cmichweather

Cmc is west also

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13 minutes ago, WinterWxLuvr said:

I sometimes wonder what posters from outside our forum think of us. Lol

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I think it's going to be fugly

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if i lived there, there would be months where i would never leave my house

I've been outside in the -40-50 stuff I wonder if my winter gear would be ok for 5 minutes out in that. The worst part if you are properly clothed is the inner nostrils, and lungs the air literally is so cold it freezes any liquid in your nostrils and will make you cough if you take a deep breath when it's that cold.

The warning system is not designed to help people in tornadoes as strong as we witnessed today. The advice is go to the basement (we don't have basements in the southeast b/c of the water table) or go to an interior room on the lowest floor.

That's great advice for most situations.

It's terrible advice for a long-track EF-4 or EF-5. The vast majority of the people took the "standard advice" and those in the path died. People are not standing outside and ignoring these things. Almost everyone I know pays close attention.

The old advice..."get in your car and get the heck outta the way"....it contradicts the new advice that has been well engrained. Go back and look at some of the footage today. Today, the best advice was the old advice. Get in the car and take your chances. It's easy in the Midwest...I've lived there. Everyone has basements and storm cellars.

What sort of irks me a little bit is that we have so, so many people who trust the authorities and follow the standard advice against their own gut feeling and that standard advice is just horrible if you're in the path of a storm that will clean the foundation of the home.

Someone said it earlier...the modern warning system saves many lives in the smaller tornadoes but it is costing lives in these big ones. People think they'll be OK in their bathtub on the first floor of their home when they're in the path of an EF-5. Personally, I think you should run like hell if you don't have an underground shelter. Run and don't look back. There's nowhere you can reasonably be safe in "riding out" tornadoes like this.

If you look at most of the damage photos, you're going to see that the places where most people were killed were places that have no business being used as shelter from a powerful, long-track wedge tornado. The conventional wisdom is usually right but it is occasionally horribly, horribly wrong. It bothers me to see educated mets go on TV and repeat the mantra to stay in an interior room of their wood-frame home while looking at something that powerful. It's time to panic. It's time to run like hell.

People did what they were told and huddled in their homes and died when they could've literally run to relative safety. They had time, but doing what they were told cost them their lives.

You also have the issue of how many people were saved by staying at home and in the safest areas of their homes imagine if a decent sized city had all picked up and left and hit the highways and the storm tracked along that highway. You could imagine what a 1/2 mile wide to 1 mile tornado that tracked along a highway of congested bumper to bumper traffic would have done. It's a lose lose situation.

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The images of destruction are mind blowing and sad. http://www.hamwx.com/?page_id=3969

You can clearly tell that this was a strong ef-4/ef-5 tornado, similar to the Moore, OK tornado, alot of the pictures were just rubble and destroyed neighborhoods from the Moore, OK storm compared to the current damage photos. I grabbed an image from the '99 destruction compared to what happened today.

The reports coming out almost make you wonder what more could have been done..... I mean yes these were insanely strong storms, but you wonder how many of those deaths were attributed to people in the center of their houses/basements, I mean I hope ppl weren't killed trying to video these storms or tape them or didn't take the warnings seriously. Really nothing "popped up" but it is also what you hear that it's just a cultural issue down there, and also the sirens being damaged/out from the previous night. It certainly is going to be an interesting sociological study as well as what can be found from the meteorology side. It wasn't really that huge of an area affected and it certainly wasn't a suprise I mean at the end of the day you can warn millions of people and no matter what you do not every single one of those people will listen.

really I don't want to be making a snap decision, these were strong tornadoes that hit populated areas, I just wonder if all the lose of life were attributed to ppl being in the safest position and taking the warnings seriously.

Welcome to the board. It was/is a historic outbreak. I will never forget this one. It reminds me how important the job of a meteorologist truly is. Kudos to the NWS offices, SPC, emergency managers, news outlets, etc for saving countless lives today.

The reports coming out almost make you wonder what more could have been done..... I mean yes these were insanely strong storms, but you wonder how many of those deaths were attributed to people in the center of their houses/basements, I mean I hope ppl weren't killed trying to video these storms or tape them or didn't take the warnings seriously. Really nothing "popped up" but it is also what you hear that it's just a cultural issue down there, and also the sirens being damaged/out from the previous night. It certainly is going to be an interesting sociological study as well as what can be found from the meteorology side. It wasn't really that huge of an area affected and it certainly wasn't a suprise I mean at the end of the day you can warn millions of people and no matter what you do not every single one of those people will listen.