Ask HN: What are the best tornado resistant home technologies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best tornado resistant home technologies?

1 pointEgregore7 comments

Also what of those technologies are echo friendlier and easier to insulate?

Avoiding places with tornadoes in the first place is likely the best long-term solution.

This would be a useful reference: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/01/weekinreview/0...

It is also useful to take into account that it is relatively easy to protect against earthquakes (cf. Japan) and floods, provided that money is less of a concern, whereas hurricanes and tornadoes are somewhat more problematic.

Or put another way: To protect against wind meaningful you have to protect the whole surface area of a building and every high-voltage electricity line etc. etc. To protect against floods, you ‘only’ have to build reasonable dams (easy) and to protect against earthquakes, you have to build reasonable houses (less easy, but doable).

I think majority multistoried concrete buildings are better protected against wind, you just need to add shutters to those buildings, the problem with concrete buildings is insulation.

I'm not sure about high voltage electricity - the main purpose is to protect people, the electricity lines are relatively inexpensive to rebuild.

Protecting your property against high-level tornadoes is expensive - probably not worth it for most residences - It makes more sense to insure, and let the occasional tornado/hurricane do its damage.

Protecting your personal safety against an earthquake can be difficult, even with a lot of money (also, cf. Japan) - though clearly safe guards can be taken.

But - with the state of the technology and advance alerts/monitoring today, your personal safety against a tornado/hurricane, if you chose to take some precautions, is almost certainly assured.

An underground storm shelter is basically invulnerable to a tornado - you only have to worry about floods and fire.

The Moore, Oklahoma residens had hours of advance warning that "Tornado Weather" was developing, and had almost 30 minutes advance notice of the actual tornado that hit them. They also had recent experience with a catastrophic Tornado in 1999.

But - the cost of $5000/family for a storm shelter is just something that we as a society (and individuals living in tornado prone areas)- just don't want to spend, even if you consider it to be a one time insurance policy that never has to be renewed again.

Earthquake and hurricane overall affect wider areas than tornadoes, there are old, more than 100 years, buildings in tornado affected areas.

http://www.monolithic.com/

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