memes

As of my writing this comment, the last EF-5 was the Moore tornado in 2013. It was one of the biggest tornadoes in history. It was 1⅓ miles wide, had winds of 210 mph, and tracked for about 17 miles. It hit a school and a hospital in a populated suburban area. You can get on Google Earth Pro and look at the damage yourself. It's like precision annihilation. Blank slabs were left behind in the worst cases.

And while it's tragic that 24 people died, consider how many people were in its track and survived.

The thing is when a tornado passes through a populated area, it's gonna hit someone. But the odds of it hitting you specifically are low. The odds of it being big enough that sheltering in place is not enough are low. The absolute vast majority of them are extremely survivable. I'd rather live in Oklahoma where tornadoes often start and end in unpopulated fields than in the southeast where they also get lots of tornadoes and hurricanes that inflict equal devastation over vast swathes of land. You can hide from a tornado most of the time, but in a hurricane, the hidey hole is about to be full of water. If it's bad enough, the only thing you can do is run away with a million other people or ride it out and end up on The Weather Channel.

I have a brother who moved to Moore a few years after the tornado. His house was two houses away from a house that was leveled by it. Half of the neighborhood was rebuilt, but the house he rented was perfectly fine. It's funny how a tornado can do that.

People that don't actually live in these areas don't seem to appreciate that tornadoes don't sneak up on you or drop out of the sky fast as lightning. If shits about to go crazy, there is a very notable build up to it. Seeing as how most people stand out and watch these things in a yard or something, not in the middle of a field, they're always at least within 10-30 seconds of shelter.

It really is not that perilous. It's effectively the same thing as fucking around on train tracks. No, it's technically not safe or smart, but the danger is very telegraphed 9/10 times and it's avoided with such ease that the overwhelming majority of people that have ever done it are alive and well.

Yeah, you can be uncomfortably close to tornados and still be okay. If I saw one coming at my house, I'd probably get my pets and documents secured in the basement, and then film it until shit starts landing near me, then I'd duck in my hole and shit my pants for the next few minutes.

I imagine it's how people near fault zones react to most earthquakes

Earthquakes only happen every few decades, so most people in California don't think about them at all. Even when the big ones hit, they typically only hit up in the bay area, or down on southern California. So when a big earthquake hits, most Californians feel it, run under a door frame, wait 10 seconds until it's over, and then talk about how crazy it felt for the rest of the day. Unfortunately the people near the epicenter usually have major damage to deal with, but like I said, they're a rarity. After the SF earthquake that hit in the 80's the State issued new seismic building standards, and all of the old buildings were retrofitted. So the damage from the next major earthquake should be quite a bit less than previous earthquakes.