Man Sticks His Camera Out Storm Shelter Hole, Captures View of Tornado [video] | Hacker News Reader

Man Sticks His Camera Out Storm Shelter Hole, Captures View of Tornado [video]

petapixel.com

98 pointsmerah19 comments

As this video and the dashcam videos of the meteorite over Russia show, while ubiquitous video recording can erode our privacy, at least we'll be able to watch cool videos of natural disasters.

Props to the two for risking their phone(s?) to film this.

I'm loving the comments under the article arguing about "NO VERTICAL VIDEO!!", hahaha :)

Based on his neighbor's houses, I'm pretty sure the tornado was not EF5 at the time it was being recorded. Here's what Wikipedia shows for an EF1 tornado: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EF1_tornado_damage_example...

The houses in the video don't even look that badly damaged.

He was not directly on the path of it. According to the article, areas some streets away were "completely wiped out ".

That tornado was awfully damned close, but they weren't in the funnel.

Check this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d...

Incredible..

And if you're wondering why the car they're in doesn't go flying or get penetrated by windblown debris, well, it's not your typical car, but a highly customized 7 ton vehicle with armor and hydraulic ground spikes.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/watch-storm-chase...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Intercept_Vehicle

Here is recent (and much more impressive, to me) footage of a direct hit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LobCDYO78Us

Or he was not that close to the funnel. If it was really 1+ miles wide he could have easily been 2+ miles from it's path based on how wide it looked.

"Please turn your device sideways to begin recording (press record again to override)"

I'm not sure if that's brave or stupid, but as this is HN, I'll go for brave.

Well it was neither, as shown in the video he just pushed up the phone through the small hole, in the worst case scenario the phone would've been pulled out.

To me it seems that type of shelter to be more dangerous as if the roof was destroyed it could've trapped them in there. I don't live in a country with tornadoes so I'm no expert on shelters, but shouldn't it have been few meters away from houses?

99%+ of the safety comes from just having a quality Tornado shelter. It can be beside the house, in the garage, or even an aboveground "Safe Room" - and you're fine.

The odds of (A) you being in a Tornado, and (B) you being in a Tornado Shelter, and (C) The house landing on your shelter and (D) nobody coming to dig you out - is close enough to 0 to not matter.

Plus the more expensive models come with jacks to force the hatch open in case of entrapment.

Are basements not common in Oklahoma? This is the first time I can recall there being a lot of discussion around these sorts of purpose-built shelters. I was surprised when the video showed the photographer inside a purpose-built shelter, with a nice-looking house across the street -- I would presume a home like that (and others in that neighborhood) would have a basement?

From: http://realestate.aol.com/blog/2013/05/28/tornado-storm-shel...

== SNIP ==

Fewer than one percent of newly-constructed homes in Moore and surrounding towns extend underground, largely due to the high water table and the red clay that most of the area's homes stand on, which absorbs moisture easily.

In the heat, the clay tends to dry out, causing a cycle of contraction and expansion that adds pressure to concrete-reinforced basement walls, causing leaks. But NPR noted that even after improvements in building technology mostly solved this problem, people avoid basements largely because of a "psychological hangover for people that are used to seeing houses from the '40s and '50s, when the technology wasn't quite as good for waterproofing."

== SNIP ==

These types of shelters are registered with the city by latitude and longitude. From what I've heard, dozens of people were trapped in these shelters for several hours and then pulled out by emergency responders. Being stuck in a small shelter until the middle of the night isn't pleasant but the standard response to tornados until this type of shelter became cheaply (<$3K installed) available was to head into an interior closet or bathroom with no windows. For 99% of tornados, that will be enough to prevent injury or loss of life if the house is damaged, but a number of people were killed in the May 20 tornado while taking shelter in this way.

Well, persumably his hand would have been partly exposed to flying debris. More importantly, I think I'd be trying to hold onto something inside the shelter, with both hands, for dear life! So I'm still going with 'brave'.

Access to the shelter, especially if stuff is already flying around, projectile injury is very common in bad tornados, is probably the most important thing, after having one.

One of the few good things about tornados is that their devastating effects are very limited in area, and what remains will be quickly checked over by "first responders" (really, the residents are the first responders) from 10s to 100s of miles away within hours. They're very good at this, have their own code for marking places they've checked out (https://www.facebook.com/LivingReady/posts/196620160486002?e...), etc. Very very different from hurricanes and earthquakes.

I speak from the viewpoint of someone who was "evicted by tornado" in Joplin, MO two years ago. By the time I exited my trashed although not breached apartment, there was already a self-organizing set of crews with firetrucks from e.g. the Indian tribe just across the Oklahoma border to the southwest to Lamar, Missouri 44 minutes away to the north (during normal times). Not much later we had crews from as far away as Kansas City (and possibly further, that's just the furthest emergency X code I noticed on various buildings).

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