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Comment by bryans | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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).

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