Tornadoes Hit the South, Hundreds of Dollars of Damage Done

[Morat20]

For tornadoes, you want to bury. Not the best choice for hurricanes, though. :)

For a fun building, check out the Vehicle Assembly Building. It's down at KSC, and it's where they put together rockets before rolling them out to the launch pad. (These days it's where they mate the Shuttle with the Stack).

The VAB is 526 feet (160.3 m) tall, 716 feet (218.2 m) long and 518 feet (157.9 m) wide. It covers 8 acres (3 ha), and encloses 129,428,000 cubic feet (3,665,000 cubic meters) of space.[4]

The building has 10,000 pounds of air conditioning equipment including 125 ventilators on the roof supported by four large air handlers (four cylindrical structures west of the building) to keep moisture under control. Air in the building can be completely replaced every hour. The interior volume of the building is so vast that it has its own weather, including "rain clouds form[ing] below the ceiling on very humid days",[5] which the moisture reduction systems are designed to minimize.

Located in Florida, the building was constructed to withstand hurricanes and tropical storms with a foundation consisting of 30,000 cubic yards of concrete and 4,225 steel rods driven 160 feet into limestone bedrock.

[Sheepherder]

Or, like the guy I heard interviewed on NPR today, bury an old bus in a hill behind your house then use that for shelter.   His brother did the same thing with an old van.   Certainly cheaper than building a whole concrete shelter underground.

I'm talking about doing the entire house minus the front face below grade, ideally partway up the slope in the southern exposure of a hill, with most of the structure surrounded by weeping tile.  You build your living rooms on the exposed end, and your bathroom, utility rooms, and bedrooms in the back.  It's pretty much wind proof and is actually a very energy efficient design.

[Morat20]

I'm talking about doing the entire house minus the front face below grade, ideally partway up the slope in the southern exposure of a hill, with most of the structure surrounded by weeping tile.  You build your living rooms on the exposed end, and your bathroom, utility rooms, and bedrooms in the back.  It's pretty much wind proof and is actually a very energy efficient design.

Flooding is an issue, and you'd have to bring in dirt to build up the hills in most places. You'd also have to anchor it with plants to prevent erosion, which means you need to have regional plants that'll do the job.

Dirt and stone are very good insulators, and there's a reason they put tornado shelters underground. There's just a lot of places where that's not an efficient solution, although you did manage to come up with a pretty good design on the whole 'wanting some actual damn windows' front. My wife would love a bedroom with no windows. :) She likes it dark and cave-like.

Hmm. I wonder how my dream hurricane home would hold up to tornadoes? Steel framed, integrated metal hurricane shutters -- the wall facings and roof would be the real problem. Pretty sure a tornado would leave the frame standing, but not much else. Certainly rip the roof off.

[Merusk]

Burying the house is a decent idea, but I'd hate to deal with all the water issues, and I don't just mean flooding.  You've got a basin on the top and sides now, not just the foundation.  Think about how damp and dank some basements that aren't built properly get.  It's something you'd have to really focus on.

As for the Hurricane house.. you could design that steel building so your roof structure stays in place.. but no matter what you do the sheathing's coming off.  The sheathing of your walls as well, most likely.  Still, it's not the wind that does the bulk of the damage in a tornado, it's the missiles it's carrying.  All that timber, trash and -at Joplin Speeds- CARS that are whirling about at 250+mph.

The last few days had me wondering about relative wind speeds between hurricanes and tornadoes.  A c5 Hurricane has windspeeds "In excess of" 156 mph (250 kph).  That only rates as an F2 tornado.  An F5 like Joplin has to have winds between 261-318 mph (420-512 kph).   That's damn scary.

The Fujita Scale indicates that an F5 will even badly damage reinforced concrete structures.. which explains why the Hospital in Joplin didn't stand much of a chance.

[Tannhauser]

Sorry we cancelled the shuttle program NASA, can you turn off the weather machine now?

[Lantyssa]

Tornadoes will have faster winds than hurricanes, so the immediate area they touch is more likely to be damaged.  Hurricanes though span a mind-boggling area, and are sustained.  While their winds can do significant damage, they also bring water damage and can ravage an hour for twelve continuous hours.

Some building techniques are probably applicable to both, I imagine they have different requirements as well.

[01101010]

Some of the larger hurricanes, while having sustained wins @ only the F2 scale (in terms of tornadoes), do show significant microbursts inside the storm as well as having the winds do complete 180s in an instant. I'll look for the webpage I read that on a little later today. I was reading up on it when Wilma blew through southern Florida out to the Atlantic and we were all left wondering how a storm that came across the state still had that much strength to do that kind of damage.

[Chimpy]

Tornados have the added problems of the axis of rotation being relatively small which leads to a very large pressure differential between the wind-wall and the eye and creates a lot of suction. A tornado is not just blowing things over, it is actually sucking things up. I have seen pictures of small ponds having almost their entire volume of water (and fish inside) picked up by a tornado that went directly over them.

A tornado is nature's wet-dry vac (with the outlet plug open).

[Morat20]

Sorry we cancelled the shuttle program NASA, can you turn off the weather machine now?

No. They still stack up rocket bits in there. :)

The sheer scale and power of what it takes to get shit into space is hard to miss when you tour the Pad and VAB, since it's full of things like "Oh, we dump 20,000 gallons of water into the blast pit at launch. What? For heat? Oh gods no. It's to muffle the sound. Otherwise the Shuttle would explode. It gets really loud, you know"

[Sand]

Didnt they report that the tornado in Joplin even took down a number of steel framed buildings?

[Samwise]

Sorry we cancelled the shuttle program NASA, can you turn off the weather machine now?

Never make nerds angry.  It's one of the classic blunders.

[Sheepherder]

Didn't they report that the tornado in Joplin even took down a number of steel framed buildings?

Steel construction may mean many things.  Some of those things are not what one would assume.

[FatuousTwat]

Sorry we cancelled the shuttle program NASA, can you turn off the weather machine now?

Finally, a realistic explanation!

[K9]

Tornados have the added problems of the axis of rotation being relatively small which leads to a very large pressure differential between the wind-wall and the eye and creates a lot of suction. A tornado is not just blowing things over, it is actually sucking things up. I have seen pictures of small ponds having almost their entire volume of water (and fish inside) picked up by a tornado that went directly over them.

A tornado is nature's wet-dry vac (with the outlet plug open).

Spoilered for size. 

[MuffinMan]

That should be spoilered for more than just the size. 

[pxib]

Apparently several tornados touched down in western Massachusettes today. The most well publicized landed in Springfield.

[Simond]

Tornado over the Connecticut river in Springfield: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/r-video/28099922/detail.html

A pair of idiots + car + mobile phone camera = http://youtu.be/636M8gOEtao
Note the change of tone from "Haha it's a little tornado! Sweet!" to "Oh fuck it's a tornado! We're gonna die!"

Someone crawling out from under the stairs in the garage he work(s/ed) at, seconds after a tornado went overhead: http://youtu.be/SSPMOoAEys8
NB: There is some strong language, as you might expect. Here's a vid from a little later by the same guy - http://youtu.be/MZXsDc072yg

[kaid]

Tornados have the added problems of the axis of rotation being relatively small which leads to a very large pressure differential between the wind-wall and the eye and creates a lot of suction. A tornado is not just blowing things over, it is actually sucking things up. I have seen pictures of small ponds having almost their entire volume of water (and fish inside) picked up by a tornado that went directly over them.

A tornado is nature's wet-dry vac (with the outlet plug open).

The other issue with tornadoes is not just the wind but the very high velocity projectiles that often accompany those winds. Its all fun and games if your house can handle the wind speeds but cannot handle the Chevy truck flying through the air. They make reinforced tornado shelter rooms but still by far the safest is a root celler/basement/buried structure. Designing a building to handle the wind speeds is very doable but trying to armor a house to withstand the high velocity flying debris without looking like an armored box is a bit more tricky.