Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerbert | Hacker News Reader

"If you're ever in such a facility and a tornado hits, hide in a truck" is my take from this video.

Edit: it’s a bad take, read below.

That is a very bad take. What you are seeing are only those trucks that survived--because the trucks that didn't survive are too badly mangled to identify as trucks. If you look at some of the later pictures in this photo deck (https://fox2now.com/news/illinois/photos-tornado-destroys-ed...), you can make out several trucks whose occupants would be dead. At least one truck appears to be sheared cleanly in two. The trucks that survived appear to have done so largely because they were out of the main debris field.

Good to know, thanks for that!

If you hid close to the floor in front of the driver's seat and covered your head you'd stand a very good chance of being able to walk out. Even though the back is gone on a lot of those vehicles that section is just large flat walls that aren't really structural and are only built to stand up to wind and rain while driving. Hide in the part of the vehicle made to protect occupants from oncoming traffic.

I grew up in the northern Midwest, where tornados happen semi-regularly. If you’re facing a tornado and in a vehicle, you’re supposed to abandon the vehicle and get to a ditch or some other low point that provides solid sideways protection and lay down as flat as you can.

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.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/faq/tornado/safety.html

Aren’t there a lot of roads in the Midwest that have ditches for this reason? That page does seem to suggest that if you don’t have a ditch lower than the roadway nearby, staying low inside the car might be better than getting out, due to deadly flying debris? You’re toast if the vehicle takes flight, of course, but I guess statistically that’s not super common?

* 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.”

No. The ditches are for water drainage and Dragula's.

High winds are not tornadoes, these are very different circumstances. You are trying not to get hit by a tornado, and if you do trying not to get relocated by one, or you’re trying not to get hit by something thrown by a tornado. A high wind isn’t going to throw a house at you or a shard of metal though a tree, a tornado will. There are small ones that are mostly harmless and will at most knock over some corn, it’s hard telling the difference between one of those and one that will pick you up and throw you a quarter mile.

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 :)

Just to add, straightline winds (not tornadoes) do not change direction suddenly. A car is very aerodynamic, and if you face into the straightline wind with it, it's a good place to be.

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.

As a small child, I once spent time lying in a ditch while visiting relatives who lived in a Tornado prone region. We got in the ditch because it was after dark and we could hear a tornado getting close but we couldn't see anything. We were lucky that it passed close to our farm but not upon us. The chaos and the violence of the wind and noise was terrifying. The visible path through the woods nearby the next morning had an alien feel to it. I remember the smell of tree sap from the many trees broken off and ripped apart. I feel so much for the many folks that endured those storms last night.

A guy I knew in college was in a truck when a tornado hit and it threw that truck like an angry toddler with a hot wheels. They found the truck more than a mile away. The guy wasn’t even in it anymore. They found him in several locations.

DO NOT get in a car for safety in a Tornado.

There was another case at the University of Maryland some years back. Two women were in a car that got picked up and tossed over (or into?) some trees. They did not survive.

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."

https://www.astro.umd.edu/~white/images/tornado/

Submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29522918

That's an absolutely terrible idea. Trucks are built with thin metal and probably have objects inside, not to mention could be easily lifted off the ground and thrown. In areas that are susceptible to tornados buildings are usually supposed to be built with at least one or two areas that have no windows and reinforced surroundings to hide when tornado alarms go off.

Yes there definitely was an interior bathroom designed as tornado shelter in this building. While it may or may not have stayed intact, it was your best chance at survival.

I’m pretty sure their comment was based on the almost flawless looking trucks in the rubble…

That is interesting but for all we know there was another row of trucks in the middle part that got picked up and thrown for miles.

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/...

Which are only there because tornadoes are extremely local events, you can be very close to the destruction and come out unscathed. Like it can reduce your house to toothpicks and leave your neighbors house entirely unharmed.

Correct. Also I’m ignorant about tornadoes.

Ideally, you want to be inside a windowless, concrete structure that's built into the ground. The closest thing like that that's typically available to people is a basement, which is why the advice is to go to the basement in a house that has one.

Real “put armor on the tips of the wings energy.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

That’s actually a really damn good point! I didn’t expect to see much from the video that wasn’t in the title, but I was struck by how complete the damage was in the tornado path; both sides of the building still there, and the middle so completely flattened, save the trucks.

Par for the course with tornados. Things stand that shouldn’t and thing that should have stood, don’t.

I’m not entirely sure what should or shouldn’t stand, but I guess I would speculate warehouse walls have a much higher surface area to mass ratio than cars, it certainly makes some sense to me that the building could go while the cars could stand, maybe especially if it’s less than EF4/5, no?

Any tornado can throw or flip a car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com