We had one cross a creek, rise up a hill and up and over some trees - and our house for two streets - then down on school temp buildings and rolled them.
Glad you were out of the way. They really change lives.
Mart> From the damage I estimate an F2-F3 tonado 2-3 miles from my home. A
Glad you're okay.
Mother Nature can be an evil b****, when she wants to!
When it's THAT close, though, almost inevitably ... you know somebody ... or ... somebody who knows somebody.
Hope the damage was minimal, the injuries were less, and the recovery quick!
In 1988, a big one passed through Raleigh. It hit a Kmart on Glenwood Ave, then skipped in a NE direction across town. The closest it came to where we were living was about 1/2 mile, but it split the distance between where we were living and the home we were building. Talk about hurrying up the next AM and driving as quickly as I could to the home under construction.
As it turned out, there was no damage to either our rental place or the house we were building- thank goodness
On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:09:53 -0700 (PDT), the infamous GarageWoodworks scrawled the following:
the blown-over tree reminds me of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid. I never saw a tornado, but the huge thunderstorms (gorgeous things, the only thing I miss from there) would uproot the big trees lining the streets there.
Congrats on the luck of dodging that tornado, Brian.
-- Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for. -- Earl Warren
GarageWoodworks wrote in news:cd13e8e7-237f- snipped-for-privacy@t23g2000yqt.googlegroups.com:
Here in Bergen county, NJ, we had a big storm 3 weeks ago. Lost power for longer than I cared (~28 hours), but some people lost it for almost a week. Many trees down, a few deaths in the tristate area due to falling trees mostly. Then the flooding, many homes. Now since Sunday we are again having torrential rains (for the area). They are expecting like 6 inches before it stops, and the ground is totally saturated, so there will be big time flooding again. Luckily, we are fairly high, and don't expect flooding, except for perhaps a few damp spots in the basement (keeping fingers crossed).
Lee Michaels wrote: ...
Actually, it's interesting in that often the very old survive better than new as construction in the '20s often was much stouter than tract housing of the post-war era which tended to get faster/cheaper continuously until, as you suggest, changes in local Codes forced some areas back into better-suited detailing (as Swing notes as well)...
I was prompted to add this note by his comment and the previous comment on shape affecting damage as well as the age...
In the Greensburg, KS, EF-5, one of the strongest ever observed, it completely flattened 95% of the entire town (path was dead-center of town, 1-1/2 mile wide destructive funnel). The few dwelling structures that did stand at all in the path were a handful small, square one-story hip-roofed houses and a single 2-story expensively built '20s-era full brick construction house that only lost a portion of roof and the add-on porches, etc.
It appears that the 4-sided roof shape of the small houses and their small size was pretty effective in minimizing the damaging forces while the brick walls were simply so stout as to keep walls intact even though damage was extensive enough it was razed. The typical ranch-style was simply flattened to the slab almost universally w/ only an occasional exterior wall or tow here or there or the interior walls in some small rooms/halls such as closets and/or bathrooms that had some initial protection.
--
A storm that can drive wheet straw right through a cedar hydro pole can do just about anything it wants to - no matter WHAT you do.
Grey concrete bricks with pink fiberglass insulation imbedded ALL THE WAY THROUGH, anyone???
That's just 2 interesting observations from the Woodstock Ontario tornado back in the late '70s
A link might help.
It's possible to build reasonably priced houses that can survive hurricanes with little damage. But if you want a house that will survive an f4 tornado unscathed you're talking steel plate or heavy reinforced concrete all around, pressure doors, and heavy laminated bulleproof glass. The kind of place that nobody but the very rich could afford, even as a rental.
On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:33:38 -0500, the infamous Swingman scrawled the following:
Most of those houses looked like they only lost pieces of roofing in the center of the roof or room, rather than the top half of the house. Most probably did have the hurricane ties in 'em. When windows got hit and blew out, so did the roofs.
Do you use the Simpson Strong-Wall(tm) shear wall panels in those, Swingy?
-- Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for. -- Earl Warren
That is right. The F5 that passed through the neighborhood south of us, and then on to Andover, literally leveled the neighborhood. This was an area we used to walk in during evenings. After the tornado, we literally couldn't identify any landmarks. Houses were gone, trees, large trees, were mowed off about 10-15 feet above ground level.
You can't build for that.
RonB
GarageWoodworks wrote: ...
Partial shot of what Greensburg looked like shortly (like several weeks, I'd guess, didn't see an indication when the photo was actually taken but there's been a ton of debris hauled off before this was taken--it was impossible to drive virtually anywhere immediately after).
I went up (it's about 80 miles from us) early the morning after and came up the south end of main street which is a mile east of the main highway that was blocked off. Once to the damage area in town, you couldn't tell which was street and which was block--the debris field was 3-ft deep essentially uniform. Damage was so complete locals couldn't even recognize which block/intersection was which much of the time.
Spent that day helping several folks recover enough belongings to be able to make it to relatives or motels that evening and many of the next several weeks as could in cleanup...after the second day they cordoned off the entire community and only through qualified organizations were anybody allowed in/out for about two months or maybe even longer...
Link to a storm chasers' page who chased it back north from OK/TX from about Coldwater,KS, where he first saw it about 40 miles S of Greensburg.
It'll be a while 'afore I'll be forgettin' this-here 'un...this is third year coming up and I've become much more diligent about my storm spotter training and making sure the weather radio has batteries...
--
Very sad. It doesn't get any worse than what happened in Greensburg.
I did more driving around today with the wife and kids and saw more damage (no camera this time). I saw buses that were thrown across the street and homes pushed off of there foundations. I also saw a brick home that had the front bricks stripped off (I guess it was a brick facade?). It is very sad driving around the homes. I don't know if I'd even feel comfortable taking more pictures. It's too much to stomach.
I drove out today to the nearest point that the twister came to me and used my GPS to calculate the distance to my house and it was 0.75 miles!!!!!!
GarageWoodworks wrote: ...
Only thing that would have made it worse would have been for Greensburg to have been a much larger place than it was/is so there would have been more population affected...in a way it was fortunate the G'burg was only a 1500-population little town even though it took out most of the town.
Speaking of moving things, there was a full-size Buick on the roof of the Courthouse afterwards (3-stories and only building to survive reasonably intact other than the grain elevators on the north side of town).
They found a combine from the John Deere dealership located on the west edge of town rolled up like a wad of aluminum foil almost 5 miles N of town...and not a little guy, this was new 9700-series four-wheel drive monster. All it was lacking was it didn't have the header on the front. I'm guessing it weighed -- well, let's see, let's just look one up; it's a larger machine than ours -- wow!!! JD say ~30,000 lb w/o header. Hmmm....if I compute a wind force times an estimated projected area
-- yeah, I get >30k-lbf by a fair margin...man, I'm more impressed after that exercise than I was when I saw the sucker out there...I didn't think actual weight would be much over half that and the thought of that was daunting enough.
--
They do tend to make a mess. Here are a few photos of the May 25, 2008 EF5 that hit Parkersburg, Iowa.
We used to live in Wichita, about 1.5 hours east of Greensburg. Before the tornado we used to drive through from time to time on the way to Colorado or New Mexico. It was a pretty town and we always thought the Green part of their name went with the hundreds of big trees all around the town. The big feature of Greenburg was the largest hand-dug will in a park a few blocks off of the highway. A very pretty town and park.
We dove through on the way to Taos in October of '08 and it almost made us cry. From the highway you could see the horizon in all directions. No houses, few buildings and all of the trees were stripped and destroyed. Besides a concrete grain elevator that survived the storm most of the above ground structures were tents and temporary buildings put up by disaster workers. There were a few starts on new homes.
If good comes from disaster, Greensburg might well become the model for green communities. With the help of some organizations, the government and a few celebrities they have committed to incorporate green technology into their rebuild. This has come at the expense of a few long-time residents who apparently are having difficulty affording some of their new building standards. Time will tell.
RonB
On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:11:55 -0700 (PDT), the infamous RonB scrawled the following:
Sure you can. Think "cement domes" and only replace a window or two.
-- May those who love us, love us; And may those that don't love us, May God turn their hearts; And if he doesn't turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles, So we'll know them by their limping. --old Gaelic blessing
"Larry Jaques" wrote
Look at these guys.
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