Saoirse's Primal Journal page 181

[Saoirse]

why hello there, Breyer's Rocky Road ice cream. make yourself at home while i slip into something more...comfortable.

[naiadknight]

these didn't bother me, they were just cool to look at. AFAIK there has been a tornado touch down in the vicinity of my house for the past 100 years, but a few miles east of us is another story. wow, storm chasing with kids? that's risky, but i imagine you have some great memories.

why do i bother browsing MDA when i feel brain dead? i've had a busy day, and i kind of wish the kids would stop talking to me for a little while.

Talking to her later, she didn't get as close as we thought. she tried to stay a mile of 2 away from where the wall cloud and esp the bear cage were. The worst we saw was hail and some rotation off in the distance as mom was doing a u-ey on some god forsaken Bob's road and driving like mad in the opposite direction. It was always fun trying to help mom find the storm's, though.

[justyouraveragecavemen]

April 27th last year we had at least one F5 come through not far from our house. It made a couple towns south of us almost completely non-existent. One smaller one went over our house (literally) and touched down about 10 miles away, causing more damage than I'd ever seen. My wife's work (non-profit) had a lot to do with the rebuilding efforts in the 2 towns mentioned above...a year later and there's still folks trying to rebuild their lives. All we had was a big heavy piece of plywood land on our roof with a crash, I thought it was the roof leaving! Our TV and cell service went out (towers were gone), I remember thinking how inconvenient is was until we learned of how many people died so close to us. Reality on line 1, reality on line 1.

[Saoirse]

wow JYACM. that's a harsh wakeup. i'm not aware of anyone dying during any tornado here in at least the past 10 years. we're just northwest of tornado alley, so sometimes our state gets hit by something, but it usually happens in unpopulated areas.

[justyouraveragecavemen]

I found this map of the line that went by our house. We live just to the left of the 1st yellow "footage" marker...the red crosses are people killed...
North Alabama tornado - April 27, 2011 - Google Maps
The tornadoes I mentioned wiping out 2 cities are not illustrated, but are below the city of Russellville toward the beginning of the red line.

[Saoirse]

wow, that's intense! you guys were awfully lucky!

i wonder what would happen if a tornado hit a nuclear plant; are they solid enough to withstand that?

[justyouraveragecavemen]

I would think so, there's one not too far from all these tornadoes...I think they're main problem would be a power outage like Fukishima where they couldn't cool the reactor. After all this my wife won't build a house without a basement or storm shelter, we nixed the basement due to costs, but the builder says he can bury a storm shelter then build the house on top of it and have an access through the floor in a closet.

[Saoirse]

that would be nice. almost all houses up here have basements, so it's kind of a foreign concept to me. i guess the water table is pretty high where you are?

[naiadknight]

Most nuclear reactors are built to withstand just about everything shy of a high Richter scale earthquake or off the charts tornado/ hurricane. Most modern ones are also equipped with not just massive generator backups, but second and third back ups too, as well as what essentially amounts to a catch basin of water to dump on the cores if all the back up systems fail. Short of an event like the tsunami that flattened Fukushima, the Galveston hurricane of 1900, or an EF-6, most will stand until dismantled or humans die.

Most houses here have neither basement nor attic. No basement because we have cemented caliche (essentially bedrock) no more than 3' below groundlevel in most places. No attic because very places in TX have the, for some reason I've neve figured out. We have plenty of sheds. Bathrooms tend to be extra reinforced in the panhandle and East TX for tornado protection (higher grade pipes and studs required by code than needed structurally.) Many people across the state (not here) put in storm cellars. Here, the caliche's too high for a basement unless you feel like blasting it out or spending hours with heavy equipment to get not very deep. The wind gets high enough that most folks stick with sprawling single levels as opposed to 2 stories for fear of tempting god.

[Saoirse]

huh. how do they get storm cellars in there with the bedrock? is it just a matter of making a small hole in the rock, rather than a full basement?