storm damage

[Andy Burns]

If half my roof had just been blown off, I don't think I'd be hanging around outside my front door for the rest to kill me!

[Jeff Layman]

Looks like it's those coming out of the front door of the house on the left who are most at risk!

[Paul]

The damage does not look so bad from street level, and you could be deceived into thinking the roof was stable.

It's an impressive bit of damage though. It's going to take quite a few rolls of duct tape to make a new roof. Someone is going to need to frame that up quickly, to get cover over it.

*******

This is a tornado from Alberta in Canada this year. The building damage is impressive.

But scroll down the page, nearer the bottom, where the picture of the farm combine is. Apparently the wind lifted the combine (10,000 kg) into the air and dropped it. It looks like it might have a flat tyre.

And you can survive winds like that, unscathed. It takes a structure made from concrete, and shaped like an Eskimo igloo. The guy who built a structure like that, all the building needed later, was a fresh coat of paint :-) There might have been a couple dings where a flying 2x4 damaged the paint. That's one of the dangers in a wind event, is a 2x4 can advance with enough velocity, to puncture a building. Like it was a javelin.

Paul

[Clive Arthur]

There's a house round here on a narrow terraced street, no front garden, with a sign on the door warning of loose slates. The odds of one falling on you are much increased by the time taken to read the notice.

[Andrew]

The two properties that have lost their roofs seem to have that strange 'sloping' roof design that is more common in south wales.

The ground has quite a gradient (look at the upstairs window lines, but rather than make each separate roof have a level ridge tile, the whole roof across both properties looks like it follows the slope of the ground.

Maybe this made them particularly vulnerable to a sudden massive circulating updraught ?.

[Paul]

I wonder how much strength-in-tension, a house has.

[Picture]

Paul

[Rod Speed]

Depends on the house. Some houses in the USA are required to be very strong in tension, in Florida from memory.

[Andrew]

The end terrace also seems to be much newer because the bricks are diffrent and it has cavity walls. Was the original property damaged during WW2 .