One of the most shocking stories to come out of the Oklahoma tornado this week is this one. The mind reels that in the middle of tornado alley, in a place where a previous F5 tornado devastated the town in 1999, no safe room existed in the school.
Full story: http://houston.cbslocal.com/2013/05/22/school-where-7-students-died-lacked-tornado-safe-room/
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. puts the issue into perspective with our QOTW:
http://twitter.com/RogerAPielkeSr/status/337023601314234368
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But you can’t get science grants, media headlines or speeches by Al Gore for funding a tornado shelter.
I really miss the insight, clarity and incisiveness of Roger Pielke, Snr’s posts at his blog.
Same goes for New York City’s lack of a storm surge barrier.
Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
Priorities! Money spent to subsidize electric cars is money that cannot be spent building tornado shelters. The true cost of wasting money on “climate change” projects is the value of higher priority projects that are not undertaken. Opportunity Cost, folks. That’s economics 101.
Common sense has been dead for sometime. It’s about power and control and nothing more. Maybe someday 51% of the sheeple will wake up.
So, you’re telling me those, who usually scream loudest “Think of the children!” don’t really care about them?
Jeez, what a shocker. Oh wait, no, it’s not. Just as expected.
As a believer in limited government, I’d argue that the federal government shouldn’t provide grants for tornado shelters.
I’d also argue that schools should have such shelters.
I would note further that, as I understand it, the kids who died were in the basement, and drowned when they couldn’t escape rising water which leads me to wonder if the sprinkler system designed to save them from fires killed them (although it wouldn’t have without the tornado.) So, take this infrmation into account when implementing the tornado shelter.
Oh yeah, one last thing. No matter what, we can’t keep everybody safe all of the time. So let’s decide what’s acceptable risk before we spend a gazillion more dollars and do only what’s reasonable. I positively abhor the phrase “if it saves one life, it’s worth it”. ‘Cuz it’s not true, but it gets used to excuse exorbitant leveles of public expenditures on a routine basis.
It is my understanding that 7 children actually survived the tornado but died from drowning when the basement space they were in flooded from broken water pipes. The walls of the building carry pipes for water fountains, sinks, toilets, etc. When these pipes ruptured from storm damage, the water apparently flooded the basement space where these children had taken shelter and they were drowned. Had there been adequate drainage in that space, those children would have likely survived.
He has a good retort for those who always want to make AGW about “the children”. Mann, Gore, Hansen et.al. got rich on the money that would have been more wisely spent on simple precautions from weather events. Events that predate the industrial age of man.
The “He” in my post above refers to Roger Pielke, Sr.
It is ironic and tragic that the FEMA Pamphlet P-431, Tornado Protection: Selecting Refuge Areas in Buildings, included Kelly Elementary School in Moore, Oklahoma and its performance in the 1999 tornado as one of its case studies. Pointless climate projections aside, I think it’s safe to say that more lives have been saved by improved tornado forecasts and warnings than by the construction of tornado shelters. That being said, it escapes me why, following the tragedy of the 1999 tornado, Moore’s schools would not have invested in constructing refuge areas in their buildings. Maybe they did, but it’s difficult to plan for the devastation of an EF-5.
If you travel across Oklahoma in I-40 you will notice signs on the interstate that point out tornado shelters. These shelters are at roadside rest areas and are basically a sort of igloo shape covered with dirt with grass growing on it. It looks like a rolling hillock from outside. The problem is that they don’t hold many people, maybe 20, and they take up a lot of space.
The Plaza Towers school apparently had an evacuation plan to get the kids to safer shelter. The 4th, 5th, and 6th graders had already been evacuated to stronger shelter nearby and suffered no casualties. The problem was that the tornado bore down on the school before the youngest ones could be evacuated. The younger ones are generally the slowest to travel so rather than hold up everyone behind them, you let the faster ones who need the least supervision go first. This sounds sad but it has the potential to save more lives overall. You reserve the larger number of staff to supervise the movement of the smallest kids last because they take the longest time to move and require the most supervision.
Still, most survived the actual tornado and the cause of most of the deaths was drowning due to being trapped in a confined space that was filling with water.
The Plaza Towers Elementary school was built in 1966.
Terrible as it sounds, the low death toll has to be considered a remarkable success. Reading the article it appears that there was quite a good warning period and good use was made of it to get the vast majority of people away from the area or into safe rooms. This was a very very big tornado and it hit a major population area. The low death toll is not due to luck, but good preparation.
As Crosspatch pointed out, the seven children appear to have been in a basement which survived the tornado, but was later flooded. This is tragic and I am sure lessons will be learned for the future, but the sad fact is that we cannot think of every eventuality beforehand and some things we only learn through sad experience.
Heard a strange discussion regarding this event on talk radio this morning. The interviewers were talking with an insurance investigator when one interviewer asked whether the lack of a shelter might increase insurance costs. The discussion concerned damaged to structures and loss of property, so the remark was particularly strange. Short of building the entire house as a shelter, there is no way to protect yourself from property damage from an EF-4 or EF-5 tornado.
I’m on the other side of the world and as I wrote before I found out about the lack of shelters, I’m not amused.
What on Earth possessed building regulators to NOT require adequate shelters in an area that’s got a history of intense, destructive storms? Why were the people left unprepared for a “regular” event? Unprepared not only in lack of shelters, but also timely notification and a knowledge of what it means to live in such an area?
Surely they didn’t expect the government to prevent “extreme weather”.
Christmas 1974, a cyclone levelled most of the Australian city of Darwin. It was rebuilt. Stronger; with most buildings able to survive inevitable repeats of such severe cyclones.
I remember seeing a documentary some years ago about the hurricane preparations in Cuba, when compared with neighboring islands. One of the significant things was that in Cuba, the electricity providers are required to cut power in storm paths, and this significantly saves lives.
With this tornado, and with Sandy a while ago, damage to live power supplies caused a lot of damage, mainly through fire. Would it not be sensible to consider such an approach in the USA?
The governor was caught off guard by this. She believed that every school had reinforced hallways to serve as shelters as well as one or two dedicated rooms, such as a cafeteria or auditorium. Hence her early optimism about survivors. She was not aware this school was built before that became standard policy.Very sad. Let us hope every school board has learned a lesson here.
And another common fail point was the metal roof rafters. They failed miserably everywhere. No more protection than wooden stick-built rafters and far less than a truss system. Until a better design is created, perhaps they should have a poured concrete roof or floor section over the safe rooms.
Also, with regard to Moore not providing better shelter subsequent to 1999: There are a LOT of towns in Oklahoma besides Moore. Oklahoma gets a lot of tornadoes in May. This would be a bigger challenge than just Moore. If you look at it statistically, it is rare for a school in Oklahoma to be hit while school is in session despite the large number of tornadoes. In 1999, schools were not in session when the tornado went through. That two EF5 tornadoes have hit the same town in living memory is unusual. The two storms did not follow the same track but the intersection of the two tracks is the town of Moore.
I can’t help but notice that the tornado never made it across the large lake Northeast of town. I wonder if large lakes might be an effective tornado barrier for large populated areas if they act to disrupt strong convection.
http://hosted.ap.org/interactives/2013/oklahoma-tornadoes/panel-breaking/images/locator-edited-pop.jpg
doesn’t OK have a water table level issue that makes it really hard to build any sort of basement/below grade shelter?
Bernd, putting it in perspective. Getting hit by a tornado is a once-in-a-number-of-lifetimes event. While I lived in tornado alley my first 20 years, I only saw one off in the distance ever. There are numerous buildings in Oklahoma that date back over a century yet have never been struck by a tornado. There are less than 100 severe tornados annually in all of America, and the majority of them touch nothing.
As far as deaths go, Tornados rank pretty low on the chances of killing you.
http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Tornado-death-rates.jpg
Compared to fire code, tornado code isn’t high on the priority list.
Perhaps this is what Topher Fields proposes to cover in his video. If the theme is “better to adapt” than to try to prevent global warming, it would be good to know what “adapt” mean, specifically. It strikes me as strange that NPR should get way out in front on this issue. Their report this morning covered the use of hurricane clips and foundation straps in building in tornado alleys. Approximate costs are a few hundred dollars per house. If people are going to build in what is known to be a dangerous place, they can be “encouraged” to build safer. I don’t know if this is advice to government or just to risk-takers, but… jeez, let’s learn from our mistakes!
Yes, investigating an issue that a significant minority of scientists believe is a threat to modern civilization is clearly the thing we should drop. Bravo, Roger.
Is this the only time the right will agree to increases in school funding? At the cost of science funding?
I noted with disgust the coverage by NBC News last night — it took them about 24 hours before they started reporting on the “questions being raised” about the lack of safe rooms in Oklahoma and “what we should be doing” in that regard. Brian Williams and his crew from New York swooped into Moore — based on a model of making money from showing video of disasters — and probed that critical issue. Never mind that rescue workers were still pulling people out of rubble. I don’t recall Mr. Williams and his fellow New Yorkers and New Jersey folks saying much about the stupidity of locating houses a few feet above the mean high tide line on the East Coast. How can I fail to conclude that the message is “People in Oklahoma are stupid and need our guidance; people in New Jersey are smart and clever and require unlimited government financial assistance.”
dmacleo says:
May 22, 2013 at 9:58 am
doesn’t OK have a water table level issue that makes it really hard to build any sort of basement/below grade shelter?
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No. Witness this school had a basement… There are some areas in the state that have water table or bedrock issues, just like everywhere else.
FWIW, Oklahoma is about the most ecologically diverse area in the United States, or on the planet, for that matter.