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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

Always amazed by those living in tornado areas, I've seen the total destruction those things do on YouTube and people just seem to pick up the pieces and rebuild their homes like it's another day.

I'd be devastated if something came and obliterated my home..

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I grew up in Ohio and experienced regular tornadoes. Like most natural disasters, people in the area get "trained" on how to be safest in them (go to a storm shelter/basement, etc) and grow accustomed to the relatively low risk to their own person.

I later moved to the SF bay area and was terrified by earthquakes and the potential building collapse, but my colleagues from the area shrugged that off.

In the end, these are all kind of similar risks, and we all just grow accustomed to the risk we're familiar with

I've lived in midwest "tornado" areas my whole life. I've never seen a tornado. They can be very destructive, but are quite localized. They don't affect nearly as many people as a major hurricane, so cleanup and recovery is much easier.

Few years ago in Iowa we ran into a sudden weather system with (the radio later said) a big tornado in it. Got off the highway, only to be on a different highway with no shelter except for highway overpasses and a flimsy gas station a couple miles down. Technically we also didn't see the tornado, but the weather around it was like nothing I've ever experienced or want to experience again: continuous multi-colored lightning, torrential rain, big hail. (And nothing even close to an appropriate building to shelter in.)

Afterward my friend looked a little thoughtful and said "oh, I guess I forgot how bad the weather out here gets." Reminded me of the way people allegedly got used to the Blitz.

Honestly hail and damaging winds cause more cumulative damage; growing up we had a derecho and hail storm that knocked out power for a week and broke at least one window (and added tons of golf ball dents) on every car that was parked outside within about a 3 mile area.

The wind pulled up tons of even healthy trees, bringing down a bunch of power lines, and it was probably the last time in my life I remember seeing more than two or three neighbors outside in the front yard at the same time (suburban midwest).

Tornados and hurricanes are entirely different beasts. Tornados, although very violent, are tiny and short lived by comparison.

You just have a storm shelter and home insurance. It's pretty rare for a tornado to actually hit your house.

>Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much damage per year, on average, as hurricanes.

Confirmation bias. It could just be a couple hundred yards that tornado tore through and it won’t ever touch that place again, yet the media will only show you the absolute worst of it (and sometimes also fake it when it deems the devastation insufficient, hello Anderson Cooper), so you think it’s like that all over. It’s not. Moreover the same is the case with nearly all news coverage. Death and devastation sells ads.

We’ve had nearly 30 tornados this year…in New York. One in downtown Buffalo. It’s been interesting

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