Posted on 05/21/2013 3:21:45 AM PDT by Carriage Hill
Search, Rescue & Recovery operations continue. 91 confirmed dead as of 6:15am, EST.
More severe storms are approaching the area, at this minute, according to TV station's weather dept.
The films of the EF-5(?) from yesterday are amazing, scary and gut-wrenching. TV crews have been up all night with rescue workers and first responders.
There are also personal shelters that bolt to the slab, $3 to $5k.
Almost nothing above ground is going to survive a slow moving F5. At Jerrel, Tx, even the asphalt was stripped from the roads.
/johnny
The water table is within a few feet of the surface?
When I was a kid, our family lived over some sort of underground waterway, but it was significantly deeper, so it apparently did not present a problem. When a tornado took our house apart, we were in the back of the basement, with 2 ft. thick reinforced concrete walls around us. (My Dad “overbuilt”.) Some bricks from the exterior structure punched partially through the floor, but none actually came all the way through into our basement.
The positive of that particular location was that we had markedly better well water than the neighbors on either side of us (~ a couple hundred feet away either way, as I recall.)
It’s easy to come up with quickie solutions about what should be done. But circumstances are all different resulting sometimes in that glib thought being irrelevant and unfeasible. As an engineer I have been on both ends. I make glib comments from a distance but I’ve also worked on things in detail and had to explain over and over again XXXXX cannot be done.
It’s best to assume people there know their best rules of thumb. There have been people there a long time and I think they have an idea of what they can do.
That happened in the tornado that hit us, before it got to our neighborhood.) Based on comparisons with reports of other storms and their "modern" ratings, I'd guess "ours" was upper end F3, maybe a low end F4. Later it became an F5, but it was out of our area at that point.
Power in Moore is coming up in the S.E. commercial area where the command center is set up.
Post office destroyed, Moore medical center looks like Murrah Building with cars stacked in parking lot. People walking around as you cannot travel in the affected area. Media row is in front of Dicks Sporting goods. That area with the Home Depot, Target, has power but is not accessible to the public due to the area being used as a staging area. Walmart although on Generator power is not accessible either but should be soon.
So people have to rely on the Red Cross for basics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.