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You mention having a cellar; doesn’t everyone out in that neck of the woods have either a basement or some sort of storm cellar?

I’m a California Native, born ‘n’ raised, but I’ve got family out in the Twin Cities of MN and they always talked about heading to the basement in the event of a tornado.

Guess I sort of assumed that, in any region where a tornado might be at all likely, your property would either have a cellar, or a basement, or you’d sell a car, or the plasma TV, or the dining room furniture — you’d just do whatever it took to have one dug out for you.

I can tell you unequivocally; if it eventuated that I had to move my family out to ANYWHERE that tornado activity was at all probable, if the house we bought didn’t have one already, there WOULD be a storm cellar or basement on the premises before we moved in. Just NO WAY I’d EVER take the chance of needing one and not having one.

I saw the storm chaser video of this monster that hit Moore, yesterday, and I simply cannot imagine being in the path of that thing, and having NOWHERE to hide but the bathtub. Out here in CA we have a word for that sort of thing; we call it “suicide.”

Very few homes here have basements. In our case, the old neighbor had a cellar and we were friends so we never put one in knowing we were welcomed to get in theirs if needed.

For the last few years we've been working toward the goal of buying a place like the one we have now that's better suited for self-sustainability. Well water, back up generator, shop, acreage, cellar and the wife's got a salt water swimming pool to sit by while the dark days approach.

In some areas of Texas and Oklahoma, underground shelters are not a viable engineering option. I live over the edge of an underground stream. There is no way, without spending hundreds of thousands, that I could have an underground shelter.

/johnny

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.