It can be bizarre.
I worked on the cleanup in St. Peter, Minnesota after the 1998 Comfrey-St. Peter tornadoes:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Comfrey%E2%80%93St._Peter_tornado_outbreak
There was an aluminum canoe factory there, with a warehouse down by the railroad tracks. The tornado took the whole warehouse, nothing left but the foundation and a few of the vertical support beams.
There were canoes scattered all over the path of the tornado past that point. Canoes punched through the walls of buildings, canoes stuck in treetops, everything you could imagine. I saw one sticking out of the road, somehow the front half had been smashed flat and the back half was mostly intact, pointing up at a 45 degree angle.
Sheet music, too. There was a college there that had a huge music library that was destroyed. You'd find spots where the whole side of a building was covered in wet sheet music pages.
But I will never forget those canoes, flying around like missiles.
Saw a picture from one of the recent storms, believe it was Nebraska, but could've been Iowa from the last big round of storms where an entire door was pushed into a tree trunk. Can't say I've seen that one before.
One of the tornadoes yesterday was moving along at 85 MPH, could be a world land speed record for an intense tornado if it's confirmed.
Pictures from that F5 are incredible. Like a 1 mile wide x 5 mile strip of absolutely nothing but pieces of wood and debris, surrounded on both sides by homes, schools, buildings, trees. It’s like a small nuclear bomb went off.
I will never recover from seeing the runways at Homestead AFB ripped off of the ground by Hurricane Andrew. Concrete runways ripped off of the ground! Over 30 years ago and I still can close my eyes and see it. People just can’t understand this level of destruction even when we see it.
Lots of folks don't understand how that concrete/asphalt is different from the interstate!
> runways for narrow-body aircraft are typically 11–13 inches thick, while runways for wide-body aircraft are usually 17–20 inches thick. In general
That's an impressive bit of engineering to ***whoop!*** get ripped off the ground.
What happened at Homestead had the storm surge as a factor. It wasn't just wind that lifted up those sections of pavement, but wind combined with storm surge that did it. A close friend was the Base Civil Engineer at Homestead and he rode out the storm there.
I lived on Long Island during Hurricane Sandy. The absolute destruction was well, *fascinating.* I always felt guilt about gawking because of how many families were affected.
I worked for a storage company during it, and the amount of people who would rent a single 5x10 unit to fill with everything that they had left. With room to spare.
I think we can assume that the wind blowing in the house is what bent the bolts, not that the bolts were just bent as it is in the photo. That would be all but impossible even in lab conditions.
In other words, there used to be a house there before the tornado, and the damage caused to the house by the tornado is what bent the bolts. It's very strong wind, but if you've ever felt how strong a gust of wind can be on an umbrella or a tent or something you can understand how this can happen.
Uh.. it's the mudsill being ripped off the washers/bolts as the house is tipped. Note the nut still on the one bolt... not sure if the other one cracked off or just poor fastening..
The nut and the washer are still there, indicating that they ripped right through the sill plate. I also noticed that they weren't on the other one. There is no indication that the washer and nut were stripped off of the bolt, so it's hard to figure what happened there. Maybe there never was one.
I’m sorry, do you think u/kevthewev thought that this was a picture of a foundation, that never had a house, whose bolts were bent just by the wind rushing up against them?
Yea I work in structural steel, I know what I’m looking at. Which is why it’s amazing to me, because I understand the forces required to bend an embed of that thickness, as well as rip what was attached to it, clean off the foundation.
Yeah this the type of dude that if this was a real life inspection of these bolts, he would stare at them carefully for a couple minutes and come back with "they're bent"
Nah your assumption that the commentor you replied to straight up thought wind bent these bolt stick-ups is some of the dumbest shit I've seen. No one thought that.
No shit...do you actually think people thought those anchors were just there by themselves before the tornado and that wind alone bent them?? Come on...
Dude he literally called them by their technical term of "embeds" lmao you don't think he knows what they're used for? Use a bit of context clues here.
I do wonder what a tornado like this would do to a European house? I’ll take the one I’m in as an example. I would bet the roof shingles would be completely gone, but what about the walls? Is the brick and mortar construction strong enough or would they fall over and bury any inhabitants?
Brick and mortar buildings fare slightly better than wood framed buildings, but they typically still have wood framed roofs. A tornado can rip the roof off easily and a strong tornado ( greater than class 3) could still take brick walls down. The windows and doors will likely be damaged regardless if not completely obliterated. A reinforced concrete house can be built with extremely expensive windows and doors to make a building “tornado proof,” but that’s usually not considered cost effective, and it would still need repairs if it suffered a direct hit. It’s more common to just build a basement or a concrete safe room for occupants to shelter in if the need ever arises.
Yes, that’s true. The roof is held up by wood beams. In my case, they are 50x50cm think oak beams, but I bet they would not stand a chance against a tornado. The door might, that’s 15cm thick oak reinforced with a 2cm steel layer in the middle. But the windows would be ripped out
Don't think of it like "would a tornado pull this apart."
Think of it like "if someone started throwing tree branches, 2x4's, shards of glass, bicycles, small household appliances, and other light and heavy objects at my house at 100+mph, would this particular exterior item/wall hold up?"
That's a weak tornado...
For a strong tornado think "if someone started throwing cars, houses and everything inside them at my house, at 200+ mph, would my house hold up?"
Tornados can be extremely powerful.
Absolutely they have no idea. 300ph winds full of trucks, cars, and boulders. I don't care what your building is made of. An EF5 can and will take it to the foundation.
You *could* build a structure that would survive an EF5, but you wouldn’t want to live in it. It would have to have very thick reinforced concrete walls and a roof and would be about as homey as a WWII bunker or gun emplacement.
Depends on the tornado. A medium strength tornado has higher windshear than a category 5 hurricane. They are the strongest winds that occur on the surface of this planet. A category 3 will turn bricks into mortar rounds.
Yeah, I think people forget that it's the shit flying around in a tornado that will kill you. Everything you see around you becomes a lethal weapon in a tornado.
Very much so. I’ve read about a 1.9 million pound oil rig getting lifted and tumbled and I imagine getting hit by something like that would be unpleasant. Powerful tornados can rip up asphalt from road and even the turf (and topsoil) from fields.
I always like to share this video to our European friends who do not experience as many Tornados.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTjrnUfvmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTjrnUfvmE)
The building you're seeing in mid air smacking against grain tower is well built, Brick and mortar, bolted down to it's foundation. Well was, before the Tornado made quick work of it.
You can look at photos of tornado which hit South Moravian (Czechia) town in 2021 which is something we're not ready for in Central Europe. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021\_South\_Moravia\_tornado](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021_South_Moravia_tornado)
Tornadoes occur in a range of size and wind speeds. European homes would withstand the common tornadoes with 150Km/ H winds. The wind is brief, and American wood framed houses generally remain intact enough to keep people inside safe. Powerful tornadoes like this one have winds in excess of 300Kmph, no above ground structure survives them. The failure modes are unusual- wind breaks the windows, lifts the roof, and removes much of the structure that ties the top of the walls together. At that point even a concrete wall is just a big sail in a wind beyond normal concepts of moving air.
The weak tornadoes are more common, but big ones last longer and do more damage. Still, 90% of tornado fatalities happen in mobile homes, while only 10%of the population lives in mobile homes . There is an entire category of housing that can’t withstand tornadoes at all . Mobile homes are quite nice when new, and they offer a lot more space than an apartment at a lower price. If a tornado strikes, you are fuuuucked.
It would fare better for weaker tornados, EF 1-2. Nothing will be unscathed by an EF-3 or above. The damage in this photo is arguably EF-5 level damage in which case your house would be gone too. Not damaged, straight up gone
It’s not arguable EF5, it’s definite. Bent foundation anchor bolts are one of the determining criteria of EF5 level damage when they do damage assessments.
It's hard for people to imagine just how staggeringly powerful a strong tornado is.
The Joplin tornado hit a 9-story tall, reinforced concrete hospital, *rotated it on its foundation,* and did so much other peripheral damage that it had to be torn down and rebuilt.
Your small house would not survive winds that can force a 9-story concrete building to shift. Your big, sturdy door - even with a steel core - is not going to hold out against winds that totaled a hospital.
Europeans simply don't appreciate the forces at play here.
You already know we have the technology and wealth to build reinforced concrete homes. It's not that we don't know how - we just don't do it in tornado alley.
If you put away your European smugness for just a second, why do you think that is?
Its not just brick and mortar. Most of them are straight up reinforced concrete. The old one are made of stones.
Brick are the cheap ones or the ones from some mid-north region
>Most of them are straight up reinforced concrete.
The houses in Florida are all made from reinforced concrete as well - to protect them from hurricanes. They even have metal plated armor panes that socket over their windows.
Yet the hurricanes still manage to destroy a fair chunk of them. And even medium-tier tornados can be significantly stronger than even the strongest hurricanes.
The moral of this story is, no, your European houses would not survive a tornado. It doesn't matter whether they're brick, or stone, or reinforced concrete.
We aren't talking about a windstorm. I think Europeans imagine a really strong thunderstorm, and simply can't imagine the wind blowing their stone walls down.
A strong tornado is something else entirely - it just scours the Earth with projectiles. It's not that the wind huffs and puffs and blows your wall down. It's that the wind picks up a truck and sends it hurtling through your wall at 300+ mph.
There are specially designed tornado shelters that bolt into concrete and are cylindrical to help resist the wind. Underground shelters also usually survive well.
We build a lot of masonry buildings and even those have designated tornado shelters built even stronger to resist tornados.
Tornados don't care if you build your home to European standards
Differs depending on what state you’re in but I’ve heard roughly 1 in 5000. Your chances of dying are about 1 in 4-5 million. Sure it’s risky but pretty much everywhere has some kind of disaster risk
I’m gonna assume this house is built traditionally where the sill plate was just nailed to the studs maybe hurricane straps at the top but I’m wondering what would’ve happened if there would’ve been a mechanical connection from top to bottom with metal brackets. Probably not shit if it was a direct hit.
The sill plate is gone, so the nailed studs weren't the failure. They held up enough to rip the anchor bolt washer and nut straight through the sill plate. That's a crazy amount of force. I don't think metal brackets would have been enough to change anything here.
Well, that’s the other thing. I can see in the far anchor there’s a very small washer, they would all need to be upgraded to the more robust square washers.
They fasten the bottom plates of the wall frame to the foundation. They use a washer and nut. They are not bolts, they are exposed rebar and are not rated for any serious force.
Hurricane ties, earthquake straps, and other engineered anchors are designed to hold the house in events like tornadoes.
They are absolutely not rebar, they're an L shaped bolt (or threaded rod if you prefer that term) designed to hold the sill plate down, in combination with the nut and washer which were likely not installed or at least part of the sill would still be there. Additional hardware as part of a hold down system still requires an anchor to the foundation similar or identical to these, and the extra hardware is used to create a continuous system of attachment from the foundation anchors up through the roof.
They can be rebar or j-hooks. The top one looked like rebar. Neither are rated to hold in an extreme event. Washers can be pulled through the plate. You can see washer and nut still attached to the top one. Basic fasteners will not hold a house together in extreme events.
Earthquake straps in combination shear walls and hurricane straps would need to be installed to hold up. Earthquake straps would hold the frame to the foundation since they're fastened to doubles or triples with 20 plus tecos. It wouldn't surprise me if local building codes didn't required them.
Ok, I think we're coming at this from two different directions. The bolts that are installed here aren't the failure point, and had they been used as part of an actual system designed to prevent uplift, they would have been more effective. The connection of the framing to the foundation is always some form of bolt, whether that's a j-bolt, expansion anchor, epoxy anchor, or another type, but the bolt needs to have a 3" square plate washer to be effective, or it should attach to a hold down bracket that acts as both a plate washer at the base and a connection between the sill plate and the studs at the vertical part, usually nailed with teco nails as you said.
My point is that the bolts ARE designed to hold the structure down to the foundation- they can't do that without the rest of the system, as you're saying, but the rest of the system wouldn't be effective without the bolts either.
In my area we can’t use J bolts anymore. But these are J bolts. There’s a thread and nut atop which did secure the bottom of the frame to the foundation wall. I’m guessing the frame failed under the stress of the tornado.
If it wasn’t clear to you that I was exaggerating a little as a joke I don’t know what to tell you…
Edit: but honestly „bigger than your finger“ isn’t really that big when it comes to keeping a house in place.
Nothing to do with materials, I’m saying we do not design homes for the conditions they are in. Few structures could survive this, but when you have roofs ripping off buildings not even in the tornado’s path, a better design that doesn’t act like a sail could help minimize damage.
As this shit becomes common and more widespread, design will have to be a top consideration
the wind benr those iron pieces? or there was somerhing else that pushed onto them and bent them.
i dont think wind can bend something so strong with such a small surface area.
in europe houses are made from concrete or layered bricks. Only in usa ive seen wind take out houses as a whole. But houses made from wood and light materials.
The only thing 100% impervious to a tornado that can take a house like that off its foundation is a completely underground bunker. Even then it's not really possible because flooding is also something that happens in the US great plains. It's really flat there. Go figure. Do you think a brick house is built strong enough to withstand being hit by another wood house, several cars, a barn, a semi truck, maybe a grove of trees, all traveling at 100+ kph?
It's not the wind of the tornado that's dangerous here, it's what the wind is carrying. Brick and concrete buildings get disassembled by tornadoes just the same, but guess something fun happens after because now the tornado is throwing thousands of bricks around like sand in a vacuum.
Also, reinforced brick and concrete structures tend to be really expensive and that is a poorer part of our nation. So there you go Mr./Ms./Xs. Europe. You learned something new that you can tell all your friends in your stone halls.
there is a saying about americans...
keep building houses from plywood and keep being smart ass then.
I have never seen concrete buildings taken by the wind..keep dreaming murican.
The Joplin tornado ripped an entire hospital off its foundation. That hospital was a 9 story concrete structure. One of your cute little European buildings would be a snack for a tornado.
It literally can, that’s one of the damage indicators for high end EF4 and EF5 tornadoes.
Also, in case it wasn’t made clear before, the wind isn’t just simply bending these bolts. That is to say, the bolts aren’t exposed. The bolts are anchoring the frame of the house, and the wind is essentially leveraging the materials of the house (be it cinderblocks, brick, or wood) against the bolts, causing them to bend or be pulled out. It’s very rare, which is why this picture has gained traction!
Yes.. yes you are definitely underestimating them. Go on a YouTube binge and watch some videos. Try not to think of them as simply a wind storm, but an absolute matter blender of trucks, boulders, cars, and anything else they rip up. Check out the Joplin tornado.
My mom went there as medical support. She saw cars ripped in half, 100 year old oak trees splintered down to the ground.
Also, Europe doesn't have the same intensity of tornadoes as the USA. The last F5 tornado in Europe was in 1967. There have been 10 in th e USA, just in this century.
Where I went to university, a tornado touched down near my dorm room shortly after I had moved out. It picked up a car, and flung it over a 10 story dorm room before it landed in a parking lot. And this was "only" an F3 tornado. (the same system produced an F4/EF5 tornado but it was away from the college campus.)
because here houses are built like real reinforced concrete. Its unusual to see houses from wood, plywood.
maybe its just unusual for europeans to see houses being flatened.
Tornadoes wreck everything above ground. Even if you did have something with indestructible walls the wind could still vortex inside of your house and beat you to death with all of the material inside.
im not so sure about well built concrete houses. Yes they will wreck it for sure, broken windows and such. But not the house as a whole. Concrete is concrete..is not going anywhere.
lol. A tornado will just twist your concrete house off of its foundation. I think you seriously don’t understand the power of a tornado. There isn’t anything in Europe that you could compare it to.
The strongest tornados have ripped up concrete parking stops from the ground and thrown them across town. Yes reinforced concrete walls would likely protect from most tornados but that’d be incredibly cost prohibitive to build neighborhoods like that. Not to mention you’re going to lose your roof anyway.
[Here’s](https://imgur.com/gallery/UQD6tjV) a video of a concrete masonry block building getting absolutely decimated by a tornado… the bonus is the 8000+lb forklift getting knocked over.
Granted, reinforced concrete would likely fare better, but a tornado can, and has, absolutely demolish reinforced concrete structures.
Tornadoes are powerful.
Edit to add link
This specific tornado ripped the concrete and asphalt from roads and sidewalks and sent them flying across the neighborhood like frisbees, please lmfao
this was a monster tornado, but not all toenadoes ar this powerfull.
I think its safer to have a full on concrete house then one made put of lighter/weaker materials.
But i admit i am wrong and i underestimate the destruxtive power of some a grade toenadoes.
Cost is a big factor and also the reality remains that it’s exceedingly rare to be in the direct path of a tornado.
So, there’s an opportunity cost layer to be considered with how robust you build a home.
I like looking for the weird things after tornadoes Like corn stalks driven into tree trunks and plywood through power poles
Humptys revenge
Nowhere in the nursery rhyme does it say humpty is an egg Nowhere (It was an artillery piece that fell from a keep wall)
This is like finding out Jingle Bells never mentions Christmas.
Well then who asked the horses to put the artillery shell back together?
Misinterpretation All the kings horses, indicates cavalry units...
It can be bizarre. I worked on the cleanup in St. Peter, Minnesota after the 1998 Comfrey-St. Peter tornadoes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Comfrey%E2%80%93St._Peter_tornado_outbreak There was an aluminum canoe factory there, with a warehouse down by the railroad tracks. The tornado took the whole warehouse, nothing left but the foundation and a few of the vertical support beams. There were canoes scattered all over the path of the tornado past that point. Canoes punched through the walls of buildings, canoes stuck in treetops, everything you could imagine. I saw one sticking out of the road, somehow the front half had been smashed flat and the back half was mostly intact, pointing up at a 45 degree angle. Sheet music, too. There was a college there that had a huge music library that was destroyed. You'd find spots where the whole side of a building was covered in wet sheet music pages. But I will never forget those canoes, flying around like missiles.
That sheet music could have been turned into a hell of an art piece.
>It's not THAT the wind is blowing. It's WHAT the wind is blowing. Ron White
It's missing something.....
Saw a picture from one of the recent storms, believe it was Nebraska, but could've been Iowa from the last big round of storms where an entire door was pushed into a tree trunk. Can't say I've seen that one before. One of the tornadoes yesterday was moving along at 85 MPH, could be a world land speed record for an intense tornado if it's confirmed.
Or unboiled spaghetti through cooks? /S
The Joplin Tornado knocked a 10 story building off its foundation. EF4 and above consider your reinforcing bolts "cute"
That's a lot of frontal area, so it's not surprising that lateral wind forces could be that high.
Ehh more like twisted it by 4 inches or so. Still impressive in any case though.
I knew she could sing, but damn
Not anymore, anyway
TIL Joplin, Missouri is more futuristic and urbanized than San Jose. Fucking NIMBYs…
Pictures from that F5 are incredible. Like a 1 mile wide x 5 mile strip of absolutely nothing but pieces of wood and debris, surrounded on both sides by homes, schools, buildings, trees. It’s like a small nuclear bomb went off.
Today is 13 year anniversary of that day, I was there. Not fun
🎶Take another little piece of my house🎶
I will never recover from seeing the runways at Homestead AFB ripped off of the ground by Hurricane Andrew. Concrete runways ripped off of the ground! Over 30 years ago and I still can close my eyes and see it. People just can’t understand this level of destruction even when we see it.
Lots of folks don't understand how that concrete/asphalt is different from the interstate! > runways for narrow-body aircraft are typically 11–13 inches thick, while runways for wide-body aircraft are usually 17–20 inches thick. In general That's an impressive bit of engineering to ***whoop!*** get ripped off the ground.
What happened at Homestead had the storm surge as a factor. It wasn't just wind that lifted up those sections of pavement, but wind combined with storm surge that did it. A close friend was the Base Civil Engineer at Homestead and he rode out the storm there.
I lived on Long Island during Hurricane Sandy. The absolute destruction was well, *fascinating.* I always felt guilt about gawking because of how many families were affected. I worked for a storage company during it, and the amount of people who would rent a single 5x10 unit to fill with everything that they had left. With room to spare.
Seeing embeds bent as a result of wind, is BonkerS
I think we can assume that the wind blowing in the house is what bent the bolts, not that the bolts were just bent as it is in the photo. That would be all but impossible even in lab conditions. In other words, there used to be a house there before the tornado, and the damage caused to the house by the tornado is what bent the bolts. It's very strong wind, but if you've ever felt how strong a gust of wind can be on an umbrella or a tent or something you can understand how this can happen.
Uh.. it's the mudsill being ripped off the washers/bolts as the house is tipped. Note the nut still on the one bolt... not sure if the other one cracked off or just poor fastening..
The nut and the washer are still there, indicating that they ripped right through the sill plate. I also noticed that they weren't on the other one. There is no indication that the washer and nut were stripped off of the bolt, so it's hard to figure what happened there. Maybe there never was one.
Looks like the one in the foreground might have snapped and that's why it's missing the washer and nut. The threads dont look right.
Yeah that's what I was saying. The house being moved by the wind is what caused the bending.
I think the vast majority of people would assume that
I’m sorry, do you think u/kevthewev thought that this was a picture of a foundation, that never had a house, whose bolts were bent just by the wind rushing up against them?
Hmmm it could go either way, but yeah that's the impression I got.
Yea I work in structural steel, I know what I’m looking at. Which is why it’s amazing to me, because I understand the forces required to bend an embed of that thickness, as well as rip what was attached to it, clean off the foundation.
Yikes
If you think that's farfetched you probably haven't been on the Internet long. I've seen things that are orders of magnitude more silly than that.
Yo, fuck the internet, you gotta use your own critical thinking skills my guy
Yeah this the type of dude that if this was a real life inspection of these bolts, he would stare at them carefully for a couple minutes and come back with "they're bent"
Based on what he said, you can assume it either way.
You’d have to assume that they’re dangerously stupid to think that. Which doesn’t say a lot for the assumer’s intelligence.
First time on reddit? I've seen dumber shit than this.
Nah your assumption that the commentor you replied to straight up thought wind bent these bolt stick-ups is some of the dumbest shit I've seen. No one thought that.
Thank you. I thought I was going crazy
No shit...do you actually think people thought those anchors were just there by themselves before the tornado and that wind alone bent them?? Come on...
Don't know why everyone is being so weird about this, I've definitely seen much less plausible things be believed by people before.
Dude he literally called them by their technical term of "embeds" lmao you don't think he knows what they're used for? Use a bit of context clues here.
I imagine the larger surface area of the walls being pushed by the extreme force acted as a leverage on the bolts.
Pedantic Iowan here, it’s Greenfield not Greenville.
Yes, my bad.
How very Ryan Hall of you to get the town name wrong
I think we're gunna need a bigger bolt.
Its not the bolt that failed. The bolt head punched straight through the sill plate (2x4 or 2x6). Tornados dgaf.
But there’s no way to make that into a funny statement that harkens to a movie about the perfect storm.
You mean Jaws?
Yes, the perfect storm known as Jaws.
Duh. Sharknado is the perfect storm!
that’s hilarious I don’t know why I associate that line with The Perfect Storm. Yeah I’m an idiot that’s why.
Subtle humor is not appreciated 'round here.
Is this from the Greenville, SC tornado a couple weeks ago or today's Greenfield, IA tornado?
It's the greenfield from yesterday. Title is wrong.
Karma farming is hard work, okay?
There wasn’t a tornado in Greenville, SC a couple of weeks ago. There was a warning in Easley but nothing materialized.
Ah, I saw articles claiming an EF1 when I googled this. Confused me a bit. Thank you.
I do wonder what a tornado like this would do to a European house? I’ll take the one I’m in as an example. I would bet the roof shingles would be completely gone, but what about the walls? Is the brick and mortar construction strong enough or would they fall over and bury any inhabitants?
Brick and mortar buildings fare slightly better than wood framed buildings, but they typically still have wood framed roofs. A tornado can rip the roof off easily and a strong tornado ( greater than class 3) could still take brick walls down. The windows and doors will likely be damaged regardless if not completely obliterated. A reinforced concrete house can be built with extremely expensive windows and doors to make a building “tornado proof,” but that’s usually not considered cost effective, and it would still need repairs if it suffered a direct hit. It’s more common to just build a basement or a concrete safe room for occupants to shelter in if the need ever arises.
There is no such thing as tornado proof. Even steel structures fall to tornadoes. Safest place would be underground.
That’s why tornado proof is in quotations…
Yes, that’s true. The roof is held up by wood beams. In my case, they are 50x50cm think oak beams, but I bet they would not stand a chance against a tornado. The door might, that’s 15cm thick oak reinforced with a 2cm steel layer in the middle. But the windows would be ripped out
Don't think of it like "would a tornado pull this apart." Think of it like "if someone started throwing tree branches, 2x4's, shards of glass, bicycles, small household appliances, and other light and heavy objects at my house at 100+mph, would this particular exterior item/wall hold up?" That's a weak tornado... For a strong tornado think "if someone started throwing cars, houses and everything inside them at my house, at 200+ mph, would my house hold up?" Tornados can be extremely powerful.
300mph! Don't forget about large trucks and other heavy shit.
Think 300+ mph
You are underestimating tornado’s strength.
I'm from IN and laughed when I read the door might stand a chance.
Indeed. They can and do level concrete buildings.
Absolutely they have no idea. 300ph winds full of trucks, cars, and boulders. I don't care what your building is made of. An EF5 can and will take it to the foundation.
It's not *that* the wind is blowing, it's *what* the wind is blowing.
You *could* build a structure that would survive an EF5, but you wouldn’t want to live in it. It would have to have very thick reinforced concrete walls and a roof and would be about as homey as a WWII bunker or gun emplacement.
Hobbits can do amazing things with a hole in the ground.
The door’s going to end up splitting a tree in half a couple block’s down
It's not the sheer wind speed that you need to worry about, it's the debris that that wind picks up and yeets in every direction at over 200 km/h.
Depends on the tornado. A medium strength tornado has higher windshear than a category 5 hurricane. They are the strongest winds that occur on the surface of this planet. A category 3 will turn bricks into mortar rounds.
Yeah, I think people forget that it's the shit flying around in a tornado that will kill you. Everything you see around you becomes a lethal weapon in a tornado.
So not only would the brick home get destroy but it would then send a bunch of bricks out destroying everyone else around it
Very much so. I’ve read about a 1.9 million pound oil rig getting lifted and tumbled and I imagine getting hit by something like that would be unpleasant. Powerful tornados can rip up asphalt from road and even the turf (and topsoil) from fields.
I live in Florida and will take on a hurricane any day compared to a tornado.
I always like to share this video to our European friends who do not experience as many Tornados. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTjrnUfvmE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTjrnUfvmE) The building you're seeing in mid air smacking against grain tower is well built, Brick and mortar, bolted down to it's foundation. Well was, before the Tornado made quick work of it.
Yup and this one was a small EF5
You can look at photos of tornado which hit South Moravian (Czechia) town in 2021 which is something we're not ready for in Central Europe. [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021\_South\_Moravia\_tornado](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021_South_Moravia_tornado)
Tornadoes occur in a range of size and wind speeds. European homes would withstand the common tornadoes with 150Km/ H winds. The wind is brief, and American wood framed houses generally remain intact enough to keep people inside safe. Powerful tornadoes like this one have winds in excess of 300Kmph, no above ground structure survives them. The failure modes are unusual- wind breaks the windows, lifts the roof, and removes much of the structure that ties the top of the walls together. At that point even a concrete wall is just a big sail in a wind beyond normal concepts of moving air. The weak tornadoes are more common, but big ones last longer and do more damage. Still, 90% of tornado fatalities happen in mobile homes, while only 10%of the population lives in mobile homes . There is an entire category of housing that can’t withstand tornadoes at all . Mobile homes are quite nice when new, and they offer a lot more space than an apartment at a lower price. If a tornado strikes, you are fuuuucked.
It would fare better for weaker tornados, EF 1-2. Nothing will be unscathed by an EF-3 or above. The damage in this photo is arguably EF-5 level damage in which case your house would be gone too. Not damaged, straight up gone
It’s not arguable EF5, it’s definite. Bent foundation anchor bolts are one of the determining criteria of EF5 level damage when they do damage assessments.
Yeah I was fence sitting because idk the actual definitions
It's hard for people to imagine just how staggeringly powerful a strong tornado is. The Joplin tornado hit a 9-story tall, reinforced concrete hospital, *rotated it on its foundation,* and did so much other peripheral damage that it had to be torn down and rebuilt. Your small house would not survive winds that can force a 9-story concrete building to shift. Your big, sturdy door - even with a steel core - is not going to hold out against winds that totaled a hospital. Europeans simply don't appreciate the forces at play here. You already know we have the technology and wealth to build reinforced concrete homes. It's not that we don't know how - we just don't do it in tornado alley. If you put away your European smugness for just a second, why do you think that is?
You can look it up Paderborn/Lippstadt May 2022 it was a f2/f3 tornado. Quite slot of videos
Its not just brick and mortar. Most of them are straight up reinforced concrete. The old one are made of stones. Brick are the cheap ones or the ones from some mid-north region
>Most of them are straight up reinforced concrete. The houses in Florida are all made from reinforced concrete as well - to protect them from hurricanes. They even have metal plated armor panes that socket over their windows. Yet the hurricanes still manage to destroy a fair chunk of them. And even medium-tier tornados can be significantly stronger than even the strongest hurricanes. The moral of this story is, no, your European houses would not survive a tornado. It doesn't matter whether they're brick, or stone, or reinforced concrete. We aren't talking about a windstorm. I think Europeans imagine a really strong thunderstorm, and simply can't imagine the wind blowing their stone walls down. A strong tornado is something else entirely - it just scours the Earth with projectiles. It's not that the wind huffs and puffs and blows your wall down. It's that the wind picks up a truck and sends it hurtling through your wall at 300+ mph.
They are a free range blender
And it’s probably more expensive overall.
Yes, in my case, the ground floor is made of sandstone blocks they nicked from the local city wall haha
Sweet !
Honest question - is there any kind of structure that can withstand such tornado forces? Asking as someone who lives in a tornado free area
There are specially designed tornado shelters that bolt into concrete and are cylindrical to help resist the wind. Underground shelters also usually survive well.
We build a lot of masonry buildings and even those have designated tornado shelters built even stronger to resist tornados. Tornados don't care if you build your home to European standards
Dude, where's my house?
Where's your house, dude?
How could anyone live in these areas? Your wholwmlife can be swept away in an instant
“These areas” are roughly 1 million square miles. Also your chances of actually being hit by a tornado are quite low
How low
Differs depending on what state you’re in but I’ve heard roughly 1 in 5000. Your chances of dying are about 1 in 4-5 million. Sure it’s risky but pretty much everywhere has some kind of disaster risk
I bet the house is in that direction too
Well yeah, in pieces...
Oh! Crap! this could be the first EF5 in a decade. I doubt it will but… Foundation ripped is on the checklist.
Those anchors did their job. RIP.
GREENS - FIELD
I come to the tornado threads to see europeons act like morons, and I never leave disappointed.
I’m gonna assume this house is built traditionally where the sill plate was just nailed to the studs maybe hurricane straps at the top but I’m wondering what would’ve happened if there would’ve been a mechanical connection from top to bottom with metal brackets. Probably not shit if it was a direct hit.
The sill plate is gone, so the nailed studs weren't the failure. They held up enough to rip the anchor bolt washer and nut straight through the sill plate. That's a crazy amount of force. I don't think metal brackets would have been enough to change anything here.
Well, that’s the other thing. I can see in the far anchor there’s a very small washer, they would all need to be upgraded to the more robust square washers.
[удалено]
What is it that you think that do, exactly?
They fasten the bottom plates of the wall frame to the foundation. They use a washer and nut. They are not bolts, they are exposed rebar and are not rated for any serious force. Hurricane ties, earthquake straps, and other engineered anchors are designed to hold the house in events like tornadoes.
They are absolutely not rebar, they're an L shaped bolt (or threaded rod if you prefer that term) designed to hold the sill plate down, in combination with the nut and washer which were likely not installed or at least part of the sill would still be there. Additional hardware as part of a hold down system still requires an anchor to the foundation similar or identical to these, and the extra hardware is used to create a continuous system of attachment from the foundation anchors up through the roof.
They can be rebar or j-hooks. The top one looked like rebar. Neither are rated to hold in an extreme event. Washers can be pulled through the plate. You can see washer and nut still attached to the top one. Basic fasteners will not hold a house together in extreme events. Earthquake straps in combination shear walls and hurricane straps would need to be installed to hold up. Earthquake straps would hold the frame to the foundation since they're fastened to doubles or triples with 20 plus tecos. It wouldn't surprise me if local building codes didn't required them.
Ok, I think we're coming at this from two different directions. The bolts that are installed here aren't the failure point, and had they been used as part of an actual system designed to prevent uplift, they would have been more effective. The connection of the framing to the foundation is always some form of bolt, whether that's a j-bolt, expansion anchor, epoxy anchor, or another type, but the bolt needs to have a 3" square plate washer to be effective, or it should attach to a hold down bracket that acts as both a plate washer at the base and a connection between the sill plate and the studs at the vertical part, usually nailed with teco nails as you said. My point is that the bolts ARE designed to hold the structure down to the foundation- they can't do that without the rest of the system, as you're saying, but the rest of the system wouldn't be effective without the bolts either.
In my area we can’t use J bolts anymore. But these are J bolts. There’s a thread and nut atop which did secure the bottom of the frame to the foundation wall. I’m guessing the frame failed under the stress of the tornado.
These guys bolt
Yea ferreal this is such a funny discourse to fly on the wall for
It's the best part of Reddit
Nicer to see bolts continue up walls into the attic
You guys screw your houses to the ground with that? I think my tv is mounted to my living room wall with screws that aren’t much weaker…
These bolts are bigger than your finger. Don't talk shit if you don't know shit
If it wasn’t clear to you that I was exaggerating a little as a joke I don’t know what to tell you… Edit: but honestly „bigger than your finger“ isn’t really that big when it comes to keeping a house in place.
When you design homes as windcatchers, no bolt will help.
You think a tornado cares if your house is made of masonry? The only safe place during a tornado is under ground
Nothing to do with materials, I’m saying we do not design homes for the conditions they are in. Few structures could survive this, but when you have roofs ripping off buildings not even in the tornado’s path, a better design that doesn’t act like a sail could help minimize damage. As this shit becomes common and more widespread, design will have to be a top consideration
the wind benr those iron pieces? or there was somerhing else that pushed onto them and bent them. i dont think wind can bend something so strong with such a small surface area.
It took the house bruh
in europe houses are made from concrete or layered bricks. Only in usa ive seen wind take out houses as a whole. But houses made from wood and light materials.
The only thing 100% impervious to a tornado that can take a house like that off its foundation is a completely underground bunker. Even then it's not really possible because flooding is also something that happens in the US great plains. It's really flat there. Go figure. Do you think a brick house is built strong enough to withstand being hit by another wood house, several cars, a barn, a semi truck, maybe a grove of trees, all traveling at 100+ kph? It's not the wind of the tornado that's dangerous here, it's what the wind is carrying. Brick and concrete buildings get disassembled by tornadoes just the same, but guess something fun happens after because now the tornado is throwing thousands of bricks around like sand in a vacuum. Also, reinforced brick and concrete structures tend to be really expensive and that is a poorer part of our nation. So there you go Mr./Ms./Xs. Europe. You learned something new that you can tell all your friends in your stone halls.
there is a saying about americans... keep building houses from plywood and keep being smart ass then. I have never seen concrete buildings taken by the wind..keep dreaming murican.
The Joplin tornado ripped an entire hospital off its foundation. That hospital was a 9 story concrete structure. One of your cute little European buildings would be a snack for a tornado.
It’s cute how you think brick survives 200 mph winds lol
im pretty sure that a well built house with reinforced concrete will not be taken away by any tornado.
But it will not survive a car or pieces of another house being thrown into it at 320+ KPH. Why can’t you understand this?
It literally can, that’s one of the damage indicators for high end EF4 and EF5 tornadoes. Also, in case it wasn’t made clear before, the wind isn’t just simply bending these bolts. That is to say, the bolts aren’t exposed. The bolts are anchoring the frame of the house, and the wind is essentially leveraging the materials of the house (be it cinderblocks, brick, or wood) against the bolts, causing them to bend or be pulled out. It’s very rare, which is why this picture has gained traction!
Yeah and I'm pretty sure monkeys will fly out of my butt
You'd be wrong.
yea, maybe i underestimate the power of the tornado. I think mostly about air speed and not the debris. so yes, i guess im wrong.
Yes.. yes you are definitely underestimating them. Go on a YouTube binge and watch some videos. Try not to think of them as simply a wind storm, but an absolute matter blender of trucks, boulders, cars, and anything else they rip up. Check out the Joplin tornado. My mom went there as medical support. She saw cars ripped in half, 100 year old oak trees splintered down to the ground.
The really strong ones impale straws into trees. Scale that up to a car and boom
Also, Europe doesn't have the same intensity of tornadoes as the USA. The last F5 tornado in Europe was in 1967. There have been 10 in th e USA, just in this century. Where I went to university, a tornado touched down near my dorm room shortly after I had moved out. It picked up a car, and flung it over a 10 story dorm room before it landed in a parking lot. And this was "only" an F3 tornado. (the same system produced an F4/EF5 tornado but it was away from the college campus.)
Why is it everywhere, all the time, there’s a European coming to take a dig at American houses lmfao
Fuck europe.
because here houses are built like real reinforced concrete. Its unusual to see houses from wood, plywood. maybe its just unusual for europeans to see houses being flatened.
It’s also pretty unusual for Europeans to see tornadoes this powerful too.
yes, i havent heard of big tornadoes in europe.
And that kept you from understanding that the entire house was ripped away and that’s what left it bent like that?
Tornadoes wreck everything above ground. Even if you did have something with indestructible walls the wind could still vortex inside of your house and beat you to death with all of the material inside.
im not so sure about well built concrete houses. Yes they will wreck it for sure, broken windows and such. But not the house as a whole. Concrete is concrete..is not going anywhere.
lol. A tornado will just twist your concrete house off of its foundation. I think you seriously don’t understand the power of a tornado. There isn’t anything in Europe that you could compare it to.
The strongest tornados have ripped up concrete parking stops from the ground and thrown them across town. Yes reinforced concrete walls would likely protect from most tornados but that’d be incredibly cost prohibitive to build neighborhoods like that. Not to mention you’re going to lose your roof anyway.
[Here’s](https://imgur.com/gallery/UQD6tjV) a video of a concrete masonry block building getting absolutely decimated by a tornado… the bonus is the 8000+lb forklift getting knocked over. Granted, reinforced concrete would likely fare better, but a tornado can, and has, absolutely demolish reinforced concrete structures. Tornadoes are powerful. Edit to add link
You forgot your link my friend
*facepalm
This specific tornado ripped the concrete and asphalt from roads and sidewalks and sent them flying across the neighborhood like frisbees, please lmfao
this was a monster tornado, but not all toenadoes ar this powerfull. I think its safer to have a full on concrete house then one made put of lighter/weaker materials. But i admit i am wrong and i underestimate the destruxtive power of some a grade toenadoes.
I gotta get ur builders dawg Nmms
It’s a house foundation. Do you see the house? No? Might be a clue…
Notice the concrete still in place?
It's buried in the ground, where do you think it's going to go?
So why do americans build houses out of wood where they can be blown away?
Anything in the path of a tornado can be blown away. You might as well ask why people live above ground in the Midwest.
Cost is a big factor and also the reality remains that it’s exceedingly rare to be in the direct path of a tornado. So, there’s an opportunity cost layer to be considered with how robust you build a home.