Mike
In the Witchita Falls, TX, tornado of 1979, practically all those who died were in cars or in the mall parking lot, trying to get to their cars. Some who were in cars and survived, said their engines quit as the tornado sucked the air away from their vehicles. As the article said, it depends on how far away you are and how fast it's traveling. Given my choice, I'd opt for a well-constructed underground storm cellar, called "fraidy holes" in Tornado Alley.
Stupid.
If you got a chance to get out its way, do it.
Seems to me that the best thing to do is consider the situation, and act accordingly. Chances are, you won't have researchers there to advise you when the time arrives to make that decision.
Look what happened to Dorothy when she stayed put.
Now, when everyone gets finished reading this, the ratio of deaths among fleeing victims will dramatically increase as people get stuck in traffic jams trying to get to the nearest interstate while the 15 or 20 people left in town sit in their basements watching The Weather Channel.
A tornado can be a mile wide?? Is that the truth???
I am ususally astonished by those ubiquitous videos on the Weather Channel showing bare slab-foundations. I understand that if one lives in a trailer-home, one might not afford a tornado-shelter, but everyone? C'mon, even Dorothy and Toto had one.
A number of people apparently got in their cars and DROVE to a highway overpass to "shelter under" and were killed or maimed...
Because of that well-known video from Kansas where people survived a (very very weak) tornado sheltering under an overpass. People also confused the weak tornado in that video with the F5 Andover tornado from the same day and mistakenly believed the people in the video had an F5 pass over them.
A lot of NWS tornado warnings now specifically warn people from stopping under overpasses. It blocks traffic and you're very likely to die.
Actually I don't understand why they got out of their cars in the video instead of just driving.
Relying on their sampling, the researchers calculated that people fleeing in vehicles had a 40 percent lower risk of death than those hiding in homes, including houses, apartments and mobile homes.
and
The paper, authored by federal and state researchers who reviewed coroner and medical reports, plus survey responses from more than 600 survivors, confirms that people caught in mobile homes face the worst odds. In the giant Oklahoma City tornado, they were 35 times more likely to die than those in permanent houses.
So people who fled had 40% lower risk than those who stayed in their homes. But those in their homes included those in mobile homes, which were 35 times more likely do die that those in permanent houses.
So if the question is who should flee and who should hide, isn't the most pertinent question whether or not they are in a mobile home? If the mobile home group (35 times more likely to die) were removed from the group of people who stayed in their homes, certainly the remaining group of people hiding in permanent homes would have fared much better than those who tried to flee.
Clearly, mobile homes are death-traps in tornados. The risk to that group towers above all others. Any group that includes that group is going to come out looking hazardous by comparison. For example, if we lump the mobile home dwellers with the people who fled, on the reasoning that they were all in enclosed spaces atop wheels, then fleeing would look like the much more dangerous approach.
The real lesson here is that mobile homes are dangerous in tornadoes. But I don't think there is anybody who lives on the plains who is not aware of that fact.
Do houses in OK not have basements?
The problem with running from them here is the topography. We have lots of steep terrain, much of the area is heavily wooded, and the roads aren't laid out in that nice section grid pattern you have out west - many originated as cow tracks and follow the fall of the land.
So you can't run from them here, because (1) you can't see them because of the hills and trees (2) a road doesn't necessarily go where you want to go, or may start out going that way and then turn you right back into the storm's path.
We were caught in a traffic jam on I-75 south of Atlanta late one night when a tornado came across the highway. We and about 50 other people got up under a freeway overpass because there was literally nowhere else to go - highway jammed in both directions, unclear info on the radio, and a loud roaring sound in the dark! We were huddled right up in the angle of the bridge between the girders. Fortunately it passed about a mile to our south. Looked like a vacuum cleaner had gone across - pine trees snapped off about 3' off the ground in a 100 yard wide swath.
The good side of the topography here is that it makes the tornados "skip" - if you're on the lee side of a hill you'll just hear it roaring overhead and get a few trees snapped off. That happened to us. Our house is in a hole, and the tornado that passed directly over us (while we were huddled in the downstairs coat closet) touched down about 10 miles up the road and obliterated a strip mall and car dealership.
We don't have an in-home shelter because our house is built on a crawlspace (I spoke to a met. prof at U of OK about this). We can't dig a "fraidy hole" because the house sits on shelving rock 6-18" under the topsoil. So we just sit in the closet and pray when the warning goes off.
Our NEXT house is going to have a proper reinforced shelter in the SW corner of the basement, with water & food, pulldown bunks, and an antenna for the weather radio.
But I really think with the F-5s all bets are off.
I've never heard of one of those people who chase tornadoes for a living being killed by one.