Amazon Facility Hit by Tornado
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It seems like the worst tornado was this one that ripped through the warehouse (other pictures show some trees that had foliage stripped); you don't mess around with a tornado warning. It can drop pretty much anywhere along a storm front, or even sometimes in the middle or tail end of a front, especially when all the atmospheric conditions aligned like they did yesterday.
There was a much larger storm that seemed to have a 200 mi or so path through Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and I think Ohio(?) last night. Some of these storms are still getting severe warnings this morning!
Now, it seems that every semi-heavy thunderstorm comes with a "Tornado Warning" based on radar returns and other metrics. They happen so often it's hard to get too worked up about them. Another case of boy who cried wolf.
A WARNING means a funnel has been sighted or detected (e.g., by weather radar).
A WATCH means tornadic conditions are highly favourable.
From NOAA:
What is the difference between a Tornado WATCH and a Tornado WARNING?
A Tornado WATCH is issued by the NOAA Storm Prediction Center meteorologists who watch the weather 24/7 across the entire U.S. for weather conditions that are favorable for tornadoes and severe weather. A watch can cover parts of a state or several states. Watch and prepare for severe weather and stay tuned to NOAA Weather Radio to know when warnings are issued.
A Tornado WARNING is issued by your local NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Office meteorologists who watch the weather 24/7 over a designated area. This means a tornado has been reported by spotters or indicated by radar and there is a serious threat to life and property to those in the path of the tornado. A tornado warning indicates that you should ACT NOW to find safe shelter! A warning can cover parts of counties or several counties in the path of danger.
https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/tornadoes/
It's quite likely that either detection (and so sightings) has improved, or that tornados are now more prevalent in actuality. There's good evidence for both.
A WARNING means a funnel has been sighted or detected (e.g., by weather radar).
A WATCH means tornadic conditions are highly favourable.
Fortunately, inside the edit window for once, I've updated my comment.
(Original repeated "warning" for both definitions in the part I'd written out rather than copied from NOAA.)
The most powerful tornados are the terrifying F5 category ones. The US has had 59 of those. Throughout the rest of the world, no other country has had more than two. See [2].
More precisely, most of these F5 tornadoes have happened in just a few states, Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas have had six each, and Alabama has had seven. See [3].
[1] https://the-weather-station.com/countries-with-most-tornadoe...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_F5_and_EF5_tornadoes
The 2 rooms themselves were basically a 12” enclosure (including the ceilings). There were also concrete pillars in the room to reinforce the structure. During normal times we used them for various activities. But, at least during a couple of summers, we had to evacuate (from the cabins or wherever) there. The program staff (people in charge of the camp) were always monitoring the meteorological radar 24/7. This was in North Texas, which is tornado alley. The camp was an hour north of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.
You lose a ton of stability once that roof is gone. You lose a truss or a few pillars, and I'd imagine it came down like a house of concrete cards very, very quickly after the first wall section fell.
It has no chance against a tornado direct hit. You need a dedicated shelter structure for that.
I’m much more concerned about general high winds. I live in a neighborhood amongst the fields and we regularly get 50-70 mph sustained winds with 70-90 mph gusts. We get these storms 2-4 times a year. Last night we had 40 mph winds with 55mph gusts.
To put it in perspective I’ve watched my neighbors fence blow apart and slam cars and neighbors windows/walls. Watched large play sets roll down the street, etc. our HOA had to put in rules about using iron / aluminum fences for this reason.
A couple years ago we had a thunderstorm & snow storm with high winds and temperatures were just right so everything built up a nice 1-2 inches of ice so power went out. Again way worse than tornadoes.
I guess the only silver lining is there are plenty of "salvage title" cars out here that are salvage just because of hail. Great for anyone that needs a car and doesn't care about dents.
Somewhere around 100 people died just last night in these tornados. I think your couple inches of ice and power outage and fences in cars is not so bad compared to these tornados last night.
Our section of the fence used to have issues also, but we spent an afternoon recently reinforcing the weak sections, and it held up just fine last night. If that had gone down though, they'd get to run directly into a prairie and anywhere in town, so I feel pretty lucky it was just part of the fence with my neighbor.
One of the two dogs did run away as a puppy (slipped out of a harness to escape going into the vet's office) and it took us four days to find and retrieve him, so I have firsthand experience and I definitely do not want to go through that process again, hopefully ever.
Additionally, once tornadic conditions are encountered, the risk itself is present over a large area, and people across 100s or 1,000s of square miles (that's rougly 260 -- 2,600 km^2) may be cautioned to take cover, affected by other strong winds, by windblown debris, and/or local or regional damage caused by the storms themselves. High winds sufficient to be damaging can exist well outside the vortex, the condensation funnel does not indicate the limit of tornadic winds, and the entire storm may be rain-wrapped, preventing visual observation.
It's a bit like being in a crowd whilst a gunman is actively shooting. The damage cross-section of any one round is small. The net effect on an aware crowd is large. The potential for damage itself changes behaviour considerably and has a marked psychological impact.
Wind damage increases with the square of the speed, and gusts are not sustained winds. The damage caused by a 500 MPH tornado field experienced for five several minutes is thousands of times greater than a few seconds of 50 mph gust, and that gust alone could topple a tree. The tornado will pick up the tree and use it to wipe your house from the Earth, with earnest effort and taking its time in doing that.
Initial reports are that this tornado was three-quarters of a mile wide and traveled more than two hundred miles. That’s 150 square miles of near total devastation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/quad-state-tornado-cros...
Edit: Yes, this is the same tornado: https://meaww.com/tornado-warning-amazon-warehouse-edwardsvi...
Edit 2: Hmm. Maybe not. Looks like I was wrong initially, and the fact this tornado hit the same night as an Amazon warehouse got leveled by another tornado is just the world's shittiest coincidence.
Edit:
https://twitter.com/ellenbacca/status/1469542791659368449?s=...
St. Louis is ~200 miles to the north (Edwardsville is an Illinois suburb in metro east). The tornado you're referencing tracked from Arkansas east, different tornado.
Another source https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/11/us/tornado-ma...
It's also possible to make tornado proof residential homes, but they're expensive and not very appealing: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tornado-proof-homes-oklahoma_...
https://www.quora.com/How-hard-would-it-be-to-build-tornado-...
So first off, to survive the wind speeds of an F-5 tornado wouldn’t be hard to build. This issue is more about price than difficulty. Add extra fasteners, sturdier materials, etc. Once you get the foundation properly anchored and the frame reinforced, the rest is very simple.
The real issue is with the debris. Imagine a tree being tossed into the house. Even IF you built the walls to withstand it, which would be insane in a residential structure, you still have doors, windows, etc. Unless you build underground, or spent 5x more for a tiny house, it would be near impossible.
Your best bet is to not build in the middle of a tornado-prone area.
To put it in perspective an F5 (strongest tornado) will leave just dirt behind and all structures, vegetation, and soil will be gone.
Here’s an example of an F5 aftermath in Illinois in the 90s
https://www.weather.gov/images/lot/pastevents/1990/Aug28/pla...
You either need very thick castle kinds of walls or to sink underground and essentially build a big hobbit hole kind of construction where wind hits a gentle slope instead of a flat wall.
A building designed to take an 80 mph wind is just a lot different than one to take a 250mph wind. One is basically guaranteed and the other an extreme rarity.
So it doesn't really make sense to spend money for something that happens once every few thousand years and is typically pretty minor when it happens. Especially given that it is usually completely predictable when it happens. Tornadoes don't suddenly appear out of a blue sky. There were warnings for the last few days that storms capable of producing tornadoes were likely for the areas that were hit last night. When the storms were going on, the TV networks interrupted programming and had the weather forecasters tell where the storms were and where they were headed next. Tornado sirens would have been going off long before the tornadoes hit. People would be getting texts on their phones warning them to take cover.
If you're in a well-built structure, you're going to be fine in most tornadoes. Even for EF2 or EF3, you would most likely be OK even in a house without a basement if you took shelter in an interior closet on the ground floor. If you're in a mobile home, you're toast. For an EF4, you have a decent chance if you are in an interior room in a basement. So for the vast majority of tornadoes, which are already rare, there isn't much reason so spend money to protect property when there is already a way to protect lives.
For EF5 tornadoes, it would be challenging to build anything other than an underground bunker to withstand them. They are incredibly rare, Wikipedia says 59 in the US since 1950. An EF5 tornado doesn't just level a house, it rips it from the foundation, sends it flying through the air and shatters it into a million pieces. Here's what an EF5 tornado does to a house: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/f5.htm. It can rip the asphalt from a roadway and send it flying through the air. If you're in a building in the path of an EF5 tornado, you are probably best off following the advice my redneck step dad gave me when I was a kid for what to do in the case of a nuclear attack. He said to head down to the basement to an interior hallway, crouch down on the floor, tuck my head down between my knees as far as I could, and kiss my ass goodbye.
The basement ceiling is not concrete typically, and in an EF5 tornado it floats away into the air like a feather.
Survivable? Sure, with a probability distribution that I don't consider particularly favorable.
My heart goes out to the families of those involved. This would be devastating at the best of times.
I would not go so far as to say 'Very rare.' Even before we started seeing more major impact to our climate due to global warming, winter tornado outbreaks were roughly ~10% of all tornado outbreaks. https://www.spc.noaa.gov/publications/galway/winter.pdf
Spring and fall are definitely the most active seasons for tornados but they occur often enough year round that I think that, at least for the US, you can't say tornados are rarer than 'uncommon' for any time of year.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/11/us/tornado-ma...
I know it's paywall'd, but I couldn't find any any other media outlet with a simple damage map like this.
(1) you can't afford to cover the loss if it should occur (or maintaining/raising cash to cover it would be more expensive than the cost of insurance);
(2) the peace of mind from knowing you won't have to worry about raising cash to cover a loss (even if you could cover it) is worth the cost of insurance to you, even if it's a bad deal financially; or
(3) you know more than the insurance actuaries about your individual risk profile and have an edge (which is rare but can happen -- e.g., you know a specific product model is extraordinarily likely to fail and buy a cheap extended warranty for it).
The first is the best and primary reason to buy insurance, the other two are corner cases.
Auto liability insurance is an example because it protects other drivers. Another example might be homeowner's insurance, which (if you have a loan) protects the lender too because the house is collateral.
Or back on amazon, under the different name
Source: https://twitter.com/AmeliaMtv/status/1469634726558412800
Buildings in Tornado-prone areas must be built with tornado shelters. Those are rooms within the building that are designed to withstand both a hit from a tornado, and the debris.
To be clear, the entire building does not need to be a tornado shelter. Just enough space within the building to hold its occupants.
This was the wrong decision also for Amazon. Taking at least the bare minimum reasonable measures to protect their employees would have saved the company a lot of money and lawyers time. Nobody could have stopped the warehouse destruction in any case but the recovering would have been much more simple and much faster.
Weather forecasts can usually identify that the conditions favorable for tornados are happening. That is announced as a Tornado Watch. If someone sees a tornado, they will issue a Tornado Warning, usually for the whole county. They will sound sirens if available. People are urged to take shelter, ideally underground. Otherwise they are told to shelter in the most substantial part of a building. Many people do take shelter but others decide to tough it out.
Tornados are relatively small compared to hurricanes and earthquakes but they are very intense within a few hundred foot wide area where they tear everything apart and blow it around with 300mph winds doing more destruction with that debris. They move in erratic directions and can pickup and hop around. There can be multiple tornados at one time.
Any one person is not a great risk of harm but anyone in the path of the tornado is at great risk. People living in the area have been through tornado warnings before without harm. This can lead to people assuming that they will be fine and not taking precautions. Chances are they are right but if they are wrong… it goes very wrong.
There are occasions where tornados can be predicted accurately with radar data, yet with only about a 4 minute lead time. The hook echo has been recognized for decades with recognition and detection further refined with Next Gen Doppler radar.[1] But not all tornadic storms display a hook echo and not all hook echoes produce tornadoes.
I’ve lived in the Midwest my whole life. I’ve heard many tornado sirens, been through many watches and warnings, and never once actually been close to a tornado that did any damage.
A few months ago I was woken in the middle of the night by my wife who heard sirens. I was groggy, and before I was convinced to get out of bed, the sirens stopped. This has happened dozens of times in my life, and felt entirely routine - there was no panic. A few minutes later my phone gave an emergency alert announcing a Tornado Watch. I decided it was time to move to the basement, so I went downstairs and set up candles and blankets, and then began the process of gently waking my 3 young children in an attempt to move them without terrifying them.
As I moved the last of them, I glanced at a clock and saw it was 11:53. We moved to the basement and all was quiet. It seemed like another false alarm.
The next morning I discovered that the tornado hit two blocks away from me, and leveled entire street’s worth of houses. Radar confirmed the tornado passed through my neighborhood at 11:50. If I had been two blocks south, at least me and my son would be dead. Potentially more of us.
Alarm fatigue is real, but don’t let it happen with tornado sirens. They come quick and hit hard.
What might apply creating similar alarm fatigue effect, and this is really just me guessing based on Amazon facilities reputation, is the incentive (or its lack thereof) Amazon may provide for workers to evacuate vs continue their work.
* I have never experienced tornado alarm, but have experienced multiple rockets alarms, some of which, I've (foolishly) decided to ignore in favor of getting another hour of sleep.
Here's an article with photos for anyone who doesn't want to watch the video: https://fox2now.com/news/illinois/photos-tornado-destroys-ed...
It is quite impractical to build a large building that will withstand a tornado. The fact that the building was cut in half and the contents largely removed is not terribly surprising.
Buildings like this (including big box stores, large grocery stores, office buildings, etc.) typically have designated tornado shelter areas. These should be on the lowest floor (below ground level is the best) with small rooms. The walls are generally made of cinder blocks or something sturdier. If you are in a building like this, need a tornado shelter, and don't know where it is look for the restrooms. When you get there you will likely find a sign that indicates it is the tornado shelter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZMAmxP5cgs
Cinder-block with metal reinforcement is a level beyond brick though.
Was at my friends house in texas a month ago who had a storm shelter in the garage, it's a 1/4" steel box that is anchored to the ground and has the GPS coordinates etched on the inside since if it does it's job there may not be anything around but GPS to tell you where it is.
If your plat and neighbourhood have been scrubbed by the FSM's Own Geographic Erasor Pencil, there's not going to be much by way of landmarks to guide responders. Street sights, structures, and even kerbside markings will be gone.
GPS coordinates tend not to be strongly affected by severe wind events.
Survivors or those requesting help might not be adults or residents. They might be children, visitors, or strangers seeking shelter (particularly in the case of a business or commercial address). They might be volunteers searching for survivors. Contact might be over radio if phone service is down. GPS operates directly via satellite, so is independent of and terrestrial infrastructure.
The operating assumption of a disaster is that previous assumptions of normality are violated. Responses which remove assumptions of available serivces, or restore a bare minimal functional level of service, or which protect against likely disruptions, tend to be those that are most useful.
GPS is based on
I think an address is much easier to understand for a child.
Using an uncommon for most people method of location identifier brings problems of its own. Sure Lat/Long is familiar to us, but I’d guess the average person is unfamiliar.
Like I said, I like the idea but it doesn’t come without its own problems and addresses aren’t as useless in this scenario as implied.
You'll find that this is the case for, e.g., earthquake construction codes in seismicly-active regions.
Structures can be rebuilt. Humans are a more challenging rehabilitation challenge.
Though the Joplin facility was demolished, and five patients died, those were due to loss of power, and not from tornadic winds or debris themselves.
The building performed as intended, even under a direct strike.
It's also quite obvious there's a need for a shelter in areas where tornadoes are likely to form. So obvious in fact it's impossible to plead ignorance of that need, so the only other possible reason they didn't is carelessness because they could not have cared less if employees lives were at risk.
I do not know for sure if that same procedure would have applied to DLI4. But my feeling is that unless the state of Illinois, Madison County, or the city of Edwardsville have a specific regulation requiring such buildings to have tornado shelters, then there was no such shelter at DLI4, and workers were instructed to assemble in the center of the building.
Internal office sections of large Amazon fulfillment centers are off-limits to non-managers, and unauthorized entry is prevented thru the use of door badge scanners, which will not unlock the door unless the badge owner has sufficient permissions.
I can't imagine what an awful, dehumanizing, and absolutely terrifying experience it was.
Edit: it’s a bad take, read below.
My Oklahoma high school took a direct hit from a tornado and cars in the parking lot were found wadded up all over town. If a tornado can pick up an Oldsmobile it can pick up a Sprinter.
Refer to these photos of what a tornado does to a truck. https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2021/...
Tornados are weirdly destructive. Some things that get directly hit survive when they shouldn’t. Vehicles are not built to take the damage even a small tornado brings.
* bewildered by the downvotes, but just to clarify, the NOAA page says explicitly: “In a car or truck: […] If you are caught by extreme winds or flying debris, park the car as quickly and safely as possible -- out of the traffic lanes. Stay in the car with the seat belt on. Put your head down below the windows; cover your head with your hands and a blanket, coat, or other cushion if possible.”
Absolutely do not hide in a vehicle from a tornado. You want to be low and near something well anchored. Inside a ditch, huddled up next to an overpass foundation, etc.
A tornado either hits you it doesn’t, but few people in places where there are tornadoes are going to be dumb enough to be near one in a vehicle. You can avoid them while in your vehicle but even seasoned storm chasers still sometimes get taken.
Source: Iowa raised, been a handful of meters away from a weather event that lifted and shifted a couple of buildings a foot off their foundations and peeled a section of roof from a barn. It may have been a microburst instead of a tornado, it was quite dark at the time.
And no, the ditches are there for water drainage like the other poster said… though I’m not sure about vampires :)
Tornadoes on the other hand are circular (roughly). Plus subvortices inside of the tornado make for unpredictable and turbulent wind.
Your car may handle the 200mph wind fairly well in one direction, but the next second it hits you at a right angle and bye bye.
DO NOT get in a car for safety in a Tornado.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_outbreak_of_September_...
"Tragically, [the victims] had just left the building and were driving away when the funnel picked them up and carried the car several hundred yards, over one of the high-rise dorms, before dropping the car into the woods beyond."
To answer your question though, unless the item someone ordered is unique and only stored in that warehouse, they will probably just mark the warehouse as down and the system will simply route around it and increase delivery estimates for the people who were served by that warehouse. They will probably redeploy the surviving trucks to nearby warehouses to handle the load.
Asking seriously. I want those complete strangers to not be in situations where they could die, and I want no one to die the same way in the future because someone did an engineering and made it safer. But they are people I don't/didn't know. Anything I could think of to say would feel as useless as "thoughts and prayers."
I don't know why I need to provide a token "thoughts and prayers" just because my question is related to some tragedy. Everything has become so absolutely performative these days.
Yes, I am sorry this happened to some people. But I guess I'm an asshole because I didn't write some meaningless consolatory words in a comment on a tech forum before having the audacity to ask a legitimate logistics question.
Thanks for the answer, but please skip the condescension next time.
You could instead not post.
> But I guess I'm an asshole because I didn't write some meaningless consolatory words in a comment on a tech forum before having the audacity to ask a legitimate logistics question.
Timing is everything. There is a time to discuss those sort of things; this is not it.
As far as I can tell my question is in line with the guidelines of the site and the submission itself doesn't provide any clarity about what the discourse of this thread is supposed to be about. It is quite open-ended.
> Timing is everything. There is a time to discuss those sort of things; this is not it.
Since you seem to know what time that will be, when is it?
To show you care about the humans that died. It's not performative. It's called being part of a society. Society prefers members who show compassion to others, and it's an important part of being a social creature.
Feel free to express how upset you are, but please don't demand that we somehow express our feelings in a way that you deem sufficient.
Imagine everyone at Amazon directly involved in the operational disaster recovering effort having to preface everything they say and write with “thoughts and prays” before getting on with fixing issues.
We’re well aware people have died, and many more will have their lives impacted.
I’m an infrastructure and steel construction guy, I’m here to get shit done. If you need consoling you’ll find me quite abrasive as you’re probably in my way.
Friends, family, mental healthcare professionals, and religious practitioners are probably better at that than I.