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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I understand the concern about tornados, but living in the Midwest I gotta be honest I have zero concerns. Tornados are rare and might only be 50-200ft wide.

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.

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Also in the Midwest, had those winds last night. The wind knocked down two fence sections in between our backyard and the neighbor's backyard this morning. I didn't notice and let the dogs out and they got to explore the neighbors back yard for almost 15 minutes before I realized I hadn't seen them for a while.

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.

Yes, a given funnel cloud has a limited destruction band, but even that can be considerable. Note that the largest storms ("wedge tornados) have recorded funnel diameters in excess of 1 mile in diameter* (1.6 km for the rest of the world).

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.

I get what you are saying, but long lived, highly destructive tornados like this one are downright terrifying.

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.

Hail also sucks

One of my old bosses bought a Subaru, she said the night she brought it come they had a massive hailstorm and when she filed an insurance claim they ended up totaling the car.

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.

If you get enough of them hail dings, they act like golfball dents and improve the aerodynamics: i buy cars with 'em for the better mileage.

And if you don't mind the appearance, it's a great way to buy a new or nearly-new car for cheap.

> everything built up a nice 1-2 inches of ice so power went out. Again way worse than tornadoes.

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.

In terms of destructiveness, yes the tornados are worse. But OP is saying that in terms of frequency*destructiveness*area, high winds are more impactful to his life.

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