F5, I had never seen a city get clobbered, and I've seen a lot of tornadoes. I only go out now if it is a really good day and it is thirty minutes from my house. Early in the season they move very fast, but in May they slow down and tend to head east. By the first week of June a high pressure ridge, known as the "death ridge" ends the season here, but as the jet moves north, there are a LOT of tornadoes up in eastern Wyoming, eastern Montana, and the Dakotas. I've seen tornadoes in all of those states.
As for the storm shelter discussion, you need to understand how rarely tornadoes hit populated areas. East of the Rockies is by far the most tornado rich area in the U.S., but statistically, a tornado crosses a single spot once every 1600 years. What has happened over and over again in Moore is just super bad luck. I have an underground shelter and I always keep the garage door open for the neighbors, and this year I have hosted up to ten people when the sirens blow. When I was watching the Moore monster come into town, the streets were totally empty and everyone had about 30 minutes of warning. This state has incredible warning systems. You must understand that although that tornado did cause deaths, without our amazing warning system, it would have been worse than Joplin, which killed 190 people or something crazy. We lost 24. In contrast, a tornado hit the town of Woodward back in the really old days and killed half the town. That was before radar and hit just after dark.
When tornadoes are about to happen, all of the TV stations stop all shows and all commercials, often for 6 hours or more. They have helicopters and small armies of really good chasers spread along the initiation line. There hasn't been a tornado not filmed in Oklahoma for ten years or something. The TV stations all have zillion dollar radars, and the weather service has theirs. We are home to the National Severe Storms Lab (very loosely lampooned in the horrible movie Twister, which I worked on for 6b weeks). We also have the Storm Prediction Center, which handles every weather watch for the entire nation. We also have a bunch of severe weather research centers all located in the same building on the OU campus in Norman. You can't live in Norman without a meteorologist living on your street.
The research and chaser community knows when we are going to have an outbreak, and as the day approaches the models get more precise. They model not only the "weather" but also the sheer environment, the available convective energy, and a ton of other indicators. We have always had guys fly in from other universities a couple of days ahead. On the day, it gets narrowed down to a few counties, and we often are sitting under blue skies when the temperature reaches the convective temp and towering cumulus begins and turn into supercells.
With all of that information, you would think that it is easy, but many, many, days the storms suck or they don't break the cap and we don't even get rain. The vast majority of tornadoes are weak and short lived. Many people live their entire lives without seeing a tornado around here.
Getting skunked happens a lot. Seeing a really major tornado, like an EF-4 or 5 is really rare. They are the top few percent. On the F5 in Moore, the helicopters and chasers were on those storms long before they put down tornadoes. The TV stations show the mesocyclone down to the street level now, so you KNOW it if it is coming.
Right now I'm in shock over the death of Tim Samaras on Friday in a large tornado in NW Oklahoma City. This has been a crazy year. We had no major tornadoes through the whole spring, and then in the past week the jet has been sending us those big troughs that come in over the Pacific Northwest.
A chaser has never been killed by a tornado before. We know storm structure so well that we always keep a bug out route, and I have been very close to many tornadoes trying to get data all around the storm. We also collect data just as vigourously on supercells that don't tornado, despite having a strong mesocyclone aloft. It is a big mystery why some storms tornado and one next to it doesn't. Of course a lot of them are easy to understand, but violent long track tornadoes are only now being modeled, using a lot of the data that we have collected in the field over the years. I've had a lot of my data end up in peer reviewed papers.
We now have a whole lot of geeks, the Twister Generation, who just chase to shoot video, as well as just curious locals, who clog the roads around good storms. A lot of us have become disgusted with this, because they don't do any research. That is why I never go out unless it is close, and if there are 50 backed up chaser vehicles on the same storm, I go home. Now I try to see one a year, but I saw a violent long track one the day before the Moore tornado, and that was a difficult storm with a lot of rain. I know how to find the updraft base, and watched it for about ten minutes.
I'll make a post about Tim Samaras, his son, and his partner in a minute. I'm just catching up on it and I have a bunch of texts coming in as I type this. Tim wasn't like that screaming bonehead that I won't name, but you may have seen on TV. Tim partnered with several universities and finally put out a string of instruments that were took direct hits after decades of failure.
He did a lot of other stuff that is pretty technical, but he recorded a 100 millibar pressure drop as one of his turtles took a direct hit. All of that data gets used my the modelers, because what goes on very close to the ground is poorly understood. He was bad ass, but very smart and knew how to be safe. The first chaser fatalities were always assumed to happen to the idiot geeks, but he was in the top 5 or so on field data collection, which I can assure you is extremely difficult. The roads have to be right. You have to be well ahead of the tornado to lay out your string of turtles, and get them directly in the path. We always carried turtles on the NSSL experiments, and only deployed them twice and both times they failed. Tim pulled it off several times, measuring all of the physical parameters which had never been measured other than with radar, which doesn't see very close to the ground.
I saw a couple of articles that made him sound like an adrenaline junky, but that isn't how weather is. It is extremely science intensive just to get in the right place to catch an incredibly short and rare event. To have a guy like Tim and his partner and son die is a total shock. He was light years ahead of anyone at the Weather Channel, who we kind of look at as a joke, because they can't put in the months and months and years and years that it takes. The experiments I worked on had anywhere from 8 to 20 vehicles and several portable Doppler radars, which can get close and see windspeeds close to the ground. It was all science, and everyone had advanced degrees.
To lose a guy like Tim is mind boggling. I'm going to get the details right now, but the weather channel is covering them right now, and is giving them the credit that they deserve from 25 years of work.
No chaser has died in a tornado until now, although we have all had scary moments. If you don't know what you are doing, a car is the worst place to get hit, but we always keep a way out. I can just put the probe in reverse, back up 500 yards and let them go by. This tornado took a very odd turn, and the visibility was poor.
Sorry to take up so much space here, but most people do not understand tornadoes and human response. In Oklahoma, the biggest dimwit can look at a radar image and see the hook echo which is where the tornadoes happen, when they happen. The lead time has been going up greatly because of all of this collaboration, and it is important from just a physics point of view. Nobody knows how a tornado forms. Sure there are a zillion radar loops showing the rotation aloft, but getting that lowest thousand feet to the ground is a huge scientific problem.
The problem is that there are many radar indicated tornado warnings on storms that have wicked rotation aloft, but don't tornado. This has cause a big cry wolf problem, and people stop paying attention to the warnings. Weeding those storms out is a huge problem.
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johntp
Trad climber
socal
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what is a turtle?
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tinker b
climber
the commonwealth
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i actually read all that.. thanks. i learned a bunch.
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