In reading the article, some of the (many) workers who got trapped in the factory when it collapsed had overheard folks asking to go home being told to get back to work, which they did, although some of them left.
I agree that going home might not have been the most advisable thing to do - it sounds like a real mess.
I was working in downtown Denver - right in the middle of Capitol Hill - when this happened in 1988: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/colorado/denver/amazing-rare-footage-denver/ (Six tornadoes touched down)
I was working in a mental health center and - wouldn’t you know it? - my boss was worried about a client he had to see, a man who was on parole from another state, who had appeared in our MHC expressing paranoid ideation and asking to be hooked up with some resources. So my boss asked me to stick around. (Note: This same guy ended up killing a couple of people just a day or two later! My boss was right to be suspicious.)
So I was hanging out just outside my boss’s office with the doors open while he talked to this guy when the sirens started going off. Everyone started yelling and hollering. The building did have a basement but I recall that when I heard there were tornadoes visibly touching down I ran to the window - the client was standing in my boss’s office and he looked really confused, with waves of danger radiating from him. My boss was trying to get the guy out the door because (I could tell) he didn’t want him in the building’s basement.
So just about every employee there actually ran out into the parking lot to watch the tornadoes, I’m sorry to say. (Most of the clients who were on the premises went to the basement, showing more sense than the staff.)
We saw the one that messed up the EMW warehouse on the corner of Evans and Broadway and then my boss came hurrying outside and exclaimed, pointing: “That one’s over my house!” (He had a very nice house in a swank part of town.) We were all just amazed to see these multiple tornadoes all around us, but for some strange reason there was little wind, hail, rain, etc, at our location.
The one my boss said was over his house did strike his house, causing little damage to the structure but it tore a huge cypress tree that was in his front yard out by the roots. The streets were so littered with tree branches after that it took forever to clear.
(I may have told this story before on this forum; apologies if that is the case.)
Don't pet the bison.
Where I used to work did not have a tornado plan because the building was tornado proof...so they said, lol.