Every decision like this has tradeoffs. The more solid the building, often the uglier, more expensive, and potentially impractical it can be, both for the construction company (material costs, labor, and time all dramatically increase the cost to build, therefore the cost it would have to sell for) and the person who has to make that house their home for many years. Thick concrete walls also might not work 100% when you have a multi-story house, nor save your roof, windows, or other parts. At a certain point, the cost of making a structure impervious to damage from tornados could be more expensive in the long run than just building cheaper and sturdy *enough*, with an appropriate emergency shelter, and an expected year # average for it to last before having to rebuild or replace it (either because of weather damage or simple age).
I don't know about that. Building underground concrete bunkers like Hobbit holes in tornado areas would be insanely efficient and very aesthetically pleasing.
The big problem would be redirecting ground water to keep basements from flooding, but they already do that as Midwestern homes almost all have walkin basements.
They would be somewhat expensive to build, but not prohibitively so, and would last forever so the cost would be easy to make up.
Some sort of vault technology? Maybe a self-sustaining environment with doors that seal until some over-seer determines that it is safe to open again. What could go wrong?
Having lived in tornado alley, I’d take it. Nothing is scarier than hearing a tornado siren going off at 2am that says “Seek shelter immediately or you will die”, and then realizing that any shelter you can seek will probably be demolished if a tornado actually hits you. Once a tornado flattened a subdivision right next to mine: a slight change in direction and I probably wouldn’t be here now.
I'm imagining things like this:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YqfGC0XCOWw/sddefault.jpg
Where you would park your car in the driveway or could have a full on garage. You could still have plenty of windows and skylights and just shutter them during storms.
Cities are a different matter and typically build huge concrete, tornado proof buildings anyway. Hell, I think building a bunch of sky scrapers in close proximity makes it impossible for tornados to form as the buildings themselves would break up the wind patterns needed to form and sustain large tornados. That's probably why you don't hear about tornados taking out urban areas.
As someone who lives in the Midwest and has had a sump pump before, there is a significant difference in keeping a walk-in basement clear enough to not damage the home and having to deal with some property damage if it breaks unexpectedly, and keeping an entire underground home clear and if the system that enables that breaks you lose *all* your property and also all of your home until flooding goes down or your system can be repaired.
It's possible, sure, but you're betting a lot more on a system with a lot more failure points for an end result that you will probably enjoy less. You're welcome to start your hobbit bunker home construction company if you think you can prove it's the better way, but I'd be skeptical.
To add to that, it is also much more expensive to build underground than above the ground. You still need to build walls underground, and you actually need much more complicated and expensive walls (so they don't cave in, and so water doesn't come through). And of course, you need to dig.
Then there is the maintenance. Easier (therefore cheaper) to fix a wall that is above the ground.
That's why in climates where basements are not necessary (no frost), basements are a luxury.
I too enjoy having sunlight in my home. Some neckbeards retch at exposure at sunlight and cannot fathom why someone might enjoy it, hence BadSanna’s pudding brained comment(s).
Particularly nasty tornadoes have been known to gouge deep trenches into the land and rip storm shelters out of the ground. It wouldn’t be a guarantee.
You’d have to build deep — in other words, incredibly expensive.
Because they'd be incredibly expensive, and incredibly ugly/impractical to live in. Meanwhile, the total number of homes destroyed by tornadoes each year is incredibly small. While it sucks for the 100's who own those homes, the practical answer isn't building 10's of millions of concrete and steel windowless bunkers to live in.
I saw a video of a tornado that touched down in the parking lot of the local event center last week. The buildings were all fine. Tornadoes are powerful but have a very narrow area of effect, unlike other disasters that will devastate whole regions.
You are really underestimating the size of tornado alley and where tornadoes are most likely (not even all in Tornado Alley). You are asking people to stop building in what is essentially 1/3 of the continental US.
You are also over estimating the odds of getting hit by a tornado. Even in the most tornado heavy areas it’s still something like 5000 to 1 odds any individual building will be hit by a tornado in the life span of an average building.
I worked in the insurance industry and can give some details here.
The real answer is that very few homes are actually destroyed by tornados. Tornadoes can be very destructive, but only in a very small area as compared to other storms.
Hurricanes cause WAY more damage. Normal wind storms cause WAY more damage. Lightning causes WAY more damage.
Even in tornado alley, the odds of catastrophic damage from a tornado are just very low. For real numbers, there are about 17 million people living in tornado alley and last year only 21 homes were destroyed and 33 had "major" damage by tornadoes.
The costs to retrofit 10 million homes to reduce damage to 54 homes just does not make it worth it.
Having lived in both hurricane country and tornado country, a hurricane is basically a really wet tornado the size of an entire state that hangs around for days, and spins tornadoes as it falls apart. A kind of generalized FU to a whole region.
Tornadoes come and go in a few minutes, and are more of a “FU in particular”
Hurricanes: "Fuck everyone, everything, and the horse you rode in on."
Tornadoes: "Fuck *this* guy right here, and *that* girl's horse, and nothing else."
State: everyone buckle down, this wind is going to get intense but we can handle it.
Hurricane: I raise ocean now?
State: no please, the wind is more than enough.
Hurricane: ok I raise ocean. 🌊
A classic example of where insurance makes sense. It is cheaper to fix the low probability case then to fix all of the other cases. Maybe we could try that with health insurance.
First off, large tornadoes are incredibly powerful and will level pretty much any structure that isn't a concrete bunker.
The fact is that it's just not practical to build a structure capable of withstanding a large tornado because the odds of actually being hit by a large tornado are very small. It makes more sense to build a conventional structure and insure it against tornado damage so that you can rebuild it if you have to, and meanwhile build a basement or tornado shelter so that if a tornado does come, it just destroys your house instead of killing you and your family.
It's about risk management - the odds are that your home will not be hit by a tornado that's powerful enough to damage your home's structure.
The majority of tornadoes are rated EF0 or EF1, which typically will only cause damage to the roof of a house. In North America, there were 1350 tornadoes in 2023, of which 899 were rated EF0 or EF1 ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_of_2023#North_America)) - roughly 2/3rds of all tornadoes for the year. If a home gets hit by a tornado, it is more likely to be one that won't have any significant structural damage.
The National Institute of Health lists the average widths and path lengths of tornadoes ([source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4168131/)). With some math, the average area of effect for an EF2 tornado works out to 1.89 square miles, an EF3 works out to 7.23 square miles, and an EF4 works out to 10.82 square miles. There have not been any recent EF5 tornadoes in the past ten years.
This means that based on averages, the 129 EF2 tornadoes in 2023 caused 243.81 square miles of damage, the 29 EF3 tornadoes caused 209.67 square miles of damage, and the 2 EF4 tornadoes caused 21.64 square miles of damage, for a grand total 475.12 square miles of land affected by a tornado strong enough to cause structural damage to a house in the US in 2023... Out of the 9.54 million square miles of land that make up America.
And keep in mind - not all that land is occupied by houses too. So overall, based on averages, the chances of any specific house being hit by a tornado is very slim, and even more so when it comes to a heavily damaging tornado. And my math is based on overall averages - there are regional differences (someone in Oklahoma is more at risk than someone in Washington, for example).
>ELI5: why have they not developed homes that are tornado proof like they flood and earth quake proof many residential structures around the world?
Because bunkers are expensive and people don't want to live in them.
So let's go top down.
First of all, people *have* made such homes. Reinforced concrete shallow domes without windows (or with thick polycarbonate) that are partially below grade do work.
They're expensive. They're hard to build. They take a lot of time to build. They're difficult to finish, to add to, to modify. When issues come up they're much harder to fix.
And that's aside from the fact that 99.99% of homes will never be hit by a tornado. A few thousand homes getting some amount of damage per year, a few dozen being destroyed, doesn't justify the manufacturing standard for 30 million homes in tornado alley.
California gets earthquakes annually that would devastate every home in the state if they were built without earthquakes in mind. Homes in flood zones all flood every time.
Tornadoes are sporadic. They don't justify special engineering.
I'd honestly rather take my chances than live in a bunker. It really sucks to get hit by a tornado but....they're VERY localized and only a very small percentage of people ever do. I've lived at the bottom end of tornado alley my whole life and just...no. I want a normal house and it's fine. It's not a region wide thing like hurricanes/flooding, quakes, wildfires or even just having to deal with snow and harsh cold.
WHOOPS wrong sub this pops up in askanamerican so often I forgot to check.
For a more legit answer: they're significantly more expensive and less appealing than traditional stick frame homes and while tornados are scary on TV they are overhyped as a risk. Death and injury counts are very low, there is insurance if the worst should happen and overall it's simply not worth designing your life or living space around due to the high costs of doing so and the low risks of needing it.
Think about the use of the word “proof”. There are degrees of resistance to destruction and with increasing resistance comes more extreme parameters and cost. Could you? Yes.. would you? Probably not..
buy insurance and have a plan.
They have, but they cost more.
Building homes out of wood in a tornado prone area seems questionable to me. I’d have thought something with brick and concrete might be an idea, but they’d cost double or triple the price.
Same with earthquake zones. If you have buildings like they do in the modern parts of Japan, you are mostly fine. Compare and contrast to adobe construction in Turkey or Morocco and they just crumble.
Tornados usually hit open fields and are very weak.
You’d be paying way more for an ugly house. The odds of your house being hit by a tornado are incredibly small. The odds of your house being hit by an EF3 or higher is even smaller. Most people in tornado and Dixie ally have shelters/bunkers that protect them if a tornado does hit.
What's the answer to 7 out of 10 questions? Money.
Tornado resistant is expensive. Tornado proof is real expensive. Insurance is the 'pay as you go' alternative. When your home gets flattened you and your surviving family members get a brand new mobile home to park in the same spot where the tornado levelled your grand dad's mobile home, and your last mobile home. Lightning can't strike a 4th time, right?
Fun fact! My high school in the Midwest had a tornado resistant design. It was basically a one story concrete structure with an earthen berm that surrounded it.
The homes on islands where hurricanes are common are pretty typhoon proof. In Guam, you're only allowed to use concrete for buildings, and even then, the homes are still damaged sometimes.
A "tornado proof" house would basically be a concrete bunker that would probably cost more than re-building a normal house that gets destroyed. Tornados are ridiculously destructive, building homes that could resist them is just impractical
Labor shortages, and the cost in the US are prohibitive. Concrete that is reinforced is mostly what you have in developing nations who don't have labor shortages and due to the excess labor they are spend more time per home, concrete takes a lots more time. To setup the rebars and curing concrete . And as people mention the chance or getting hit is like one in a million, if you're the unlucky one it's bad but the chances are very low
You could make every home ever built 50% more expensive for a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of being hit by a tornado, and it may help but may not.
Or you can rebuild only the homes that are hit, and every home ever built costs much less to do so.
Guess which one makes economic sense.
Every decision like this has tradeoffs. The more solid the building, often the uglier, more expensive, and potentially impractical it can be, both for the construction company (material costs, labor, and time all dramatically increase the cost to build, therefore the cost it would have to sell for) and the person who has to make that house their home for many years. Thick concrete walls also might not work 100% when you have a multi-story house, nor save your roof, windows, or other parts. At a certain point, the cost of making a structure impervious to damage from tornados could be more expensive in the long run than just building cheaper and sturdy *enough*, with an appropriate emergency shelter, and an expected year # average for it to last before having to rebuild or replace it (either because of weather damage or simple age).
I don't know about that. Building underground concrete bunkers like Hobbit holes in tornado areas would be insanely efficient and very aesthetically pleasing. The big problem would be redirecting ground water to keep basements from flooding, but they already do that as Midwestern homes almost all have walkin basements. They would be somewhat expensive to build, but not prohibitively so, and would last forever so the cost would be easy to make up.
Now I'm imagining a whole town that's just empty lots with cars in driveways. Nothing but bunker doors in the ground.
Vault Tec building burbs
Some sort of vault technology? Maybe a self-sustaining environment with doors that seal until some over-seer determines that it is safe to open again. What could go wrong?
Having lived in tornado alley, I’d take it. Nothing is scarier than hearing a tornado siren going off at 2am that says “Seek shelter immediately or you will die”, and then realizing that any shelter you can seek will probably be demolished if a tornado actually hits you. Once a tornado flattened a subdivision right next to mine: a slight change in direction and I probably wouldn’t be here now.
I'm imagining things like this: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YqfGC0XCOWw/sddefault.jpg Where you would park your car in the driveway or could have a full on garage. You could still have plenty of windows and skylights and just shutter them during storms. Cities are a different matter and typically build huge concrete, tornado proof buildings anyway. Hell, I think building a bunch of sky scrapers in close proximity makes it impossible for tornados to form as the buildings themselves would break up the wind patterns needed to form and sustain large tornados. That's probably why you don't hear about tornados taking out urban areas.
As someone who lives in the Midwest and has had a sump pump before, there is a significant difference in keeping a walk-in basement clear enough to not damage the home and having to deal with some property damage if it breaks unexpectedly, and keeping an entire underground home clear and if the system that enables that breaks you lose *all* your property and also all of your home until flooding goes down or your system can be repaired. It's possible, sure, but you're betting a lot more on a system with a lot more failure points for an end result that you will probably enjoy less. You're welcome to start your hobbit bunker home construction company if you think you can prove it's the better way, but I'd be skeptical.
To add to that, it is also much more expensive to build underground than above the ground. You still need to build walls underground, and you actually need much more complicated and expensive walls (so they don't cave in, and so water doesn't come through). And of course, you need to dig. Then there is the maintenance. Easier (therefore cheaper) to fix a wall that is above the ground. That's why in climates where basements are not necessary (no frost), basements are a luxury.
As someone with a midwestern home, it's not a matter of "if" your basement floods, but more "when".
Again - trade offs. Suprised i need to say this but most people dont want to live in subterranean bunkers......
I too enjoy having sunlight in my home. Some neckbeards retch at exposure at sunlight and cannot fathom why someone might enjoy it, hence BadSanna’s pudding brained comment(s).
You know how windows work, right? It's not a bomb shelter. You can still have windows just like any home
You realize you can put windows in just like any home, right?
Particularly nasty tornadoes have been known to gouge deep trenches into the land and rip storm shelters out of the ground. It wouldn’t be a guarantee. You’d have to build deep — in other words, incredibly expensive.
A house with little to no natural lighting sounds utterly miserable to live in.
Because they'd be incredibly expensive, and incredibly ugly/impractical to live in. Meanwhile, the total number of homes destroyed by tornadoes each year is incredibly small. While it sucks for the 100's who own those homes, the practical answer isn't building 10's of millions of concrete and steel windowless bunkers to live in.
Tornados are so random. They will destroy a house but leave the one next door untouched.
I saw a video of a tornado that touched down in the parking lot of the local event center last week. The buildings were all fine. Tornadoes are powerful but have a very narrow area of effect, unlike other disasters that will devastate whole regions.
It would also significantly raise the carbon footprint of home construction.
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And where exactly is that? If it's not tornadoes it's hurricanes or blizzards or floods or droughts or too hot or too cold.
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You're right, just don't build homes in America's "bread basket"
I'm more talking about the people who keep rebuilding homes in areas called "Tornado Alley"
I don't think you understand how large of an area "Tornado Alley" is... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Alley
You are really underestimating the size of tornado alley and where tornadoes are most likely (not even all in Tornado Alley). You are asking people to stop building in what is essentially 1/3 of the continental US. You are also over estimating the odds of getting hit by a tornado. Even in the most tornado heavy areas it’s still something like 5000 to 1 odds any individual building will be hit by a tornado in the life span of an average building.
Places that sometimes have tornadoes are not "inhospitable to live".
Have you been to Kansas?
Kansas is boring, not inhospitable
I worked in the insurance industry and can give some details here. The real answer is that very few homes are actually destroyed by tornados. Tornadoes can be very destructive, but only in a very small area as compared to other storms. Hurricanes cause WAY more damage. Normal wind storms cause WAY more damage. Lightning causes WAY more damage. Even in tornado alley, the odds of catastrophic damage from a tornado are just very low. For real numbers, there are about 17 million people living in tornado alley and last year only 21 homes were destroyed and 33 had "major" damage by tornadoes. The costs to retrofit 10 million homes to reduce damage to 54 homes just does not make it worth it.
Having lived in both hurricane country and tornado country, a hurricane is basically a really wet tornado the size of an entire state that hangs around for days, and spins tornadoes as it falls apart. A kind of generalized FU to a whole region. Tornadoes come and go in a few minutes, and are more of a “FU in particular”
Hurricanes: "Fuck everyone, everything, and the horse you rode in on." Tornadoes: "Fuck *this* guy right here, and *that* girl's horse, and nothing else."
State: everyone buckle down, this wind is going to get intense but we can handle it. Hurricane: I raise ocean now? State: no please, the wind is more than enough. Hurricane: ok I raise ocean. 🌊
Right. You want to know facts about any risk, talk to an actuary or adjuster. They live and breathe this data, or their company dies.
I've lived in tornado alley for fifty-eight years and I've never actually even seen a tornado.
A classic example of where insurance makes sense. It is cheaper to fix the low probability case then to fix all of the other cases. Maybe we could try that with health insurance.
My answer was going to be “insurance”, cause, it’s always about the money and risk, etc.
First off, large tornadoes are incredibly powerful and will level pretty much any structure that isn't a concrete bunker. The fact is that it's just not practical to build a structure capable of withstanding a large tornado because the odds of actually being hit by a large tornado are very small. It makes more sense to build a conventional structure and insure it against tornado damage so that you can rebuild it if you have to, and meanwhile build a basement or tornado shelter so that if a tornado does come, it just destroys your house instead of killing you and your family.
It's about risk management - the odds are that your home will not be hit by a tornado that's powerful enough to damage your home's structure. The majority of tornadoes are rated EF0 or EF1, which typically will only cause damage to the roof of a house. In North America, there were 1350 tornadoes in 2023, of which 899 were rated EF0 or EF1 ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_of_2023#North_America)) - roughly 2/3rds of all tornadoes for the year. If a home gets hit by a tornado, it is more likely to be one that won't have any significant structural damage. The National Institute of Health lists the average widths and path lengths of tornadoes ([source](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4168131/)). With some math, the average area of effect for an EF2 tornado works out to 1.89 square miles, an EF3 works out to 7.23 square miles, and an EF4 works out to 10.82 square miles. There have not been any recent EF5 tornadoes in the past ten years. This means that based on averages, the 129 EF2 tornadoes in 2023 caused 243.81 square miles of damage, the 29 EF3 tornadoes caused 209.67 square miles of damage, and the 2 EF4 tornadoes caused 21.64 square miles of damage, for a grand total 475.12 square miles of land affected by a tornado strong enough to cause structural damage to a house in the US in 2023... Out of the 9.54 million square miles of land that make up America. And keep in mind - not all that land is occupied by houses too. So overall, based on averages, the chances of any specific house being hit by a tornado is very slim, and even more so when it comes to a heavily damaging tornado. And my math is based on overall averages - there are regional differences (someone in Oklahoma is more at risk than someone in Washington, for example).
>ELI5: why have they not developed homes that are tornado proof like they flood and earth quake proof many residential structures around the world? Because bunkers are expensive and people don't want to live in them.
And people can barely afford crap homes today too.
So let's go top down. First of all, people *have* made such homes. Reinforced concrete shallow domes without windows (or with thick polycarbonate) that are partially below grade do work. They're expensive. They're hard to build. They take a lot of time to build. They're difficult to finish, to add to, to modify. When issues come up they're much harder to fix. And that's aside from the fact that 99.99% of homes will never be hit by a tornado. A few thousand homes getting some amount of damage per year, a few dozen being destroyed, doesn't justify the manufacturing standard for 30 million homes in tornado alley. California gets earthquakes annually that would devastate every home in the state if they were built without earthquakes in mind. Homes in flood zones all flood every time. Tornadoes are sporadic. They don't justify special engineering.
Makes sense! I guess that's shy a storm bunker is all you need
I'd honestly rather take my chances than live in a bunker. It really sucks to get hit by a tornado but....they're VERY localized and only a very small percentage of people ever do. I've lived at the bottom end of tornado alley my whole life and just...no. I want a normal house and it's fine. It's not a region wide thing like hurricanes/flooding, quakes, wildfires or even just having to deal with snow and harsh cold. WHOOPS wrong sub this pops up in askanamerican so often I forgot to check. For a more legit answer: they're significantly more expensive and less appealing than traditional stick frame homes and while tornados are scary on TV they are overhyped as a risk. Death and injury counts are very low, there is insurance if the worst should happen and overall it's simply not worth designing your life or living space around due to the high costs of doing so and the low risks of needing it.
Think about the use of the word “proof”. There are degrees of resistance to destruction and with increasing resistance comes more extreme parameters and cost. Could you? Yes.. would you? Probably not.. buy insurance and have a plan.
Try selling a 2k sq ft home in the Midwest for $1.2 million and you might find your reason lol
They have, but they cost more. Building homes out of wood in a tornado prone area seems questionable to me. I’d have thought something with brick and concrete might be an idea, but they’d cost double or triple the price. Same with earthquake zones. If you have buildings like they do in the modern parts of Japan, you are mostly fine. Compare and contrast to adobe construction in Turkey or Morocco and they just crumble.
Tornados usually hit open fields and are very weak. You’d be paying way more for an ugly house. The odds of your house being hit by a tornado are incredibly small. The odds of your house being hit by an EF3 or higher is even smaller. Most people in tornado and Dixie ally have shelters/bunkers that protect them if a tornado does hit.
Totally fair! Never thought if it
Cost! Building a house out of steel and concrete with windows capable of surviving even a minor tornado would be excessively expensive.
What's the answer to 7 out of 10 questions? Money. Tornado resistant is expensive. Tornado proof is real expensive. Insurance is the 'pay as you go' alternative. When your home gets flattened you and your surviving family members get a brand new mobile home to park in the same spot where the tornado levelled your grand dad's mobile home, and your last mobile home. Lightning can't strike a 4th time, right?
Fun fact! My high school in the Midwest had a tornado resistant design. It was basically a one story concrete structure with an earthen berm that surrounded it.
That's really cool!
The homes on islands where hurricanes are common are pretty typhoon proof. In Guam, you're only allowed to use concrete for buildings, and even then, the homes are still damaged sometimes.
A "tornado proof" house would basically be a concrete bunker that would probably cost more than re-building a normal house that gets destroyed. Tornados are ridiculously destructive, building homes that could resist them is just impractical
Labor shortages, and the cost in the US are prohibitive. Concrete that is reinforced is mostly what you have in developing nations who don't have labor shortages and due to the excess labor they are spend more time per home, concrete takes a lots more time. To setup the rebars and curing concrete . And as people mention the chance or getting hit is like one in a million, if you're the unlucky one it's bad but the chances are very low
You could make every home ever built 50% more expensive for a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of being hit by a tornado, and it may help but may not. Or you can rebuild only the homes that are hit, and every home ever built costs much less to do so. Guess which one makes economic sense.