I’m from Singapore so I don’t ever experience natural disasters, but I’ve heard of the dangerous one around the world. However, I realised don’t hear much about tornadoes being very destructive despite it looking scary. I always hear about the earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes, but never the tornadoes. Thought I should ask here since a video I saw talked about tornadoes in USA lol
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Tornadoes are far more dangerous than earthquakes/hurricanes if you happen to be in one. Many earthquakes and hurricanes are relatively small and can be a matter of preparing a little and then riding it out.
However tornadoes are physically much smaller, so your odds of being in one are much smaller. You can have two or even three of them in the same city as you and be unaffected yourself.
Basically, if a hurricane goes right over your house, it may not be a big one and you just needed to board up your windows. If a tornado goes right over your house, you may not have a house.
Tsunamis are thankfully rare but probably combine the devastation capability of tornadoes with the wide effect of other disasters.
So higher impact, much smaller scale.
It really depends. I happen to live very near the county that gets more tornadoes than anywhere else on earth, but they’re usually rather small, don’t last long, and do little to no damage. We get lots of tornadoes, relatively speaking, but they rarely if ever even make the news.
Tornadoes in places like Oklahoma and Texas, however, can be literally devastating. Like, leveling entire towns and causing several fatalities devastating. Some of the biggest tornadoes can be more than a mile in diameter, with winds up to 300mph+; they’ll demolish houses, flip over cars, destroy infrastructure and obliterate crops.
I’ve never seen one.
I know they do damage but I’ll be most Americans are like me, we’ve never seen one.
If a hurricane is like ten thousand BBs, a tornado is like a cannonball. Not nearly as widespread, but absolutely devastating to one particular spot.
I’ve personally been involved with multiple tornado cleanup and relief efforts. It’s not uncommon to see one house virtually obliterated while the next door neighbors’ house is perfectly intact. Tornados are almost surgical the way they cut a path of destruction.
Very. While fairly localized, they’re definitely one of the absolute deadliest natural disasters. Not something you can take shelter from and assume survival.
For context op, here’s a pretty clear video of a tornado:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjb7QtMEBUg
Tornadoes are kind of like if you threw a dagger in a room. If you don’t throw it with enough force or if you miss all the people, no problem. But a serious tornado hits a house or a person? Goodbye.
It depends on the size of the tornado. I grew up in Oklahoma and we had about 80 every year.
Tornadoes are intense and deadly, but you have to be very close to one to be in danger. They aren’t always small though, the damage zone can be well over a kilometer wide. But outside of that, it can pass by you without you even knowing it’s just more than a really intense thunderstorm.
Luckily we have knowledge about how they form and can make a good forecast for where a tornado can form.
They’re devastating and unpredictable. They can demolish one house and leave its neighbor untouched. That’s what makes them so scary.
My grandparents’ house was destroyed by a tornado last year, but it was the only house on the street that was affected by this tornado. A few streets away from us, the tornado touched down again and ruined other houses. When your area gets a tornado warning, you never know if you’re safe or if your whole life is about to be destroyed. It feels so random. One minute you’re fine, and the next minute your roof is flung into the treetops.
Tornadoes are devastating.
Even “weak” tornadoes can ruin a house.
It’s not so much the wind itself, but the debris within the tornado, that’s the problem.
Tornadoes can throw pieces of wood through concrete.
They can wedge sheets of paper into asphalt.
They can turn your house, and practically everything in it, into pieces no bigger than your first and scatter those pieces for miles.
Luckily, they’re localized. You can be a mile away from the strongest tornado on earth, but get no damage at all.
Depends on the tornado’s size, strength, length of time on ground, and where it hits. Even a large tornado would cause relatively little damage if it hit uninhabited prairie or sparsely inhabited farmland. The same tornado hitting a heavily populated area w/ little warning can be devastating (Plainfield, Illinois tornado of 1990)
I live in an area that is prone to tornadoes. It’s not quite “tornado alley,” but I guess it could be 🤷
That being said, after approximately 15 years of living in this area, I’ve not once seen a tornado (and I don’t ever want to). The thing is, even if you live in a place that is susceptible to tornadoes, the chances of actually seeing/experiencing one are slim. Even if you do, it may go right past you and it may not be strong enough to do any real damage. It’s something to be aware of and prepared for, but not something that should dictate decisions on where to live.
You have a much higher chance of getting killed by things other than a tornado in the US, that’s for sure.
Hurricanes and earthquakes can cause widespread property damage and danger to people from things like collapsing buildings over a fairly large ares. Tornados are very localized, with a funnel cloud carving a path maybe a mile long and a few tens or hundreds of feet wide. But where the funnel cloud touches down stand a good chance of total destruction. They are smaller but have a huge amount of energy in a relatively small package
Tornadoes are pretty random. They usually touch down and disappear in minutes. Some huge ones can last like thirty minutes and those are the ones that destroy entire towns. Usually, it just destroys a small path of stuff in a town.
Smaller tornadoes generally do not destroy houses but damage them, like tearing off roofing or siding of a house. Throwing debris through windows. Stuff like that.
I live in what’s known as ‘tornado alley’ it’s a pretty large area of land in the Midwest. We’re used to them here. Well, those of us that grew up here. We don’t really get too scared by big storms and tornado warnings/watches (warning means a storm has the ability to produce a tornado, a watch means a tornado has been spotted in the area already from that storm so people need to watch out in particular there). There’s sirens that go off for tornado watches in every city/town. It’s like an air raid siren that sits in the center of cities and youc an hear it for miles away. They test them once a month in tornado season to make sure they work, which freaks out people who don’t live here lol.
But yeah… storms around here are pretty bad in general in the summer. High winds that damage houses. Hail the size of your fist. Absurdly loud thunder. Tornadoes. The power usually gets knocked out like maybe on average 5-10 hours every summer from storm damage, not even necessarily tornadoes. So, it’s these kind of crazy storms that produce tornadoes and if you live around here you’re kind of used to it.
I’ve actually seen one and I deal with cleaning up after them. You are much less likely to get hit by a tornado here than a hurricane when on the coast, but a tornado can demolish your house if you get hit directly. Tornados hit a relatively small number of homes a year compared to hurricanes, but do immense damage
I’d like to contribute a fun fact: the US has more tornadoes that the entire rest of the world combined, and it’s not even close.
USA per year: ~1200
Rest of the world combined: ~300
Tornadoes are very compact events, meteorologically speaking, unlike typhoons and hurricanes. However, also unlike typhoons and hurricanes, there aren’t days of warning for someone to prepare. If you’re VERY lucky, you get a few minutes. Sometimes you get just seconds.
A very violent and large hurricane (Class 5) will have sustained winds of at least 157 mph (252 kph) and will last for a full day or more. The most powerful hurricane on record had sustained winds of 200 mph (322 kph).
A very weak tornado (EF1) will have winds of about 100 mph and a very strong tornado (EF5) will have winds of at least 200 mph (322 kph). The 1999 Bridge Creek–Moore tornado was a large, long-lived and exceptionally powerful F5 tornado in which the highest wind speed ever measured globally was recorded at 321 mph (517 kph).
Tornadoes can last anywhere from a couple minutes to 3.5 hours.
So tornadoes are incredibly dangerous and deadly events.
A tornado doesn’t cover a lot of area, but what it hits it absolutely destroys. Your house isn’t damaged it’s GONE.
You can see a lot of videos on YouTube that shows how destructive tornadoes can be. It depends how powerful it is.
Tornados generally aren’t super deadly because of where they happen. The grand majority of strong tornados happen in the Tornado Alley, across many of the flat central rural states. For this reason, so many can happen, but many miss major residential areas or towns. Many of the more populated places as you go East may experience tornados, but on the lower side of the Enhanced Fujita scale, which measures tornado intensity. They will cause damage and kill if somebody is in the wrong place, but generally speaking, they are weak and short lived.
With this being said, tornados of the stronger variety are extremely dangerous should you be unlucky to find yourself in their path. For one, they are quickly forming storms that can sometimes have very little warning. Conditions can change so quickly which is part of the reason why tornado watches can be so long. Evading or analyzing a tornado is difficult since the funnel can be cloaked in the storm clouds/rain around it, and the directional path can adjust on it’s own. There are many cases of storm chasers who meet their end because of misreading the unpredictable trajectory of the storm. One of the worst elements can also be if it is nighttime. The storms are dark enough, but you will see absolutely nothing during the dead of night.
We haven’t even touched on the actual destructive power. An EF-5 tornado can reach wind speeds of +200, enough to rip houses clean off their foundation, and occasionally even worse like digging up plumbing and destroying concrete. Tornados generally have the potential for higher wind speeds when compared to Hurricanes or other storms. I really can’t describe much more other than cars, animals, trailers, etc just getting picked up and thrown around…
Go to YouTube and watch videos by TornadoTRX and Overcast. Their respective videos on the Jarrell Texas Tornado should suffice to show you the true nature of a strong tornado.
In short, it’s incredibly dangerous, but pure odds prevent insane loss of life. Your odds also increase if you get to a basement/tornado shelter or cellar. There is usually tremendous financial loss though.
They are deadly in plains states. Look at a map of the Great Plains. Those states are rough with tornadoes. That being said, the odds of getting killed or injured by one are like slim.
Well, 2 towns in AR and 1 in TN were devastated just last week. Multiple deaths. They just come up so fast, you don’t get the warning that you get with a hurricane. And some people don’t live in a house with a safe area (and sometimes even your “safe” area gets destroyed too).
Tornadoes are deadly. I’ve been in two. One did serious damage to the house i was in, and the other bounced over my house and hit my next-door neighbor’s. One of the worst things about them is they can be impossible to predict where they go. I’ve seen tornado damage where one side of the street is utterly destroyed, and the other is basically untouched. Tornadoes can touch down, then pick up into the air and touch down again a mile or two later. While smaller, I would argue that tornadoes can be more dangerous than other natural disasters in their unpredictability.
Very bad if you’re in the direct path. I’ve driven through Missouri after the 2011 Joplin tornado and it looked like the area had been bombed.
Compared to earthquakes, floods, forest fires, and hurricanes, they’re not that dangerous. Worst case scenario in a place like Dallas or Oklahoma City, you might have a dozen tornadoes drop down in a day and destroy a few dozen buildings. They’re pretty bad, yeah, but the damage and loss of life just isn’t at the same scale when you compare it to, say, some of the larger California wildfires or hurricane Harvey or Katrina.
We don’t get super bad tornadoes in my area, but it’s still VERY scary when one has been spotted. A shrieking alert is sent to everyone’s phone, and you’re supposed to find a sheltered room, preferably underground, and stay there until the warning ends.
If it hits your house, your house will be destroyed. If you’re aboveground, you’ll probably die.
Check out Pecos Hank on youtube. Awesome channel with amazing content on tornadoes.
Lowest level – wind storm……. highest – “the finger of god” that forms the landscape…
Tornadoes can be devastating. They’re relatively small and usually don’t last long, but they can flatten anything they touch.
I live in Arkansas and have had one or two near misses with tornadoes. Around here we have tornado sirens and 6 large public storm shelters scattered around town.
We had a tornado last year that luckily didn’t hit us but tore up the entire street behind our house. It took months to restore all of that. It’s a lot of farmland too, so a lot of animals died and every house was basically destroyed. They can be pretty bad and since they are more localized, they do a lot of damage in a small area.
If you have access to Netflix watch “the tornado”. It’s new and about the 2014 Joplin mo tornado.
Depends on the type of tornado and the area it hits. They’re particularly dangerous if they’re intense, which often correlates with size – and a wider tornado path is more dangerous as well. Some of the worst tornadoes have wind speeds over 300 mph or are wider than 1-2 miles wide. It’s also more dangerous if it hits a populated area (ie Joplin, MO 2011) or if it hits areas that have poor building construction or mobile homes.
Areas like the Great Plains (especially the southern portions, like Oklahoma and Texas), as well as the South and portions of the Midwest are particularly prone to intense tornadoes. They’re very localized, but can cause ridiculous damage, far more than a hurricane or earthquake in the worst of them.
Watch this video from Andover Texas as it rips through a neighborhood. This particular tornado is “naked” in that it’s not hidden by rain or a condensation cone, so you can see the internal vortices clearly.
These are HUGE American multi-story homes being obliterated, and all those pieces of debris are entire chunks of walls and garage doors, so like 8×16 feet/2.5×5 meters.
Tornadoes are monsterous.
https://youtu.be/lxdFh8nYMgM
We had a fair number of tornadoes in Indiana. Most did little damage, usually falling tree branches and a few fallen trees. Sometimes power lines will be down. Roofs might lose some shingles.
Some tornadoes do significant damage. One hit the local airfield and flipped pretty much every small plane not in a hangar.
The same tornado exploded a gas station. Cinderblocks were flung everywhere, but no fires. The tornado drove hail with enough force that the aluminum sidng on my sister’s home was all dented up and had be replaced.
I watched a poleshed (maybe 10x12m, corrugated aluminum, 15×15cm beams) that had been ripped free by the tornado, blowing across an empty field like a tumbleweed.
I recall no casualties from any local tornadoes. Nor were any of the tornadoes I actually saw shaped like a funnel. They were more like tubes going straight down and kicking up huge clouds of dirt and debris. Our tornadoes were a bit meh compared to the monsters in some other states.
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A tornado went through my town a few years back. We were sheltering in the cellar. We didn’t hear it, it was about 5 miles away from us. It completely took out about 5 houses, and all the trees down a street. But no one was hurt. A tornado about 50 miles from us 20 years ago took out an all the trees in the woods for about a mile, 100 yards wide. Damages a bunch of buildings, too.
I don’t live in an area that gets a lot of tornados. Other places get worse damage, and hurt people.
Ever see groundskeepers or yard maintenance people or gardeners using a weed whacker? You know, the loud, spinny things that you use to put an edge on a strip of grass?
Imagine you’re an ant in the path of that. That’s how I’d frame a real, legitimate tornado. They’ll level everything in their path, but can leave things outside that path relatively untouched, provided they don’t get hit with debris.
In 2011 a tornado went through Joplin, Missouri (middle of the United States). An aerial picture looked like a giant lawn mower had been run across about a third of the city, shredding it.
If the tornado doesn’t hit a populated area, it’s a bunch of downed trees and power lines to clean up. If it hits a populated area, everything is either torn up or just gone.
If people take shelter they are usually ok.
Comedian Ron White has a joke:
> It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.
Don’t analyze the joke for scientific correctness. The point is that as already mentioned in other comments, large objects such as cars and trains are tossed around, but what I haven’t seen mentioned yet are the examples of lumber and other items piercing trees and concrete:
Piece of wood/lumber impaled through a concrete curb, picture taken in the aftermath of the 2011 Joplin, Missouri EF5 Tornado.
Items thrown at high speeds due to tornadoes is insane.
2×4 in tree on display for Tri-State Tornado 100th Anniversary
They’re incredibly personal. I in my 20 years in Alabama had them jump my house and tear up houses a half mile east west and south of me. So law of averages says I’m due. But they’ll form and just float in the air. That just drop and depending on the strength can level houses or just take out power lines.
One came through a Chicago suburb and crossed highway 59. On the east side of the highway was a large stucco church, made to look like adobe. On the west side was a ripe soybean field ready for picking. After the tornado, there was no soybean stalk taller than 3 inches in the field, and the wall of the church was bristling with soybean stalks embedded in it and sticking out.
Tornados are dangerous but with modern science, we know they’re coming well in advance- and that’s what makes them significantly less likely to kill you in 2025.
Even major ones like Tri-state of 1925 would have killed only a fraction of the 700 people it killed in 1925 had it happen today due to advanced warnings, better education and medical/search and rescue advancements.
They just didn’t have that to the same degree we have it now meaning it would end up catching people by surprise. Nowadays, the infrastructure alone needed to make such early warnings systems and early response possible would have been inconceivable to people living in that time- let alone the scientific advancements with understanding them.
I’m stuck on Singapore not getting natural disasters. You all are practically in the middle of the ocean. How is that possible? No hurricanes? No tsunamis? No floods? What’s blocking those from hitting you?
Some of the biggest ones are so powerful that the wind will drive a piece of wheat straw several inches into a wooden telephone pole.
A lot of them hit rural countryside and wreck crops and trees because so much of the Midwest is wide open spaces.
They can be sudden. So the need to take shelter can happen at a moments notice. As opposed to a hurricane where you’ve likely been tracking it for days. And also the damage can be very localized in that one house is untouched and the next one is virtually destroyed.
Tornadoes are often called The Finger of God, they can be both merciful and devastating at the same time. They can destroy one house and won’t even damage a house 30 feet away. They are beautiful yet terrifying.
One thing that makes tornadoes so dangerous is that they’re extremely unpredictable.
Meteorologists can warn you about hurricanes several days in advance and can predict their path with a pretty narrow margin of error.
Every year, we get maybe a dozen storms that are capable of producing a tornado, but you never know when or where an actual tornado will develop until it’s too late.
Here’s my personal experiences with it. In 1998 Raleigh had what was labeled an F5, but is now classified as an F4.
It cut a path nearly 800m wide in places. It hit a local k-Mart, and cleaned it off the map. What was odd was you could be driving and go from normal, to complete bare earth, then right back to normal. We were driving to pick up some friends and go to school and we had to drive right through the path it took. It looked like a bulldozer just cleared it.
A friends dad had it go right through his back yard. Didn’t realize what it was until it was too late. It was past 1 in the morning and he was standing looking out his back sliding door, and said the entire world went green. Just pure green. NC has a lot of pine trees, and this was basically the tornado stripping every one of them of needles.
Had one friend who had to stand in a 1m x 1m closet with her whole family while it passed. Turns out the closet was the only thing standing when it was over. They walked out into the outside from what used to be the inside of the house.
As school kids we had two kinds of drills, fire and tornado. This one was probably less deadly because most people were asleep. I think the only deaths were stockers at K-Mart.