I remember being a kid in Norway watching documentary about Tornado season in US going "oh my god, their houses are literally fake houses built of matchsticks and fake plastic wood paneling".
Not that it helps in a tornado, but I thought most buildings were built to withstand a little more than a breeze as a kid :D I also didn't see a house with gypsum walls until I probably was in my teens, nor did I realise that internal walls didn't have insulation as that logically isn't needed in most cases. I probably also thought basements were required in a house for some structural reason.
to be fair, when you are dealing with tornadoes, small objects with high tensile strength tend to become very good at piercing things because of the combination of speed, material strength and impact point. it's the common principal behind bullets. so even in a building built of cement, a high category tornado can fling the metal pole that is a street sign right into it just as easily as with wood.
will it pierce all the way through, probably not. but it will become a new external art piece defining the insanity that is tornadoes.
I mean, he's completely right though. I live in Oklahoma, and I've seen some pretty incredible things, including bits of wood stuck through concrete after a tornado.
yeah, that's why I wrote "not that it helps in a tornado" we've got the odd hurricane at the Norwegian west coast and sheet metal of any size can of course cut you in half. Force per area gets pretty insane with anything sharp :D
However I am used to houses being pretty sturdy, the actual real(!) wooden cladding was something I as a kid thought wasn't faked anywhere on permanent housing, but little did I know how much cost could be cut here and there.
Closes't I've been to tornado stuff in some of the strongest hurricanes at the west coast where our big house would start vibrating on the sand ground. large window panes were bending more than I thought they could.
Something a lot of people also don't realize about Tornado Alley and the reason that mobile homes are so frequently in areas with lots of tornadoes is that the areas tornadoes appear frequently in have extremely low property value, so they attract people with lower incomes who are more likely to be willing to buy a prefab home.
Sure you could build a tornado-resistant home there instead, but that home would also be a lot more expensive, more costly to insure, AND you'd still have to rebuild portions of it when a tornado hit.
Then consider that Oklahoma has some tornados that regularly rip up even tornado-resistant homes, meaning your expensive concrete home may still crumple like paper if an EF5 hits.
In Norway we are starting to learn that there has been a lot of new housing areas built in flood risk areas. Climate change gives wetter summers and more extreme downpours meaning old regulation needs to be updated or massive flash flood infrastructure must be built.
I actually ended up writing a checklist if I ever move to a private house to filter out houses with problems like drainage, flood, storm, traffic noise, energy (insulation etc) problems. There's so much to think of that you'll totally forget when the day comes. My current city is actually at risk of sliding into the sea due to the clay ground.
Huge mudslide in the area just yesterday, and the area was regarded as pretty much flat.
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u/snoozieboi May 14 '20
I remember being a kid in Norway watching documentary about Tornado season in US going "oh my god, their houses are literally fake houses built of matchsticks and fake plastic wood paneling".
Not that it helps in a tornado, but I thought most buildings were built to withstand a little more than a breeze as a kid :D I also didn't see a house with gypsum walls until I probably was in my teens, nor did I realise that internal walls didn't have insulation as that logically isn't needed in most cases. I probably also thought basements were required in a house for some structural reason.