Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis | Hacker News Reader

Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

reuters.com

288 points1cvmask336 comments

I slept through three tornado sirens last night. It was pretty wild. The first one, I thought it was a test. (We have tests every month on the 1st.) But it wasn't until a few minutes in that I realized it was for real.

Then apparently I just... went to sleep? That wasn't the smartest decision I've ever made. It went off a couple more times.

One strange thing was the realization that I had no idea where to turn for information. The fall of TV means that in a situation like that, there isn't any "tune to your local TV station" type broadcast. All you get is a tornado siren.

I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar. Though at least with that, there'll be some information channel to turn to.

Interesting that your reaction was to just go to sleep. Do you feel you have nothing left to lose in life?

I'm really not sure. It surprised me. I was just comfy.

It was also a question of probabilities; very few people die in an event like this, so the odds seemed in my favor. But of course, https://xkcd.com/795/ points out that fallacy.

EDIT: Their question was fair. I feel bad that they're downvoted; please be nice.

One day, fully alert and sober at something like 5 PM with no excuses, during a thunderstorm, I heard tornado sirens go off. I thought to myself, "sheesh they are only supposed to run tests at noon once a month, and not during sto- oh"

That is also my response to fire alarms so sensitive that they'll start to chirp when I can't even recognize the smell of a neighbor 50+ ft away smoking outside. It'd be really nice if no one smoked and if these alarms reserved the shrill noises for real emergencies and user initiated tests only.

FYI, fire alarms are designed to become more sensitive as they age/die so if yours is picking up false positives, it’s a good indicator you need to replace it. That, or it really is poor ventilation.

I hadn't really thought about it, but that makes a ton of sense. Smoke detectors typically use an alpha-emitter, smoke absorbs alpha particles, so a failure to detect is what triggers the alarm. The cost for a false-negative is much higher than a false-positive, so that's what the detector should default to.

I have a Nest smoke alarm and it was bad for going off due to the vapours from showers, boiling water when cooking.

But to the credit of Nest/Google/Alphabet they replaced it free of charge. It was just an off-the-cuff comment I made on Twitter and Nest said send it back. They sent a new one, a new model, and when it arrived I sent back the older model. The new model is much better essentially zero false positives due to water vapour.

Mine only chirps when the battery dies. Of course, it's always at 3am and I don't have any 9v batteries. Worse now is none of the stores are open 24 hours so you have to suffer 'til 6am or pay $5 at a gas station for a battery.

This would be a good opportunity to get rechargeable batteries and/or an alarm that takes AAs.

Isn't this what emergency alerts are for on our phones?

No. There's for some parental custody battle 200 miles away. I disabled mine because I can't afford to have an audible alarm go off randomly in my line of work.

Thinking of what jobs this would be a thing...all of them. Turn your damn ringers off at work people!!!

Even with ringer off, the ‘Amber Alerts” ring. I’ve had it ruin recording sessions.

Amber alerts are not really that frequent. Jane 2 cubicles over that has that cute ring tone, or Jim next to you with the clicks whose got text notifications turned to 11 are the problem.

I know many people that turned it off because the authorities abused the system too much.

Yes, I especially loved it months ago when I was getting Amber alerts for a child abduction that took place in San Antonio (I'm in Dallas). I was totally ready to jump out of bed at 3am and look for a silver Impala that couldn't have even gotten to my location for another 5 hours.

if you live in tornado alley you ought to have an emergency radio, it at least gives you something to listen to while the power’s out

https://www.amazon.com/Raynic-Emergency-Portable-Flashlight-...

There's something surreal about this being an Amazon link, for a customer in St. Louis.

Yeah definitely. Especially one with the NOAA weather alert stations like this one. You can just tune in to that and get regular updates about the weather situation.

If you happen to lose yours, like I did (It's in the basement somewhere, but I should probably just buy another one at this point), as long as your internet is still up and running you can stream from a laptop, which I've done a few times:

https://www.weatherusa.net/radio

They're also windup, so even if your power's out for 10 days, they'll still work.

These are great devices, especially the better models. Radio including weather band, flashlight and phone charger, plug in a lamp or water kettle. Must have on the gulf coast.

>The fall of TV means that in a situation like that, there isn't any "tune to your local TV station" type broadcast. All you get is a tornado siren.

You didn't get a phone alert about it happening? I thought those were mandatory for these kinds of events, I think they even overrule some of the DND rules on your phone.

I had something similar happen this summer, and I can't remember if I woke up from the alert and went back to sleep or woke up to a missed alert, but I definitely got more information on my phone without ever asking for it.

I definitely get the Amber-alert-style phone alert for Tornado warnings in my area.

I had to turn these off because they went off 5 times a day for large parts of the year, often at night. We get a lot of weird spot storms in northeast Georgia from the Gulf that seem to confuse warning systems. It was a choice between dying of stress and poor sleep for sure or maybe dying from a tornado.

Yeah I have all that alerting stuff disabled on my phone too. Way too many false alarms.

> You didn't get a phone alert about it happening? I thought those were mandatory for these kinds of events, I think they even overrule some of the DND rules on your phone.

I turned those off at the system level because the local authorities would abuse them to announce allegations of kidnapping, or license plate numbers of people who supposedly shot at cops and other such things that are not a threat to my life or safety (and thus not my business).

Apple, fortunately, in iOS 15 broke out the categories so you can turn off the "we want you to pay attention to this" crap from the police separately from the "here is critical information about something that might kill you".

Having them on the same category/priority before was massively irresponsible on the part of the police. I'm glad people with enough sense to understand alert fatigue eventually prevailed.

I was getting "emergency alerts" for "COVID vaccine available in your area."

That may be really important information, but it doesn't rise to the level of an emergency.

Yep, I turned them all off after one too many covid alerts.

My area never did that, any government that used EAS for that should be voted out at the next opportunity

You can't vote out the police in the USA, generally, otherwise people would have done so long ago.

Highly unlikely that the police issued the EAS about COVID, also even if you can not vote out the police, you can vote out the head of the police (sheriff or mayor) who would have had to approve an EAS about covid

However these types of messages are often sent out by our local dept of Emergency Management, or Health Dept, both of which do have access to EAS just like the police.

Hmm. I guess I should've checked my phone. Thanks for the tip!

I lived in Midwest for over 20 years. There were times when I'd be sipping coffee while sitting outside a coffee shop underneath giant funnel clouds above. Tornado alerts are common but touchdowns are so rare that you just kind of not pay attention anymore. With that said, it seems like when they do occur they are increasingly more damaging and closer to densely populated areas. Two years ago there was one just a few miles outside of Kansas City downtown. I remember hearing the next days in the news that it was nothing short of a miracle that it didn't move toward downtown and instead went off into the rural parts of the city.

Interesting. I lived in the Midwest for nearly 20 years as well. Tornado watches were common, warnings much less so... and if anyone saw a funnel cloud, it was time to panic, duck, and cover right freaking now.

years ago they would only call a warning when they had a confirmed visual on a touch down, I am not sure when they made the change but for at least the last few years (and probably longer) I have noticed them calling more and more warning based on radar signature alone

I'd venture a guess that's due to better radar and better spotting intelligence. When you can't physically see tornadoes when they're rain-wrapped, but have high confidence that they're there, you're putting lives at risk by not activating the sirens.

In part because the radar tech has advanced so much. Based on reflectivity, velocity, and correlation coefficient alone, they are able to make a pretty sound guess about whether or not a supercell or QLCS is capable of producing a tornado. There’s no reason why you would want to wait for visual confirmation of the radar output when it could mean the difference (potentially) between giving people in the path a long or a short lead time on the warning.

There is a reason, which is that the new criteria for warning trains people to not take them seriously as they don't necessarily mean acute danger from tornado anymore.

As our radar technology has advanced, it's really a shame that warnings are less indicative of a tornado than they were a decade ago.

A better solution would be three categories of warning (watch, new possibly fake warning, and the old real warning) as each should prompt more response than the lower tier.

The general public can’t grasp the distinction between watches and warnings, and your solution is to divide warnings into subcategories?

My proposed solution is to continue to reserve the word warning for its old use, to keep people safe by preventing the cry-wolf effect and to introduce an intermediate term to appease the people who want to ring the alarm more often and communicate with locals who want more information.

I agree that the older, simpler watch and warning system was better, if that's what you're saying.

We agree that the existing watch/warning system as it stands is highly effective. Sure, there are more warnings than there used to be, but that is largely based on the fact that the radar data available to make warning decisions is much more reliable than it used to be. There are potentially more warnings issued that don’t verify, but they’re also based on data that is much likelier to verify. (As opposed to relying solely on spotters to make warning decisions.)

Adding complications to the existing watch/warning system just seems unnecessary. What people don’t grasp is that a tornado warning may not verify for their exact location, while it may (unfortunately) verify for a location two miles away. The fact that some warnings don’t verify doesn’t mean we should change our warning system. What we have in place remains highly accurate. It might be better if people understood how to interpret radar data and to evaluate warnings based on that.

Yes, the bottom line is we have to hope for more sophisticated interaction with weather alerts over time. Events like this weekend's tornado could have that silver lining as the timeline becomes more widely known as it currently appears to have involved tornado(s) that moved too quickly once on the ground for lives to be saved. I'm not optimistic given the careless behavior I've observed living in tornado-prevalent areas--but this was a bad one.

I suspect the confusion is the specific but uncommon word choice. Perhaps if they were called something like "tornado likely" and "active tornado", respectively, it would be more widely understood.

Now, that’s a reasonable solution. My only concern is that people won’t take “tornado likely” seriously. But I guess, based on OP, people don’t take “tornado warning” seriously, either.

The NWS does distinguish between warnings for radar-indicated tornadoes and for confirmed tornadoes on the ground (usually confirmed by spotters), but you have to read the warning text to tell (you'll see phrasing like "particularly dangerous situation" and "confirmed tornado" in the warning when they're working based on something that's been visually seen versus radar indicated). For an example of what this looks like, see the Text Data tab here [1]; this warning (from last night in Nashville) was originally issued for a radar-indicated tornado, which was subsequently observed on the ground and the warning was updated accordingly in Update 1.

But you should take any tornado warning seriously. Yes, they come more frequently than they used to, but that's because we didn't have any advance warning before-- if you wait to get to your safe place until a tornado's been confirmed on the ground, you might not be able to get to safety in time. Or you might not get to safety at all; just because someone hasn't seen a tornado and reported it to the NWS doesn't mean it's not on the ground and deadly.

That's why you have to read into the text to see this distinction: the actions you should take if you're in the path of a PDS (observed) tornado warning and the actions you should take if you're in the path of a radar-indicated tornado warning are the same.

[1] https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KOHX-TO-W...

Also worth noting that “more frequently” for any given location is likely somewhere on the order of 1-2 warnings per year maximum.

Excellent information; thank you. Communicating all this to the public is a significant challenge. You can't ask people to take shelter more often, and you also can't ask them to read more detailed reports. Compliance rate saves lives, for better or worse.

Yeah, there is a reason, after so many times of dropping what you are doing and rushing to the basement, only to have nothing happen, it becomes an annoyance and is not taken seriously.

I mean, frankly, how often are you under a legitimate TOR warning that you’re having to do this? I live in the Midwest—in tornado country, no less—and the number of TOR warnings that disrupt my life in a given year I can count on one hand (assuming there are any).

Also this just misunderstands the threat of tornadoes. A warning is issued for a county-wide area, even though a tornado threatens (at most) a couple-mile wide swath of land. That seems ridiculous, except for the fact that even small deviations in the storm’s path can disrupt lives significantly. The NWS isn’t wrong.

Tornado and other storm warnings haven't been issued by county for several years now-- warnings are issued for a polygon where the storm may impact (plus some margin of error). If you're in a tornado warning polygon now, you'll want to take shelter. If you're not in the polygon, you don't need to (depending on how you get your storm alerts, you might still be alerted by county, though-- that's my big complaint about the current state of weather radio).

https://www.weather.gov/media/pah/WeatherEducation/stormbase...

>>>Tornado and other storm warnings haven't been issued by county for several years now... depending on how you get your storm alerts, you might still be alerted by county, though-- that's my big complaint about the current state of weather radio

To a normal person this is perceived as as a warning being issued for them, even if you are technically correct that the NWS only target a narrow polygon, if a person phone lights up with an EAS saying "Tornado warning", or their TV, or weather radio, that is perceived as them personally being issued a tornado warning.

  > after so many times of dropping what you are doing and rushing to the basement, only to have nothing happen, it becomes an annoyance and is not taken seriously.

Is that feeling widespread? In my area we have sirens for different a type of threat, but everybody that I know drops what they are doing and rushes to the shelter, even if it happens two dozen times day and night.

To what would you attribute the lack of compliance? Attrition? How often is "so many times"? I'm seriously interested because it seems to different - and indifferent.

I have never once dropped what I was doing an rushed to a shelter unless forced to do so by overriding company policy while at my employers place of business.

If I am operating under my own accord if a warning is issued I normally find the nearest weather resource with active tracking of the cell to see if I should even care as warning are no where near targeted enough

If I am in path of the storm I then look to see if this is a confirmed or radar based warning, I then look to other sources (including visual outside) to my my own determination on if it is proper to shelter. 80% of the time I make the choice of Nope do not need to bother

I see, so at least you do check if the warning is pertinent to you. Our warnings cover relatively small geographical areas, so if we hear it then it sure is pertinent to us. But I understand that maybe your warnings cover larger areas.

Thanks for the detail. Here's to a siren-free week!

> it seems like when they do occur they are increasingly more damaging and closer to densely populated areas.

I think this more a function of urban sprawl, and the fact there are simply more populated area spread out over larger tracts of land, thus the odds of a tornado hitting a population center increase.

In short the tornadoes are not moving closer, the populated areas are what has moved

OK, that seems completely weird.

I've lived in the midwest for 50 years, and have never seen a funnel cloud (I have seen the aftermath of a few).

Twitter is a great source of information; when there's a tornado warning I keep a close eye on #gawx (substitute first 2 letters for your own state). That ends up producing a feed of info from meteorologists and amateur spotters with a mix of official reports, amateur info, photos, radar pics, etc. Often any photo or video will have comments from TV stations asking for permission to rebroadcast.

For me twitter is a terrible source of information because there is just too much noise. I rarely read anything on Twitter anymore

There's people who do this as a job/hobby. I don't mean following some random people. We live in SoCal and follow VCScanner, he has up to date info about fires, and is the whole reason we were already leaving our city when the firefighters were driving in to let people know to evacuate.

You can use your phone as an FM/AM radio receiver. Tune to your local station.

I assume you're talking about streaming the station over the Internet

No he or she is not, a radio receiver is not such a high tech after all and I think all of my mobile phones had or have that feature build in, even though I never used it (in some you would have to have earphones plugged in as a antenna)

Do you live in the American Midwest?

I haven't had a phone with built in radio, but back in the late 0s I had an ipod with a built in FM radio, and it was the coolest radio I ever had. You could pause and rewind it like a tivo. I assume the radio on a smart phone would be about the same.

Not all, not even most from the listings I looked at a few years ago. Only one of the three old Android phones I have supports it, and it's one without a recognizable brand (the other two are Samsung and LG).

Not true for all phones. I know I checked with at least one of my older phones (a Samsung Galaxy) and it could not do radio.

Edit: Checked: My current phone doesn't support radio as well.

Can you do this on an iPhone? The first time I was in a Tesla, my initial thought was why can’t my phone tune into FM Radio.

wow TIL Teslas don’t come standard with a radio, who do they think they are, Lotus? ;-)

I'm not sure it's what he said. Mine has a radio.

wow look at this guy, got the upgraded entertainment package with AM/FM radio!

(I kid, seems to be something that changes with the model year)

It has a DAB radio too!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting

First step is to plug in headphones to serve as an antenna. Then you're all set.

I downvoted you because very few phones have AM and/or FM receivers. I've never owned a phone with one. None of the most popular phones have had them.

TV is still a thing--get a small antenna to pick up your local stations. Growing up in tornado alley we always had a local TV news station on during severe weather. They cut out of regular broadcasting and usually have a live play by play with the weatherman showing radar and locations of known funnel clouds, etc. If you're going to live there make a plan for future severe weather like this--it's nothing you want to sleep through.

>The fall of TV

You mean in your daily in-take of media? Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather. It's actually part of their licensing. So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather. Even if regular programming is on, they will break in when requested by the NWS. Local radio will as well, but I can't remember the last time I heard Clearcom or whatever the othe station owner is do this. I just don't listen to radio.

Also, most local stations will also be running live webcasts to FB/YT/etc. They do this in order to avoid interrupting programming until it is urgent enough to do so.

I'm in North Texas, and during severe weather season, I have a web browser permantely tuned to the radar. If it's getting bad, I'll find a local station.

> I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar

If you're in Hawaii, you'll get a text.

> If you're in Hawaii, you'll get a text.

Or even a missile alert! This must have been terrifying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Hawaii_false_missile_aler...

> So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather.

How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors. Even for radio, I would have to go to my car to listen.

Get an emergency radio. They’re not expensive.

If getting a cheap TV is out of the question. Get a cheap USB TV Tuner (and prob a decent portable aerial, the ones that come with cheap USB TV Tuners are OK if you live in a strong signal area, but you might need something a bit better if not).

It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

Also get a cheap battery operated radio and a stock of batteries for it. Batteries don't last forever in storage, so replace them every now and then (check the expiry date on the pack) and don't leave the batteries in the radio but next to it (saves them leaking over the contacts, last thing you want to do when you NEED the radio is having to take it apart to clean the battery contacts or hunting for the batteries that fit it).

EDIT: Also something to put on your list, A decent flashlight. Your phone is great, but if you have a power outage then you will want to kepe that charge for actual phone calls.

> It comes with the side effect of being a decent SDR for tuning into all sorts of things not just your local TV stations :-)

USB broadcast tuners can be repurposed as software-defined radios? That sounds like a few Amazon and GitHub links I’d be very curious to see!

https://www.adafruit.com/product/1497 <-- is relatively affordable

But most of the cheap ones ($20 and less) are just DTV receivers that happen to be able to provide a signal that SDR tools can utilize.

More information about this: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

I think https://www.rtl-sdr.com/ would be a good place to start learning about SDR USB sticks. But beware -'this rabbit hole goes deep!

FM radio and ATSC TV are still things despite the presence of new media. And the hardware is cheaper than it’s ever been. A television is like fifty or sixty bucks on sale. It’s ridiculous. I remember as a kid so badly wanting a small 12” TV and it was like $250.

If you can get an antenna up then there are Ethernet-connected HDTV tuners you can use to pick up OTA.

Are you being pedantic with no information on how to receive local broadcasts because you've chosen to not have TV/radio/etc, or are you really just unaware of how to do this on modern equipment? Many responses answer if it is the latter, for the former, well, go back under your bridge troll ;-)

I was being pedantic. But also truthful, in that I do not have a tv and the only radio is in my car.

That's what I thought. So, the onus is on you to stay informed. Society has put in place many many ways to notify of severe weather. You have elected to use none. Don't be the next statistic.

The onus is indeed on me. When I've lived in places with rare susceptibility to tornados, they use the emergency alert system. When I lived somewhere with susceptibility to north korea firing missiles overhead, they have an air raid siren. When I lived somewhere the only weather danger is hurricanes, I just check the weather forecast.

Part of living in an area prone to certain disasters is being prepared to deal with them. Get a small weather radio.

But I would have to listen to its crap all the time waiting for the rare signal I actually want from it.

Edit: having continued reading more comments and googling what the fuck a “weather radio” is… I’m now deeply annoyed at the fact I have no equivalent living in Australia. I could look at a global weather service like Navtex but I’m actually not interested in the weather, i just want a way to get emergency broadcast warnings without relying on my phone. The system in Australia doesn’t use cell broadcast it uses a shitty alternative, they are tendering for a replacement that does use cell broadcast but who knows when that will actually be running. Since I have zero trust in the current system I’d like a way to get critical emergency notices without having to develop a habit of paranoid checking emergency websites or building my own fragile alert system using their RSS feeds or something like that.

If it’s of any comfort, there used to be a lot less severe weather to need a radio for, and no one’s quite caught up to the reality of it yet.

The thing about severe weather is you can tell when it's happening. Tornadoes don't typically drop out of the clear blue sky. If it's a heavy thunderstorm and the weather forecast for the day calls for torando watches then keep the radio on and nearby. This doesn't have to be complicated.

In my city, the public local station (CBFT-2) is broadcasting news and some other emissions on the Web. But I love my cheap ATSC tuner "converter box": can be useful in case of network outage, it can also record programs on a USB drive and play a lot of video files. Sadly, it's difficult to find an ATSC dongle for computer, they're less popular and more expensive than DVB dongles.

> How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors.

Buy a $15 DTV tuner and antenna and hook them up to a monitor. You're being blasted with free HDTV over the air.

I live fairly remotely in Canada and I'm not - I believe CBC may be available but I'm not certain

It was somewhat rhetorical, as I have access to weather alerts via the internet and am not in an area vulnerable to tornados or earthquakes.

Get a radio and batteries. It's part of being prepared for an emergency.

Wow. Go to their website, Twitter, whatever. Spend $15 on a weather radio with alerts. It’s really not as hard as you’re making it out to be.

> Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather.

Television stations in the U.S. are required, in a broad sense, to serve their local communities, and many choose to do so by providing weather forecasts and alerts, but I don’t know of any law or regulation that requires broadcasters to provide weather information, in emergencies or at all.

Stations do have to participate in the Emergency Alert System, but they don’t have to transmit anything other than the required tests and an Emergency Action Notification for a national emergency. (See 47 CFR 11.52(d)(4).)

The better source for tornado and other warnings is NOAA Weather Radio (https://www.weather.gov/nwr/), a network of dedicated FM stations transmitting in the 162 MHz band. Receivers are widely available and can be programmed to turn on only when a warning for a specific area is broadcast.

Well, yeah, required might have been too strong. It is strongly frowned upon for a station with a news/weather program to not participate in a "The NWS has requested...". Not sure they'd not get their license renewed, but their audience sure wouldn't watch them for much longer. What kind of news station would NOT broadcast this info?

Besides, if you're a news/weather station in Tornado Alley, you pride yourself on the equipment and people operating it. They do entire promos dedicated to storm spotting etc. I've worked with one local station shooting a package specifically for this.

Some of the news channels where my parents live have experimented with outsourcing and/or prerecording their weather reports. On one channel, the daily weather report talks about yesterday's weather and tomorrow's weather, but skips things like the current day's high temperature because it hasn't happened yet when that segment was recorded. Although I suppose if the anchors are live they can jump in with an emergency warning.

I hate everything you just said about current local station ownership. Budget cuts to the extreme to get outsourced weather. I don't know where "here" is for your parents, but I'm assuming weather doesn't get severe often there. Reminds me of LA. LA doesn't have weather. It has climate. The local programming there is beyond ridiculous. In my area, local weather people can literally save lives with their broadcasts. Yes, they get updates from NWS, but they are true meteorologists to be able to reach conclusions on their own without needing hand holding from NWS. That's my base line. Anything less than just seems like a waste.

> Local TV stations are required to broadcast weather. It's actually part of their licensing. So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather

On what? I don’t have a tuner

Honestly. You know exactly you’d need to watch TV (a tuner). Or more accurately, if you have a TV, you really just need an antenna. If you don’t have a TV, then many (most?) local TV stations have a website with streaming video. This is especially true for news and weather. And if that all fails, you can get a network tuner/dvr that will stream broadcast TV to an app.

There are many options to get local TV/weather. Let’s not pretend that this is a problem without a solution.

Smartphones are also plugged into emergency service broadcasts. I've received a few for severe weather in my area.

Get an emergency weather radio. I used to have one in the Midwest. I imagine they still work, right?

Hand crank radio that picks up weather band frequencies and has a built in flashlight and can be charged via solar. I love this gadget!

> One strange thing was the realization that I had no idea where to turn for information. The fall of TV means that in a situation like that, there isn't any "tune to your local TV station" type broadcast

Get a DTV antenna for your TV and you'll get your free local broadcasts.

> I imagine if nuclear armageddon ever happens, it'll be similar

In that case, I think any of us would be lucky to get a warning at all.

The most straightforward thing you can do is pick up a cheap TV antenna and a basic battery powered radio.

Over the air TV is actually really good now. The switch to digital brought full HD over the air. And local FM/AM radio will broadcast info in an emergency. Can get a weather radio too if you want to.

My wife and I were evaluating last night what to do. We saw the warnings, but they happen so often we just went back to bed after looking outside. Woke up to part of our siding was ripped off from the storms (not uncommon). We kind of figured it would happen, but the storms were hours long and 99.9% of the time nothing happens.

One of the many reasons I love the ABC (our national broadcaster in Australia) is that everybody knows that they will have the info you need in an emergency - on TV, radio, online, and social media, round the clock.

At least until Murdoch and Fairfax get their wish and the ABC is dismantled

Then we'll be able to hear about it in between commercials for gambling and MasterChef

Unfortunately I have to listen to them to find out. Our emergency alert system is basically garbage. If there was any kind of sudden emergency like a tornado (this becoming a real threat in Sydney and Perth it’s not common but i hear the phrase “mini-tornado” way too frequently over the last few years) Then our systems are completely inadequate for promptly alerting the population at risk. It’s scraping by for bushfires and other big long lasting dangers, but it’s utterly inadequate for “urgent emergencies”.

When I was studying in the states fire alarm tests (or someone cooking triggering them) were so frequent that I would have never expected to be informed of a real fire this way.

Monthly test alarms are so wrong.

Buy WX “weather alert” radio Midland makes a bunch of models some that even run off batteries. Basically it is several radio stations run By NOAA to send out local wether and warnings. They are like 20 bucks and most also do AM FM as well.

Do you think you would have reacted differently during tornado season? (I'm not sure when that is, but I am pretty sure December isn't in it, or at least was not before the storms of 2011.)

I think it is also worth pointing out that merely having sirens, and the information network capable (for the most part) of setting them off when and only when there is a significant risk, is well within about 90% of being as good as one should reasonably expect: if that is the most information you can get in the moment, how, rationally, should you respond, if not by seeking cover?

On the other hand, it is quickly counter-productive to set off the sirens for every mildly elevated risk, as it conditions everyone to be skeptical. Unfortunately, current social dynamics, which blame and punish anyone who makes a decision to not raise the alarm prior to something bad subsequently happening, is guaranteed to bring about this skepticism.

I didn't pay it much mind, exactly because it wasn't very warm out. Once tree branches started flying around and banging on the roof, I did go downstairs for a few minutes.

Following radar maps can give you a hint of what's to come. Check out this doppler map of Mayfield right before it got hit:

https://weather.us/radar-us/kentucky/radar-and-lightning/KHP...

Notice it was right in line with a cell at the "extreme/hail" end of the spectrum.

As far as I know we don't have tornado sirens here (Western Washington across Puget Sound from Seattle), but we got a tornado warning here a month ago and officials issued some kind of alert by smart phone.

It was amazingly loud on my iPhone. I don't think I've ever been so tired that I would have been able to sleep through it if it had happened when I was asleep.

Tornadoes are rare here--before that one the last had been in 2018, and the last before that was 1991, and I don't think there are any on record before that in this county.

I Googled for something like "active tornado warnings" and found this site: https://www.tornadohq.com/

The warning for my area was on the list on the front page, had a link to show the full alert from the National Weather Service, and had a link to show a map of the boundary of the area covered by the warning.

I had no plan for what to do. There is a place in my house where I can stand and have walls or closed doors between me and all windows to provide some shelter from flying debris, so that was one idea. The other idea was to hop in my car and drive to a place nearby that is up on top of a hill and has roads in perpendicular directions and good visibility. From there the hope would be to be able to see if it was coming my way, and then flee by whichever road is most perpendicular to the direction it was moving.

If you're at home, get to a basement or an interior room; it's not a bad idea to bring along some blankets or pillows as well to protect yourself from flying debris.

Don't get in your car and go drive. You can't outrun a tornado, and you don't want to be outdoors in one. If you're already outside or in your car driving when a warning's issued for your area, the best course of action is to find the closest sturdy building to shelter in (a gas station, grocery store, whatever); if that's not possible, either get down in your car and cover your head, or abandon your car and shelter in a low-lying area.

See: https://www.weather.gov/safety/tornado-during

Get a weather radio if you don't have one. For about 20-40 bucks, you can get one with rechargeable batteries and a charging cradle. Follow the instructions to set it for your regional station. It will wake up and sound the alert for any warnings in your area. Plus you can actively listen to it for the latest storm news.

As long as you still have power & internet, your local tv station will usually stream during weather emergencies. I've done this on more than one stormy day. Sat comfortably on the couch watching one stream on the iPad while another played on the television. Wondering if this was going to be the day when it finally hit.

On your phone, get RadarScope. It's highly worth the 5 or 10 dollars. It's a detailed radar app. Has many different radar products. Can see the usual storm views with warnings outlined. the relative velocity to see the spin. correlation coefficient to determine if there's a debris ball. Etc. Shows the estimated tracking path for storm cells. For the many storms in my area, this has been invaluable.

Probably the most important resource is NOAA's local prediction pages and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). During storm seasons, the SPC's Convective Outlook is worth checking at least once a day to see if anything's likely in the near future. Plus the mesoscale discussions are useful on the storm day to see how the forecasters think the events will play out.

For local reporting by locals, Twitter is surprisingly useful. Look for a hashtag that contains the two letter abbreviation for your state plus the letters "wx". I follow #kswx for Kansas storms.

Seconding the recommendation for a weather radio. If you get a good one, you can program it with your SAME code (basically a region code) and also select which types of alerts you want it to sound for. I have one next to my bed since we're on the upper level of a 2-story house with it set to only alert on severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado warnings. This gives me confidence that I will be alerted if there's an issue and still have time to make it to the basement.

This is the radio I have, and though I have a few small complaints overall I'm very happy with it:

https://www.amazon.com/Sangean-CL-100-Certified-Table-Top-St...

As a side note, having lived my whole life in the Midwest I've always dealt with tornados and know how they work, and it's shocking how little a lot of other people here seem to know. I guess if you don't have a few tornado watches/warnings a year then you just don't ever learn about them. The amount of ridiculous takes in these comments is really something - you don't find out about tornados before you go to work so you can stay home, or have time when there's a tornado warning to get in your car and go for a drive or anything like that. If you're lucky you have 5-10 minutes notice, but it's common to get only 30 seconds or so of warning. People who live in the Midwest know that when you hear a tornado warning (around here they sound the civil defense sirens, but also weather radio and phone alerts), you go to your place of shelter immediately.

EAS is still broadcast over the air on the VHF spectrum and includes NOAA weather updates which your taxes pay for. Buy a weather radio, because the TV alerts are literally just EAS receivers interrupting programming.

EAS transmission sites are built to withstand tornadoes and even casual offensive military strikes. TV stations aren't.

You may also consider getting into amateur radio too.

I know this doesn't directly help you in STL, but Tennessee has a pretty incredible volunteer crew who update us on Twitter and also go live on YouTube when things get bad. There may be something similar in your area. We find them to be invaluable for keeping us up to date, more effectively than TV news ever did.

https://twitter.com/nashseverewx

Sample of last night's coverage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfdgKfoV538

This is all so dumb that it feels like it must be a troll. You don’t need a TV to watch your local TV news. They have this newfangled thing called a website and they are also on twitter. Or try your local newspaper’s website, which will obviously cover live weather events. Sigh.

You can also get a hand-crank emergency radio - does AM, FM and some other weird (NWS) bands. Once you know the emergency stations just write them on the radio with Sharpie.

Like these https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-hand-crank-radio/

In situations like these I tune into a local radio stations online. Most of them do streaming.

Also, you can google quickly what siren signals mean. There are specific patterns for various disasters and tests.

And finally - if it’s in the middle of night, for sure it’s something serious.

> It was unclear how many workers were still missing, as Amazon did not have an exact count of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said.

I find this hard to accept. They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??

> They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??

I'd say there's a good chance their on-site computer systems that keep track of employees and their productivity happen to also be out of commission ATM.

They’re not accessible via and/or redundant to the cloud? Shame they’re not aware of a company that provides that type of service.

I have a third person anecdote that Amazon engineers are not allowed to use AWS.

did something change since these answers?

https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS

This is bullshit indeed. Amazon is terrible.

I mean the real question is how many people are in the premises. How can they know how many people stopped in the bathroom after clocking out? They don't have an exact count but I'm sure there's some estimate.

I don't think anyone can enter the premise without swiping their badge.

I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw.

Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? When I was working in the office, we were usually forced (literally security swept the building) to leave when severe winter weather was coming in a few times.

Why doesn’t Amazon, in the middle of Tornado Alley, have tornado shelters for its employees? Employees should not be having to run around finding places to hide. There should be designated shelters.

Amazon penalizes their workers for bathroom breaks and replaced their HR team with a chatbot. This is allowed by federal labor laws, and Amazon’s primary source of retail revenue is externalizing human costs. Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. So I don’t see how we can prevent their abuse unless something changes; yet, no one wants to be the one that changes. A startup seems unlikely to help, but I remain optimistic that someone will change.

> unless something changes

People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change.

It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.

That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate.

On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.

> That is there best argument to fight now for good conditions, the more robots in the future the less leverage to negotiate.

Humans in warehouse don’t have leverage and will have even less leverage in the future regardless of what they would be able to negotiate now.

> Who is going to buy products?

People making robots (designing, configuring, installing, fixing etc).

Or people doing service work like nannies, teachers, massage therapists, waiters, diving instructors, receptionists etc. All the work which can be automated, but humans are still preferable than robots.

Science fiction has been making about universal basic income, zero cost basic living goods and housing, and comprehensive social support services. They also suffer a lot of wealth stratification and “we don’t talk about how we load cash into the money pump” blind spots. It’s the right question to ask; isn’t all revenue eventually deprecated by robotics?

Thankfully, the reality is that we can’t create safe and resilient automatons, so we don’t have to worry about humans being replaced any time soon, if not for centuries. For example, we have landed zero fully autonomous rovers on Mars, and we have no autonomous rover repair bot, even if we did, so it would break down because we’re terrible at producing technology that works for a decade or more between failures.

The wealthy humans who don’t like paying humans are thrilled to let us think that the wealth gaps are due to automation and globalization, because otherwise there’d be pitchfork mobs at their doors. But it’s not robots we need to be afraid of. It’s greed we need to be afraid of. That’s what drives Amazon to externalize humanity as a cost to be paid by anyone else but them. That’s what drives Uber to destroy taxis and then try to harvest automaton driver training data. There are no robotic taxis that can survive human beings who realize that the taxis are so risk-averse that they can be taken advantage of, cut off in traffic, trapped and damaged or harvested for parts, etc.

We seriously are like fifty or a hundred years away from automation being able to do a single job for a year without human maintenance. Everyone’s afraid of robots replacing us (beep beep boop boop) but in reality we can’t even advance past VCRs that flash 12:00, and it’s been one week since Tesla locked their entire worldwide customer base out of their cars with a 500 Server Error. Automatons are not a relevant big bad.

Here’s a simple litmus test for whether you should worry about automation at a macroeconomic level: How long has it been since your production web server responded with a single unhandled exception to a user? Not 404s, not “your cookie is defective, bounty hunter”, but like 429 Too Many or 500 Proxy time-out or whatever. Everyone will say “well, it’s really difficult to have such effective HA that you trap outbound errors and try to resolve them, and POST requests aren’t repeatable, and you can’t control the Internet”. If we can’t deliver static HTML without blips and outages, then we certainly don’t need to be afraid of a human-facing, human-serving automaton. It’s a great litmus test. I call it “zero nines”, because there’s no 9s in 100% uptime.

> On a second note, if robots replace humans. Who is going to buy products? Because humans without jobs do not have money. Why have warehouses if nobody can but anything? That hypothetical future were robots replace workers is way more complicated that many people thinks.

Production will shift towards serving those with wealth versus those that need to work to survive. It's already happening to the housing market.

> Production will shift towards serving those with wealth

That's right. Serving those who created wealth.

It is already happening everywhere. Grocery store cashiers are serving while collar workers.

If robots replaced humans there’d be significant deflation and some UBI policy would be enough for people to afford said deflated goods

Maybe. Idk really though. Sure it depends on the good

Tesla Bot enters the chat.

https://youtu.be/HUP6Z5voiS8?t=87

Given how often I have to reboot my car stereo — Subaru stereos are all powered by a decades-old Windows CE platform — I’m not thinking that McDonalds will successfully overcome the traumas of unattended automation to the degree that their reputation requires. Apparently something like a tenth or a quarter (I forget) of their automatic soft serve machines are down nationwide at any given second of the day. If a tenth of McDonalds were closed worldwide at any given open-hours time due to removing human workers and replacing them with current-grade automation, their reputation would be forever destroyed.

> Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept.

Perhaps the latter is a convenient way to take action on the former?

Those things all sound like they might decrease profits.

6 deaths will reduce profits and something else.

Not by nearly as much as proper severe weather planning nationwide would.

>Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early?

There were warnings. Warnings that skipping work would get one fired[1]. And since the warehouse was not closed that day, the warning was: clock in on time, or else, weather be damned.

>When I was working in the office...

Well there's a difference between how office employees are treated, and how warehouse employees are treated.

>Why doesn’t Amazon....

Because they can. And that, because their workforce isn't unionized and doesn't have the collective bargaining power to get what Amazon should give them.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/technology/amazon-employe...

Given Amazon's track record with warehouses, I expect surviving staff will be provided with the opportunity to take an unpaid day off to grieve.

And because we keep buying from Amazon no matter what.

The solution is regulations and unions. If it's not Amazon it will be something else. Many people do not have time or money to look for alternatives. I never buy on Amazon but directly from the providers, but that takes time that I have but many people does not.

> If it's not Amazon it will be something else.

Companies do vary in how they treat their workers. Some are unionized.

“Vote with your wallet” principles are relevant when it comes to toxic social behavior only if you’re actually paying activists/lobbyists.

Otherwise pushing for the rules to be properly enforced and/or to change for the better should be where efforts go.

Speak for yourself. I haven't done business with them in almost a decade. The last several years, since their prices went up, I've been saving money doing so.

Well, we is a figure of speech in this case, I haven't bought anything there. I'm very anti-anti unions.

Your article is over a month old...

Do you think Amazon has changed its labor practices in the last month? The OP's point is that warehouse employees don't have the option to not show up.

With tornados you don't have a long heads up. You normally know there's a bad storm coming and that's it. It's not until the sirens go off that everyone stops what they're doing. Everybody in that town most likely went to work that day.

Is it commonplace in such areas for workplaces to have plans for such an event? Tornado shelters?

Shelters no, at least not in my experience (lived in Illinois). But knowing of a more safe place in the building. For example, my high school had us go into the inner hallways and sit down against the walls.

Presumably this wouldn’t go any better than it did for the Amazon employees when facing a tornado of the strength being talked about in the original post?

All of that was my point.

Sure, I just felt like answering the rhetorical questions explicitly for anyone who's skimming for the sake of clarity.

Gotcha!

I've never been called off for the threat of severe non-winter weather anywhere. And the risk of being in a house hit by this tornado was probably higher than in the warehouse.

The lack of tornado shelter is the problem here - or more likely, they probably had one but weren't instructed to use it...

The article says employees were notified to go to the shelter-in-place area? It's phrased a bit strangely so I don't know if it means 'our policy is to do X' or if it means 'we actually did X'.

> Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area.

I have had to shelter in place for tornadoes a few times in school but that really meant getting every person in a single room so you could evacuate if needed. It sounds like either the tornado that hit the warehouse either formed too quickly and close by for them to respond or perhaps there was some process/training issue where someone forgot they needed to be watching the weather closely. It would also be easy to accidentally be getting weather news for a nearby but different location.

Having worked in an Amazon warehouse (as a contractor, but my wife was a direct Amazon employee in the same warehouse at a time), I can tell you that if they had any severe weather plans, none of the employees were aware of them.

By "employees were notified" they likely mean "the MOD shit his pants and screamed 'RUUUUUUUUN' "

Tornadoes aren't hurricanes... There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction.

The article did somewhat address your questions:

"Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware of a tornado warning in the area.

Emergency response training is provided to new employees and reinforced throughout the year, the company said."

I hope they find out why their systems were inadequate and make sure it doesn't happen again.

> There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes.

Every major weather and news organization was warning about "a very high likelihood of nocturnal tornadoes in the area" 12+ hours before they happened.

Tornados are still very localized even with advance warning. The buildings across the street from the warehouse might well have been undamaged (I don't know, but certainly possible).

Are you aware though that those kinds of warnings are relatively common in the Midwest? We receive those kinds of advisories at least a few dozen times a year. It would be impractical for everyone to stay home from work every time the conditions are favorable for tornado formation.

Plus, in this part of the country most people operate under the assumption that whatever building they're in at the time of a tornado warning will have an appropriate shelter. I don't know anything about this Amazon building and if they had appropriate shelters and if people had time to get there or what, but my point is more generally in this region of the country, "tornados possible today" is just not something people stay home from work for. And yes, that goes for office workers too. I've had to move to a storm shelter at my office many times due to a tornado warning during the work day.

Furthermore, there's no guarantee that anyone would have been safer at home anyway. An EF3 tornado (what this supposedly was) will absolutely obliterate homes if they are in the direct path.

(edit) Can't reply anymore, but you quoted this: "There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes." and responded that there was plenty of notice of a possibility of tornados. The sentence after your quote said "You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction.", so it seemed to me like you were offering a rebuttal to the idea of "you can't shut down...". Sorry if I misunderstood what you were trying to say.

I never said anything about staying home, yet you've constructed a multi-paragraph argument in an attempt to "prove me wrong." I'd love to hear why you thought this was necessary.

Context. You jumped into this conversation very much on the side of the guy who did say: "warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work".

Your comment about tornado warnings can ONLY serve to confuse people and potentially give them a very mistaken impression that tornadoes can be accurately and precisely forecast, such that advanced evacuation of an area is a viable strategy.

As someone who grew up in the midwest (specifically in Joplin, where we know a thing or two about tornados! [1]), I'll say those are largely ignored both in and out of work. I've never left work during a tornado. I've rarely even stopped working during a tornado -- the only time I even went to a basement was when we literally saw a tornado out the window from our desks. As soon as it passed, it was back to work. If you're at home, it's not unusual to go outside and see dozens of other people also outside, watching tornados. At night, the sirens are usually just an annoyance: you plug your ears and do your best to go back to sleep.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado

> I'll say those are largely ignored both in and out of work. I've never left work during a tornado. I've rarely even stopped working during a tornado ...

Which is exactly how dozens of people died in a candle factory and six more at an Amazon warehouse, all for the sake of holiday gifts. Just because you don't currently take something seriously, doesn't mean you shouldn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

First of all those workers absolutely stopped working, they went to the shelter section of the building but guess what, mother nature sometimes can get worse than what your preparation is ready for.

Secondly I don't know what you are suggesting here. Do you have any idea how frequent weather like this are in the midwest?

Have you ever lived in Tornado Alley? These warnings are ubiquitous several months out of the year, year after year. I must've received at least a hundred of those. In the entire time I lived in that part of the world, I saw a single tornado, and that is because I was lucky -- most people that live there decades don't see them. The false positive rate for the average person is extremely high, so it is no wonder people stop paying attention. Honestly, we had worse problems with severe lightning; your house might get hit once a year.

A "very high likelihood of tornadoes" is their Tuesday. That likelihood manifesting as an actual tornado that is a material risk to them is a once in a lifetime situation. You get used to it, like earthquakes on the West Coast. Nobody on the West Coast spends their days obsessing over the big earthquake that will inevitably hit them sometime in the next several decades.

Warnings like you are talking about are effectively useless because they virtually never materialize as a real threat to most of the people they are sent to.

If I understand correctly, tornadoes are a part of the weather there, with any structure having a set probability to get hit once or more by a tornado in its lifetime.

So perhaps the issue would be on why the warehouse crumbled, if Amazon was aware of the structural risks, and how they reacted if there were any warnings on that front ?

> like earthquakes on the West Coast.

If it’s really so, earthquake zones have building codes and constructions have rating on what they can withstand. If for instance your workplace was to go down on M2 shake, there would clearly be an issue with the building and the contracting process, or maintenance.

The engineering challenges aren't equivalent. There is no practical engineering that will allow a building to survive an extreme tornado event unless you want to build everything as an underground bunker. We are literally talking serious nuclear weapon energy equivalents, delivered in the way tornados deliver it. That they erase towns is not a surprise.

However, these events are relatively rare and, unlike a M8+ earthquake, the effects are extremely localized. For example, if there was another New Madrid fault zone event at the same scale as happened in the 19th century, which happened in the same region, the damage would dwarf extreme tornado events.

We know how to build practical buildings that can survive severe seismic events, within limits. We do not know how to build practical ordinary buildings that can survive an EF5 tornado, same way we don't know how to survive a direct nuclear strike. Those weather systems are a serious force of nature.

> Tornadoes aren't hurricanes... There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction.

Most thunderstorms don't include tornado alerts from the NWS. They absolutely can (and should) shut down when there are severe weather, but because they care more about profit than about their employees' lives, they don't.

Good to know you also care about profit more than people's lives.

I've lived in tornado country almost all of my life and I'm not aware of any business that shuts down due to a tornado watch. They'd be shutting down all the time. By the time the watch becomes a warning, it's too late. People need to shelter, not be leaving the facility to go home.

> People need to shelter, not be leaving the facility to go home.

Perhaps you should re-read my comment.

> They absolutely can (and should) shut down

PS I live in tornado alley and any time there was any kind of watch, my school enacted their severe weather plan. I am well aware that the vast majority of businesses don't even have a severe weather plan. That has absolutely no bearing on whether or not they should.

I know. I’m familiar with severe weather that produces tornadoes.

People hiding in bathrooms or anywhere they could doesn’t sound like there were shelters appropriate for tornados or even a plan in place or if there was one it wasn’t used.

It’s inexcusable for people to die on the job like this, especially on a job that doesn’t give you easy access to live information, due to the work environment, or even even the ability to hear or see what’s going on outside.

Fwiw, bathrooms are usually a good place to ride out a tornado. No windows and they are usually in a central location.

> Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early

Bahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha

The cost of them sending employees home during forecast severe weather would exceed the cost of a few of their employees dying, so yes there were warnings but no, the employees and contractors did NOT have the choice of not going in or of leaving early.

I doubt they have any kind of severe weather plan as well. I know the Amazon warehouse I used to work out of didn't have any (here in tornado alley).

Weather reports will callout serious weather conditions predicted in the next 48-24 hours.

There are Tornado Watches that are issued when conditions are favorable for tornados to form. That will cover a several hour period where you should be aware and alert for threat notices.

Then there are Tornado Alerts. These are issues when either someone has reported seeing a funnel cloud or the radar systems show a funnel type formation. These alerts usually cover a county sized area.

When you see an alert you should seek shelter. This means ideally underground like a basement or storm shelter. Otherwise the most secure part of a building. Bathrooms are good because they are small with lots of walls but if the building comes down they offer limited protection. A large structure like a warehouse should have a designated storm shelter where extra protection is built into an area. This may be an office or bathroom with concrete or metal cladding that is securely anchored in the ground.

The photos of the aftermath are shocking. More than half of the building is completely demolished. Exterior walls flattened. Vans are draped with 30 foot concrete panels. The roof is everywhere. A ruined skeleton of support columns and trusses towers ominously above the wreckage.

I can only imagine the terror of witnessing this devastation unfold around your person.

Aside - check out the difference in the photos from last night to today. The emergency response has cleared out an incredible amount of rubble.

I find it interesting that no one seems to be talking about the fact that we're having deadly tornadoes in December. This is not normal, especially if this was a multiple tornado event, but even one really big one would be way out of the ordinary. Maybe it's my northern Illinois upbringing, but tornadoes this time of year seems way unlikely.

It's pretty shocking. I found this paper which mentions the following, most of which I don't understand:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209471...

"Recent work has determined that peak, or maximum, tornado activity in the Great Plains has shifted earlier in the year by an average of 7 days (Long and Stoy, 2014) and 12–13 days (Lu et al., 2015) relative to the 1950s. Observed shifts in the seasonality in the Great Plains are accompanied by corresponding trends in convective available potential energy (CAPE) and the fourth power of storm relative helicity (SRH4), as well as their interaction, CAPE × SRH4 (Lu et al., 2015)."

The CAPE measurement above, which seems to be a measure of fuel availability for thunderstorms, is apparently predicted to rise with global heating:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020JCli...33.2025C/abstra...

No snarky comments from me. Just RIP and I hope their families are compensated. No compensation will ever bring back those people or extinguish their families anguish but something is better than nothing.

Amazon might use this as a PR opportunity to clean up their image a tiny bit, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the workers just get screwed.

My dad had to go through workers comp once and the process took 7 years and covered only a small percent of his costs - not with Amazon, but with an employer who cared more about their employees and never made anybody go to the bathroom in bottles out of some ruthless abusive system to squeeze more work out of people

In my country the government pays our workers comp immediately (like, days or weeks), no questions asked.

"Six Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) workers were confirmed dead on Saturday after a series of tornadoes roared through a warehouse near St Louis, ripping off its roof and causing 11-inch thick concrete walls longer than football fields to collapse on themselves."

Horrific.

A wall that size cannot possibly survive a big wind.

Cannot.

I wonder why they haven't compartmentalized the wall in such a way that in case of structural failure only individual sections will potentially collapse, not the whole thing.

Most likely the cost benefit ratio is too high.

Look at the photos—the panels that make up the exterior wall are segmented into narrow vertical strips. There’s not much you can do about a direct hit across all the cells.

Compartmentalization doesn't work when the iceberg slices them all open.

This type of warehouse building is extremely pervasive right now. Having worked in an amazon facility and several other 'modern' warehouses, they all share the same design. It's prefabbed concrete sections held in place by steel support columns. Steel truss structure holding roof with steel I-beams providing support to roof. Any modern warehouse struck by the same inclement weather will suffer the same exact fate.

Will add that the weather affecting this particular facility was extreme by any measure but most facilities that occupy the tornado alley should seriously consider this. My facility had a shelter in place policy in case of inclement weather which basically means, everyone(800-1k people?) huddle into 4, 6 person bathrooms.

Amazon Leased the building I worked in, so kind of removes them from blame of structural failure, but maybe not he decision to occupy the building during known severe weather.

I can't even imagine what it would take to design a warehouse-size building to withstand 200-300 mph winds. Not just expensive, but the engineering required would be pretty significant.

By comparison, I think it is probably fairly straightforward to make office buildings that can stay reasonably intact even with a direct hit. Much more structure to work with.

> Horrific.

> A wall that size cannot possibly survive a big wind.

> Cannot.

A reinforced concrete should've been easily capable of withstanding a hurricane.

First thing I see is that roof was not attached to anything reinforcing in the wall, or columns.

It seems it solely relied on its weight, which was easily overwhelmed by wind, to keep it in place.

Damage scales exponentially with wind speed. Hurricanes max out around ~180MPH. That's the speed of a feisty F3 tornado. You can be "hit" by a hurricane and be fine unless it's the eye or you get some debris in higher winds further out. Any hit from a tornado brings the full force of a thin column of debris whirling at that speed.

> A reinforced concrete should've been easily capable of withstanding a hurricane.

Hurricanes are kinda wimpy, though. Their main claim to fame is sustained winds. A tornado can pack winds pushing 300 mph. Good luck building a warehouse that can take a direct hit from that.

plus it’s not always the wind that does the damage, it’s what the wind picks up and throws at you

“It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing. If you get hit with a Volvo, it doesn’t really matter how many sit-ups you did that morning.” — Ron White

Hurricanes and tornados are two different phenomena, entirely.

A Category 5 hurricane generally has wind speeds less than 200 mph.

EF5 tornadoes start at 200 mph, and can be well over 300 mph.

Could you design a warehouse (note: not a small storm shelter, but a warehouse, which by definition needs to have very large interior open spaces) that would withstand a 300 mph wind? Maybe.

The budget would be well beyond the reach of any non-military client, though.

To be fair hurricanes and tornadoes are not completely separate phenomena. Hurricanes are know to spawn tornadoes within them and these tornadoes can substantially add to the destruction.

Point me to a warehouse currently built in the US that would survive this.

I am not sure about US warehouses, but somewhere else it will surely will.

Any seismic regulation would've probably completely blasted a building where roof is not held in place in tension. In general, remains seem to lack any continuous reinforcement in between panels. Only flimsy fasteners held them together.

USA is a land of contradictions, and its building codes are no exception.

They write 100 pages sections of building codes regarding fire resistance, down to mandating which kinds of doorknobs can be installed, and then allow people building stuff from plywood.

Same for building in hurricane/tornado areas. It's absolutely nobrainer how to build buildings capable of withstanding any imaginable hurricane.

But instead of just banning anything not built from reinforced concrete, or steel, they keep trying to "rationalise" building methods which would still have zero chances surviving a tornado, even if laden with every reinforcement imaginable.

> zero chances surviving a tornado

Most buildings are in this category, and it make sense. This is not where the fault lies.

Building something to specifically withstand 200mph wind is NOT reasonable. Hurricanes force wind by comparison starts at 74mph and decays quickly inland.

> Building something to specifically withstand 200mph wind

A properly engineered reinforced concrete building would easily withstand that.

What's the point, though? Statistically, most people who live deep in Tornado Alley will never even see a tornado in their lifetime. Getting hit by one is like winning the bad luck lottery; trying to build all buildings to be tornado proof would be wildly expensive and difficult to justify. Better to focus on good warning systems and making sure shelters are plentiful.

> will never even see a tornado in their lifetime

Could that be changing as the climate changes?

Like seeing 500-year floods several times in 20 years.

> A properly engineered reinforced concrete building would easily withstand that.

You could build a building like a tank, but it would price most people out of the market. Doors and windows in that structure won't be able to withstand the obscene wind forces however, so everyone inside will still likely be killed by the airborne debris, anyhow. You really wouldn't have time to install steel shutters on the windows and bar all the doors like you'd need to. But hey, the building will remain standing, so that's a win, right?

Instead of all of that, just requiring a small emergency shelter in each home might actually keep the occupants alive.

Tornadoes can be more powerful than a hurricane. The only structure that would survive them all is a concrete bunker.

https://www.steelmasterusa.com/quonset-huts/disaster-resista...

In particular, the hundred-ish year old design called a Quonset Hut is partly designed for this wind-deflecting purpose.

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder about that. The largest Quonset hut ever built was 54,000 sq ft [1]. The Amazon facility was 1.167 million sq ft.

At that square footage, the semi-circle arc (which is its main wind-deflecting feature) would have to be gigantically tall. It doesn't sound like a feasible geometry at that scale.

[1] http://varnumcontinentals.org/2016/04/the-quonset-hut-a-rhod...

Not a warehouse, but there are data centers in the tornado belt where the whole building is designed and built that way.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2497174/tornadoes-and-...

If all your <s>friends</s>warehouses jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?

Question: what was the peak wind speed? Is it more than a hurricane's, or less?

The next question is: do they have stricter building codes in Florida, such that this storm wouldn't have knocked down warehouses?

> Question: what was the peak wind speed? Is it more than a hurricane's, or less?

More, a lot more, to the point where any building code that saves you would just make it not economical to build anything

More.

It's much more likely to be hit by a hurricane in Florida? It's also unpractical to build everything to be able to withstand the off chance there's a tornado. You essentially need bunkers.

Better question here is if there are adequate alarm and evacuation plans.

> Question: what was the peak wind speed? Is it more than a hurricane's, or less?

For comparison, a cat 5 hurricane is 157 mph or higher. An EF-5 tornado is 200 mph and up. The highest recorded wind speed is about 300 mph.

Thanks everyone. The hypothesis was "if Midwest buildings were built to Florida standards, the warehouse would have survived."

Disproved.

Looking at the photos it seems like a massive building and the tornado just sliced straight through it. I’m not sure what you can do about that that’s reasonable?

A candle factory was completely leveled. Dozens dead. Many still missing.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/kentucky-candle-factory-ha...

https://patch.com/illinois/chicago/tornado-hits-southern-il-...

EF-3 tornado: 136-165 mph

When there are Tornado Warnings in the area, are there any policies at big warehouses like this one (not just Amazon's others too) to take shelter? Is there enough time to get to a reinforced area? How long would staff have to stay in the reinforced area?

Low probability, high consequence events are hard to plan for.

Sad for all those who have died or are suffering in the wake of the storms.

Right? In a place called tornado alley who could have thought. If only a company like Amazon had some money to spare to figure local risks and plan to protect their people.

In fact, its amazing Amazon is seen as so reliable since they couldn't foresee something like a Tornado in Tornado Alley killing their workers and disrupting business.

You imagine a company which couldn't factor in that sort of risk goes out of business from a sea of missed deliveries.

St. Louis gets tornadoes, but it is not in tornado alley.

Yeah, probably not what most people think of as Tornado alley, but it’s pretty loosely defined.

Just about anywhere east of the Rockies should be prepared for tornadoes.

It absolutely is. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Tornado_...

That map is not showing "tornado alley", this one is (from the same Wikipedia article):

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/To...

Note that there's no formal definition, but most people would not consider Missouri/Illinois to be "in" tornado alley, despite regular tornadic activity.

I dont know who most people is, but the map is just an illustration, there are no official boundaries because tornado alley is not an official thing. I grew up in central illinois and we regularly drilled taking shelter in the school’s hallway when the tornado sirens were tested, and feel pretty strongly that counts as living in tornado alley.

That map is showing the only definition of tornado alley there can be if you insist on a single definition: where tornados happen.

I'm not sure who your most people are but they ain't mine.

> That map is showing the only definition of tornado alley there can be if you insist on a single definition: where tornados happen.

That's a weird definition you're insisting on. More than half the width of the country isn't an alley.

It's true that anything narrower is giving up on "single definition: where tornadoes happen". But that's also what you have to do. It's an inherent part of the term to be more narrow than that entire map. Raleigh isn't in tornado alley.

You're correct, Raleigh isn't in tornado alley. Raleigh also gets a fraction (somewhere around 1/3rd) of the tornadoes that St Louis does. Whereas St Louis gets as many tornadoes as most of whatever YOU consider "tornado alley".

Your use of "YOU" is weird when I haven't even really decided what I think should be called tornado alley. I just wanted to point out that whatever method you're using is not "single definition: where tornadoes happen"; it's something more subjective.

Also to be clear I was using "Raleigh" as shorthand for "that orange cell right next to Raleigh", which is the same 11-15 color as St. Louis.

I never said it wasn't subjective, so I'm not sure why you're commenting here. I said IF one insisted on a single definition. i.e. like the person I was replying to did.

"That orange cell right next to Raleigh" is an outlier, unlike say... St Louis.

> I said IF one insisted on a single definition. i.e. like the person I was replying to did.

And I'm saying that you're wrong on that. IF there is a single definition, it's not the one you proposed.

Also it's worth noting that even if a definition of a term is subjective, people can still be right or wrong; subjectivity usually has limits.

> "That orange cell right next to Raleigh" is an outlier, unlike say... St Louis.

I thought you might say that. But if you want to look at the local area, then do that on both cities! Multiple cells in the St Louis area only have 1-4. The average is 5-10. And there are also multiple 5-10 cells right next to Raleigh. St Louis gets more tornadoes, but it's not by a very big factor.

And the Springfield MO area is on par with the Raleigh area. So, as a thought experiment, if that should matter... well, then we'd want to define tornado alley to exclude Springfield. The line from Springfield MO to Chicago has significantly fewer tornadoes than the areas on either side, so a very natural outcome would be splitting the tornado risk into two swaths, east and west. And huh, the West one more or less matches that supposed map of tornado alley. And it doesn't include St Louis.

I'm not saying that definition is necessarily right, but it's reasonable.

Why were they forced to work during a tornado?

Probably for the same reason they’re not allowed to take bathroom breaks.

Assuming they had no reinforced structure to shelter in. What would they do to prevent injuries and deaths.

*"reduce to rubble" or "destroys"

How tragic, I feel awful for their families and so close to the holidays. :(

It looks like the title just got truncated by the HN mangler; the original has "to rubble" (as genocidicbunny points out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29525689).

What’s crazy is how at least 70 people have died in other states. A bunch of tornadoes happened at around the same time. It caught everybody by surprise.

It shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. As of Thursday morning, the Storm Prediction Center had identified the threat:

> Severe thunderstorms capable of producing several tornadoes and scattered to numerous damaging winds appear probable from mainly Friday evening into Friday night across parts of the lower/mid Mississippi Valley into the lower Ohio Valley and Tennessee Valley. Some of these nocturnal tornadoes may be strong.

https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/outlook/archive/2021/day2o...

We stayed in the basement after the sirens started, and followed it on the weather radar. We got notifications on the phone, and kids were dismissed from evening activities early. Pretty rare to get this type of weather this time of year.

Who the heck schedules tornados in December ? What a disaster.

Mods - this truncated headline makes no sense, which is awful with such a serious story.

It should be rephrased to: "6 Amazon workers killed after tornadoes destroy warehouse near St. Louis".

Best way to reach mods is via email. Quite responsive

For future reference, the current headline is "Six Amazon workers killed after tornadoes reduce warehouse near St. Louis", which makes one wonder whether it was a tornado or some sort of shrink ray.

"Reduced to rubble" is familiar enough to me to get the gist. I did think it an odd choice, but had no problem understanding.

I mean, I'm not aware of any current shrink ray technology...

"to rubble" is a reasonable guess but chopping off a piece of the building is also a plausible interpretation.

And actually, looking at the right images, that might be more the more accurate interpretation. It seems like the warehouse was big enough that half of it is intact.

When is the character limit on HN going to be increased so we can create longer subjects/headlines?

We're not going to do that, for a bunch of reasons. One is that it's a creative constraint which (after 15 years I think we can say) is always possible to work within.

Another is that if we made it longer, people would soon experience the new length as a constraint in its own right.

One trick is that HN also recommends we use the original headline from the piece posted. Whenever I have to edit it for length, I sometimes worry I'm going to be warned for editorializing a headline.

It's pretty obvious when someone has simply been editing to fit the length limit. That's legit.

Editorializing has to do with changing the meaning of a title—for example to put a spin or interpretation on it that the submitter wants to emphasize. On HN, submitters don't get to use the title field as a sort of mini comment box.

Reduce as in "reduced to ruble".

Thanks - fixed now.

Submitted title was "Six Amazon workers killed after tornadoes reduce warehouse near St. Louis". I don't think that was awful, but ok.

> Amazon did not have an exact count of the number of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said.

WTF? Do they record attendance on paper?

Usually they're bragging about how everyone is tracked relentlessly so they can penalize people for taking longer than 38 seconds to piss. It does seem unlikely that such a system could function without knowing how many people are working at any particular time.

Unfortunately, this will cost Amazon significantly less than if they were to... you know... have well-constructed buildings, and severe weather plans, etc.

Businesses are responsible for the physical welfare of their employees when they require their employees to be on the business premises. But until the cost of not ensuring their safety exceeds the cost of occasional death or injury, this will keep happening.

It's not the first time severe weather has killed multiple people in a warehouse (this year, or probably even this month), and it won't be the last until we demand change.

Unfortunate that the title got cut off: "Six Amazon workers killed after tornadoes reduce warehouse near St. Louis to rubble"

But the bigger story here is that despite multiple warnings of dangerous weather, the workers at this warehouse still ended up having to choose between risking their life or being fired/written up for refusing to come in. They didn't feel like they had the power to say "No, I won't work because its too dangerous" and some of that paid for that with their lives. Everyone responsible for that decision should be prosecuted criminally for each of those deaths.

> They didn't feel like they had the power to say

You definitely don't know this. Please don't speak to the mindset of people that just died when you have no idea.

it feels more like you don't know what actually happens in the real world.

every single one of us (employees of large companies) are completely and wholly expendable in the eyes of the people who run the companies we work for, when compared against potentially lost profit.

we all know this. we work at these places anyway because there are no places to work which are not like this.

not only are we expendable, we only have the tiny value that we have as assets because the law strongly encourages employers to view us as having some value. if the risk of profit loss outweighs the risk of paying to recover from personnel loss, people are gonna regularly die working for that company. leadership doesn't even call things like this "loss" but the "cost of doing business".

Can you post some citation for these allegations? Maybe this is being widely reported and I've just missed it, but I'm not aware of positive evidence for the allegations you've made.

https://twitter.com/JonathanAhl/status/1469809376894541825

Governor says it happened during shift change. Active tornado warning in the area at the time.

I mean I get that they were at work. Shift change or whatever does not seem to make that big a difference. What's not clear to me is whether any of the workers were coerced to come in (i.e. they said they didn't want to and Amazon said they must regardless). And whether Amazon knew or ought to know that this would unacceptably increase the risk of harm (i.e. that a tornado was in fact likely and that being at work was much more dangerous than wherever else the workers might be).

I would also be interested in the standard practice at other workplaces in tornado alley. St Louis area gets four tornados a year on average, plus some additional number of warnings that don't end up being tornados. Is it the standard practice of workplaces to shut down in such situations? I don't remember tornado warnings being that big of a deal when I lived there but admittedly I was a dumb college kid at the time so what did I know.

I guess my point is that allegations of wrongdoing would seem to be very slightly jumping the gun in this situation. Plays well to a certain audience but there will be plenty of time for finger pointing once we know more.

>>I would also be interested in the standard practice at other workplaces in tornado alley

For my Employer, in a high tornado state..

Watch: Monitor but no change in business

Warning: Equipment is shut down, employee move to interior rooms approved as "shelters" (i.e no windows, normally slightly reinforced, etc), until the warning is cleared, or confirmation of the tornado's path as no chance of hitting facility.

I have seen other ask the question of "why was the facility open during the warning", questions like that show an extreme ignorance of how tornado's work, and warnings are issued, Warnings are normally short lived events not hours or days long. Warnings last like 15-30mins... Another problem with warnings is many of them have no actual tornado attached to them.

It is clear a large amount of the user base has never lived in a high tornado state, I have my entire life.

I also live in a tornado-prone state and agree with all of this. In my experience, nothing at all shuts down in the event of a tornado watch - everything is business as usual (schools, businesses, retail, etc.). Outdoor activities might be cancelled, but even that wouldn't be a given. As said, tornado warnings are short-lived and you just shelter in place wherever you happen to be. I've been crammed in a bathroom with 30-40 other people at my cushy 9-5 office job many times due to tornado warnings. The thought has never even crossed my mind about not going into work during a tornado watch.

It's mind-boggling how many people are spouting away here who clearly have no understanding of how tornados work. Didn't anyone ever watch Twister?

Active tornado warnings happen here all the time - most people ignore the sirens and keep wandering around.

Now if the warehouse didn’t have designated tornado shelters …

There were tornado warnings issued for the area. The weather was getting bad. I am not saying these workers were directly coerced into coming in, but I think given the choice, anyone not in some way forced to come in to work would avoid coming in to work when there's a tornado warning for the area. The simple fact that these people came into work leads me to think that one of three things is at play -- ignorance, stupidity, or coercion. So sure, there may be some people who worked at that warehouse who just moved to the area and weren't familiar with tornadoes, tornado warnings and inclement weather. Some may have just completely ignored the danger. But I think the majority felt that they had to still show up to work or risk losing their job. And despite what r/antiwork would have you believe about jobs being plentiful, in some areas they just aren't. Losing a job at the only major employer in the area can spell disaster.

The article doesn’t say that. Where’s an article that says they had to come in despite the dangerous storms?

Given the long history of labour abuse that's occurred on Amazon's watch at their warehouses and for their delivery drivers, at this point do they deserve the benefit of the doubt? Do you think these people came in to work at the warehouse while the weather reports blared tornado warnings out of love for their job and loyalty to Bezos?

Not sure why you're being downvoted, the events are already evidence that the facility was not shut down during a tornado that was known to hit the area. Workers were changing shifts when the tornadoes hit.

This site has a very anti-labor bias, as most people here expect to be running companies (or already do).

"This site" has a very strong dislike for politically motivated speculation masquerading as fact.

Both you and the parent could be correct. I see a lot of spurious speculation in various forms but only certain speculation is more likely to get downvoted. Case in point the speculation surrounding the motivations of some unknown anonymous poster downvoting the grandgrandparent based off of extrapolating from other downvotes elsewhere.

This came across my Twitter feed just now: https://twitter.com/LCampbell_35/status/1469815411462000647

Seems credible based on photos.

I'm not sure that really is the story. Homes are not exactly safer, and there was a tornado warning for all of Madison county. Perhaps you've seen photos of what these things do to small wooden structures. Yes, their home was probably ok from this particular tornado, but I think that has more to do with luck than safety.

Being alert and prepared is safer, and neither is all that possible while working.

Especially working where they track how long it takes to reach for a product and place it in a box, and that action is repeated multiple times a minute for the entire shift. All employees are on the edge of panic at all times.

Sure their homes may not have been safer, but they would have had more opportunities to get to a shelter, or to find somewhere safe, as compared to having to be at work picking shelves in a warehouse built to the minimum spec/cost.

Well, they could have just... done exactly that.

Will Amazon count that as Time off Task every time the warehouse isn't hit by a tornado?

The official advice in the first warning:

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

To repeat, a tornado is on the ground. TAKE COVER NOW! Move to a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. Avoid windows. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris.

https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KLSX-TO-W...

If you are in a reasonable building (such as a typical home) when a tornado warning is issued, do not seek alternative shelter. Seek the most secure area of the building you are already in.

You can search all the warnings/watches here: https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/search.php#byugc/MOC1...

I will note that the watch (which proceeded the warning) suggested to precautionary action.

https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KLSX-TO-A...

Homes have basements and other structures that can be more secure during tornadoes than other structures. And most importantly, people are familiar with where those safer places are in their own homes, so that when the power goes out and the wind blowing so hard and loud that it breaks their windows, they still know where to go and how to get there quickly and safely.

There are often storm shelters in areas hit by weather like this, and there was ample warning about this storm system, so at least some of those that don't feel safe in their homes could have sheltered somewhere else if they were free to do so.

The article doesn’t support what you are saying. Do you have evidence to support these theories?

What happened is terrible and is part of a much broader natural disaster. Trying to turn this into some shallow Amazon shaming is unfortunate.

This data goes well beyond this specific article.

I'm not trying to shame Amazon; Not any more than I would be any other company. If this had been a Walmart or a Target or a Trader Joe's warehouse, I would have said the same.

When there's tornadoes about, the first thing companies should tell their workers is 'Find somewhere safe to shelter, don't worry about the job or reducing damage to the company. Just make sure you're safe' (and if located somewhere known for tornadoes, also providing adequate shelter) is the bare minimum that companies should be expected to do/provide.

Six people died in a <Company> warehouse. This shouldn't have happened, regardless of <Company>.

> When there's tornadoes about, the first thing companies should tell their workers is 'Find somewhere safe to shelter, don't worry about the job or reducing damage to the company.

I worked in the Midwest for a number of years. Every time there was a tornado siren, an attempt would be made to alert everyone in the building. We were to go to the shelter in the basement and/or 1st floor.

Only a minority would actually get up and move there. Worse, many would go to wall size windows to see the storm outside. There's no way security can force the majority of workers to move. All they can do is walk around and warn. Did people not go because they were worried about productivity dropping? No! They didn't go because they hear these sirens often enough (a few times every summer) and simply ignored them, because the odds of getting hurt appear low.[1]

So to me, reading people imply that they got killed because of capitalism is ludicrous. Simpler explanations exist.

Also, tornado shelters are not perfect.

Also, tornado shelters at work locations often are safer than ones at home. I know when I lived there, I always preferred to be in the office when a tornado siren hit. My home didn't have a basement, and you're not supposed to be in any room that has a window. That meant I should be either in the kitchen or the bathroom. At least the shelter at work was much bigger - you could walk around, etc.

[1] For that city, a tornado touches down there once every twenty years, and even that will be in a limited part of town. Not saying this is a good rationale, but humans will be humans.

> Did people not go because they were worried about productivity dropping? No!

> So to me, reading people imply that they got killed because of capitalism is ludicrous.

Take a look at people who aren't brainwashed by capitalism if you think this is ludicrous--kids in elementary school. Most of them are happy for emergency drills as they waste class time. They get to chat with their peers and go for a walk instead of sitting in class.

It is adults who have been coerced into caring about the company's/there own productivity who would not want an on-the-clock break, especially, in my experience, in this type of manual-labor-for-a-big-corp situation.

Would you really rather literally mop the floor for Amazon if you could, worry free and on the clock, chill in a room during a tornado warning?

And this isn't some generalized indictment of capitalism, which I personally believe to be highly effective at harnessing the whole of humanity towards social progress, just an observation about the realities of this type of situation.

At this stage you might as well indict human nature. Drawing a line at "company" or "Amazon" is arbitrary.

Most children are happy to not do work in general. Most children are happy not trying to save food for the winter as well. It's up to you to decide if encouraging stocking for the winter is evil or not.

The facts we have are:

Amazon kept a warehouse open and operational, including bringing a new shift in, during a Tornado watch for the area. (this is in the article)

edit r.e. this point: other commenters have noted that while the circumstances for a tornado arising are known in advance, the tornado appears quickly enough that realistically the only option if workers are in the building at that point is to move them to a designated area of the building that's more protected. There isn't any evidence of this happening from what I have seen from the media or Amazon.

Amazon workers are penalized heavily for being late or missing shifts and the systems for calling out can be unreliable or your request can be rejected outright. Workers are also heavily penalized for Time-Off-Task and its unclear that the policy or tracking software acknowledges seeking shelter during a tornado warning as not TOT. [1][2][hundreds of anecdotal accounts across the internet]

Amazon has not released any evidence that they informed workers there wouldn't be a penalty for a no show despite having made public statements about the incident, nor have any workers who survived attested to that. (Impossible to provide a source for a lack of evidence).

and for opinion:

Even if Amazon had told workers they were free not to come in, I believe it is the responsibility of Amazon to determine the safety of their building relative to the inclement weather which they have clearly failed to do.

What else is there left unanswered about the situation, in your view?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...

[2] https://twitter.com/LCampbell_35/status/1469815411462000647

Does anyone close down operations for a tornado watch? Maybe they should, but I've never heard of anyone doing that anywhere...

The bigger issue imho is that these employees don't seem to have been in a tornado shelter during a tornado warning?

several people on this thread are asking for "evidence" for claims. but here's the more interesting question: why is an amazon warehouse open when a tornado warning was in effect? was it to shelter people? and if not, why was it open?

Because tornado warnings and watches happen many times a year in tornado alley. Amazon is far from exceptional in having its warehouse open during these weather conditions.

Amazon is far from exceptional in having its warehouse open during these weather conditions.

And you know that how precisely?

Because people live here and are telling you that a tornado watch can sometimes be a weekly occurrence in the summer. Tornado warnings are far more rare, but even then, it generally takes tornado sirens/phone alerts to adjust people's behavior.

OK I get the message. Do we know when these alerts start appearing in the Edwardsville area?

As far as yesterday was concerned, Edwardsville (and neighboring areas) knew they were in the line of fire by 8PM local time. The tornado hit the facility at ~8:40.

Source: my phone blew up with 3+ emergency alerts starting at around 8. (here's a NWS tweet from 7:45 -- you can see what we were dealing with: https://twitter.com/NWSStLouis/status/1469483383994691586)

Things can get out of control quicker (15-20 minutes warning is usually as close as it gets), but I think it's definitely reasonable to suspect negligence in this instance. There are two possibilities, imo:

1. They had enough time to get people to shelter, and chose not to 2. The facility wasn't up to par

Tornado warnings are sudden, the last thing you want to do is put everyone in their car and on the road during a tornado warning. A tornado watch is not reason enough to shut down. A tornado watch means “keep an eye on the weather”. There’s a lot of room between watch and warning (there’s also “tornado emergency” in extreme scenarios) and deciding when things are bad enough to close but not bad enough to shelter in place is more of an art than science. I’m sure whoever was in charge of keeping the warehouse open or closing it down isn’t exactly sleeping well.

I can’t answer your question exactly but I have been in a warehouse when a tornado warning was issued and the warehouse in the path of the storm. They got everyone together and put us all against the strongest wall furthest from the approaching tornado. (It lifted before reaching us)

Do you have evidence to support these theories?

Sadly, the preponderance of evidence -- specifically the timing of the numerous severe tornado warnings in the region, starting as early as 4 hours earlier -- and the company's unfortunate track record during other severe weather events (such as Hurricane Ida) -- does suggest there is a significant chance Amazon was too slow to warn its employees of the impending danger as this particular calamity was unfolding.

More investigation will be needed of course -- but the initial indications do appear to be quite disturbing.

Also, this particular tweet suggests that Amazon's monitoring of the actual weather conditions in the area was ... at best haphazard. Seems like they have people just randomly googling for a second or two instead of doing actual research.

I'm an Amazon worker in Kentucky, tornado hit 2 miles from my house and I physically couldn't get to work for my shift. The ERC team told me that they had no record of tornadoes in Kentucky and couldn't help me with not getting attendance time reduced for today

https://twitter.com/LCampbell_35/status/1469815411462000647

The "fuck you, prove to us otherwise" attitude of the ERC when there's obviously a major catastrophe unfolding in the region is in itself quite revealing of the companies overall sense of priorities.

What is the counter factual where the workers' don't risk their lives? My intuition is that an Amazon warehouse is safer than a typical home during a tornado. And many homes were completely destroyed during this event as well. With the benifit of hindsight, it would have been better if no one was at that particular warehouse. But we can only say that because we know where the tornado hit with an accuracy that is no where near possible to achieve ahead of time.

My understanding is that a house with a basement or other underground structure is likely far safer than the warehouse floor. Without a basement you are at much more risk but there are ways to personally mitigate risk like tornado straps and reinforced garage doors.

> The safest place to be is a reinforced concrete building, but if that’s not an option a basement really is your best bet. An analysis of the Oklahoma tornado outbreak of May 1999, which featured an EF5 (i.e., scale-topping monster) twister, found that out of 40 deaths, 133 severe injuries, and 265 minor injuries, the total harm inflicted on people holed up in basements amounted to just one minor injury.

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/217899/straight-dope...

not sure where they sourced from but shouldn't be too hard to find given the exact numbers quoted.

The ideal scenario is that the warehouse would have a reinforced concrete tornado shelter (or multiple given the size) and a mandatory work stoppage whenever a tornado emergency is declared.

My fear is the house will collapse and trap me in the basement.

A warehouse is a very bad place to be... what kills you is flying objects, not the wind itself.

Or the roof could fall on you.

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