> “It appears most were sheltering in the place they were told to shelter,” the governor, Andy Beshear, said. “I hope that area was as safe as it could be, but this thing got hit directly by the strongest tornado we could have possibly imagined.”
You can only take so many precautions when tornadoes are in the neighborhood, because although the devastation where a large one touches down can be severe, the area is limited and the path is unpredictable.
Also:
> A company spokesperson said Sunday that eight of the 110 workers on the overnight shift Friday are confirmed dead and another eight are missing. For most of Sunday, the authorities had feared that more than 70 of those shift workers were missing [...]
RIP for those who have passed; it's good to hear that they are fewer that we thought.
> You can only take so many precautions when tornadoes are in the neighborhood, because although the devastation where one touches down is severe, the area is limited and the path is unpredictable.
One of those precautions is to not make your employees come in to work.
Tornados come and go quickly. Storms capable of producing tornados don't always do so, and those that do produce them only in small areas compared to where they are actually capable of producing them.
Having your employees stay home doesn't help at all. Many of them will be living in the same danger zone, and in fact many will be living in buildings that are less capable of withstanding a tornado.
>Having your employees stay home doesn't help at all. Many of them will be living in the same danger zone, and in fact many will be living in buildings that are less capable of withstanding a tornado.
Single floor factory building built on a concrete slab vs house with a basement.
You really think the factory will win in terms of human safety?
Oh, but of course, thats the whole point of weaseling around the term 'withstanding a tornado'.
I'm sure the factory building will withstand it better, in terms of how much of it will be remaining in the after math, but I'm also sure that the house with a basement is gonna be safer for the humans.
How do you know they have a house with a basement? Many houses in the Midwest are single-story ranches on a slab. Many people live in manufactured homes, mobile homes, or trailers, especially in places like rural Illinois and Kentucky.
Evidence you have never lived in the midwest. When I lived there, the tornado sirens would sometimes give you up to 15 minutes of warning that they one was likely in your area. This is not hurricanes where you have a weeks notice.
This was so obviously going to be a troublesome weather day that the local tv stations had canceled previously scheduled scheduling for the day after and replaced it with news.
Everybody knew some shit was gonna go down.
At the very least giving your employees the option of staying home without fear of reprisal is minimum necessary for a clear conscience.
I saw amazon was hit in this storm, knowing somebody who got fired for calling out because a tree blocked the only road out of their area, I guarantee there were people who only showed up because they feared being fired and they wanted to stay home during this but couldn't.
While that can still be true, lead times have gotten much better in general, and Mayfield actually had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH[0], which is remarkable. But 45 mins or more seems to be the norm these days, at least in my general observations. Local authorities choosing to sound the alarms as soon as the warnings are issued is perhaps another matter.
Edit: Someone else commented elsewhere that the current average lead time on TOR warnings is 9 minutes, so I stand corrected. Some of this probably depends on the storm mode associated with the tornado.
For a supercell, the radar signatures are pretty clear and distinct, so it’s easier to provide earlier warnings. A tornado embedded in a QLCS is more difficult to detect, so I’d expect advanced notification to be more difficult.
Tornado sirens are generally triggered by tornado warnings, which require confirmation of a tornado (either by visual confirmation of tornado, or more frequently, the telltale signs on radar). The blog post you cite talks about sufficient evidence to drive severe storm warnings or tornado watches, which are events that can happen close to weekly for some locations--too frequent to be used for tornado sirens.
It should be obvious that the text from the KPAH tweet at 7:03 is not your run-of-the-mill SVR warning or TOR watch (which aren’t issued by tweet, anyway). It was a very clear alert that a storm that had already produced a visibly-confirmed and dangerous tornado was heading toward that location. NWS offices don’t tweet out that kind of language that far in advance unless they are certain about it. They weren’t going to trigger an actual warning at that point, as there was still time for the storm to lift or dissipate, but when they finally did trigger the PDS warning for Mayfield[0] at 9:05, it had been clearly signaled beforehand that that storm was on the way and that it was serious.
So, no, local authorities aren’t going to sound the sirens based on a tweet over two hours in advance of an event (nor was anyone suggesting they should have done), but emergency managers should have been well aware in advance of the first warning issuance that a very dangerous tornado was on its way.
It was pointed out to me above that the 2.5 hour figure is spurious. (Cliff Mass apparently didn’t account for the fact that time stamps on tweets display the time of the tweet in the reader’s local time zone, not in the OP’s—or OT’s in this case.) So, NWS Paducah tweeted that alert at 9:03 CST, effectively contemporaneous with their issuance of the PDS warning. Still a pretty good lead time for a TOR warning, but nothing like hours of notice. In any case, I stand corrected on that.
That much warning time is an eternity and people who may be in the target zone may end up getting nothing.
When the Joplin tornado hit, we lived "in the path" of where it was expected to go (tracking WSW)/ We hunkered down... but the storm ended up going 15 miles south of us. This was just in a short period of time (maybe 20 minutes).
A lot can change in hours. Storms can dissipate or strengthen with frightening speed. Directions can change.
Right, which is why KPAH didn’t issue an actual warning until 9:05. Giving people a strongly-worded heads-up a couple of hours in advance via tweet gets the word out to emergency managers and other interested parties who can then disseminate that information as the situation develops. Once it becomes clear the tornadic cell hasn’t weakened or deviated, then you can trigger the actual alert systems. But I don’t think anyone can argue that no one had any idea what was coming until minutes in advance.
I'm visiting family right now about 70 miles north of the Mayfield tornado touchdown and we had severe weather warnings a couple of days before the storm.
That morning the TV news had a map over the local "heartland" area (Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri, Northern Kentucky and Southwest Indiana) showing likely severe impacts with likely tornadoes.
So, they knew the risk was there. That said, nobody that grows up here expected that big of a storm in December. It isn't "tornado season" so a lot of folks didn't take it seriously. I know didn't take it too seriously and I've been through an F4 tornado as a kid that did a lot of damage to my town (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion,_Illinois_tornado_outbr...).
Yes, they knew the risk was there, but when these warnings are hundreds of miles across and tornadoes are essentially razor blades going across this warning zone, are you supposed to just stop everything?
The people who died in their homes: what if they had gone to work and been spared? We only hear about the deaths, but people working or going to school during storms (anyone remember Moore, OK?) happen.
Yes, everyone remembers Moore where a school was hit sometime in the 2000's with fatalities because there was no tornado shelter, and the good citizens of Moore voted against tornado shelters, consequently there were more fatalities when another tornado hit in 2013. It shows that proper building codes and proper code enforcement is needed.
>Yes, they knew the risk was there, but when these warnings are hundreds of miles across and tornadoes are essentially razor blades going across this warning zone, are you supposed to just stop everything?
Yes.
OR! at the least! not force your employees to come in at the threat of firing if they don't.
Let them have the freedom to choose their own personal risk factor.
Well, it would be a different matter if these factories and warehouses had tornado shelters that were fit for purpose.
After all, it would be pretty absurd to believe that extreme weather is so common that factories and warehouses need to keep working through it; and yet at the same time so uncommon that factories and warehouses don't need adequate shelters.
Tornados like this one are a statistical risk you take by living in that part of the planet. We can't engineer practical structures that can survive them. The only mitigation is to live somewhere that doesn't have severe tornados.
We can engineer bunkers and safe houses though, right?
There's a question of whether or not its worth it, especially the maintenance costs. But if tornadoes in the region only give 15 minutes of warning, then a very strong "safehouse" of some kind is probably the best option.
Maybe the group would get trapped in the safehouse and be nearly starving after 2 or 3 days. But the rescuers might find them in time?
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I'm not necessarily saying that its easy to build a 110-person bunker. But if you have 110 workers, then surely that's something you need to consider as a preventative / safety measure?
They had a tornado shelter, as would any significantly sized workplace in the midwest. We will find out if it was as good as it was supposed to be in the investigation.
You wouldn't want a 110 bunker, you want 4 or 5 30 person bunkers.
The building was roughly 340'x300', if the shelter was in the center the longest inside distance would be 200' but they also had material storage outside, up to 380' away as the crow flies(aka. gonna be longer).
They will be literally running for their lives but Bob is 45 and has been smoking since he was 15. Jim is in a wheelchair.
Dude: when the people from a region tell you that your expectations about preventing tragedy are unreasonable, why do you continue to argue with their firsthand knowledge? Do you think you bring something novel or noteworthy to the table?
Because discussion is helpful to me for understanding the situation. Why is it unreasonable? Surely anyone with first-hand experience could tell me easily if it truly is obvious.
Discussion is not only needed for the higher-level of thought, but also for lower-level of thought. To get the ignorant caught up on the subject.
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Furthermore, the above post is my first post in the topic entirely. I don't think I personally should be wearing anyone's patience out yet.
Nobody wants to listen to your holier than thou attitude.
Regardless of where I or anybody else does or doesn't live, I have a seat at the table on how much companies should be allowed to put human lives in danger by expecting they come in to work during inclement weather, because I am a human.
I don't give a fuck how much rich capitalists on hackernews think the expectation that candle making and amazon orders can stop for a night during an abnormal weather event is unreasonable.
I don't give a fuck how much they think me being an outsider makes my opinion worthless.
If you are gonna argue that this loss of life to make fucking candles and ship fucking widgets is necessary for the midwest heartland way of life:tm: then I think your opinion is worthless
Obviously you can't do this here. I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> The employees are no safer at home than at work.
Yes but if they're at work, the employer is responsible for their basic safety. Asking them to sit in a sheet-metal-on-slab building during an EF3 storm is neglectful.
Sending them home to shelter with their families, whatever they do there, would maybe have been the better plan.
A basement isn't tornado proof when the house above it is collapsing. It looks like ~90% of the workers survived which doesn't strike me as much different than those in homes that took a direct hit.
When the tornado sirens go off, you have at most a half-hour of warning of an approaching tornado, and generally fewer than 10 minutes. With that level of warning, you don't have time to tell your employees not to come in--they're either already there or are on the way. (And if they're on the way, then they probably need to execute the "get out of the car and hide in the ditch" phase of tornado preparedness anyways).
Do you really think this was unknown until the tornado sirens sounded?
Every news station in the region was warning of this storm, but i guess if you look it from a capitalist prospective why take the risk that you accidentally needlessly save a human life at the expense of some profits by canceling the unneeded 3 AM FUCKING MIDNIGHT SHIFT, when you can count on people on hacker news to justify the human cost of your business.
You are willfully ignoring the reality of living in a tornado-prone region. Tornado watches are issued when conditions are favorable for tornados to form. These watches cover hundreds and hundreds of miles (a large part of a state or sometimes even multiple states). They last for many hours. They happen a few dozen times a year for any given location. Tornado watches simply mean "conditions are favorable, keep an eye on the weather" but do not otherwise really impact people's planning or behavior. Do you really expect every business to shut down for 6+ hours each time a tornado watch is issued, dozens of times a year? People who live here and deal with tornados know how they work and none of them would expect their place of business to close just due to a tornado watch.
Tornado warnings are acute, cover a very small area (by weather standards), and come with only minutes notice (and usually only last for 10-30 minutes). Tornado warnings just mean "shelter in place now". There is not time from a warning to do things like drive home from work or cancel a shift. If someone gets a warning as they are about to leave for work, they usually would just shelter without needing to be contacted by work. Due to the size of tornado warning areas, it's likely that a warning at your house may not cover your place of employment or vice-versa. If an employer penalizes an employee for being late because they were sheltering due to a tornado warning, then that is something that they deserve to be criticized for.
Tornado watches and tornado warnings are not all of the weather service for a given area.
Everybody in the region knew this was different, this wasn't a fucking tornado watch, you are being really fucking dishonest when you try to frame it that way.
This was a severe weather warning that predicted the not just the level of conditions needed for form a tornado, but the conditions needed to form a massive storm of tornado.
Everybody knew this, and managers choose their bosses profit over their employees lives.
Simple as that.
Trying to lump this situation in with the worse of unpredictable tornado storms isn't gonna change that fact.
You're willfully ignoring this particular weather system, and just talking about tornadoes and tornado warnings in general. People knew this system was going to be exceptionally, maybe historically bad, and they knew it well (meaning days) in advance.
So what exactly do you think should have been done instead? Do you think people across a half dozen states should have been told to stay home all day Friday/Saturday?
The map is a little difficult to read, but I don’t believe “any given location” has reached even 10 watches in 2021. 171 total have been issued, which seems like a lot at first, but generally multiple watches are going to be issued on one day, so there are relatively few days a year on which TOR watches are being issued, even in areas where they are likelier to be issued.
Life shouldn’t shut down because of a TOR watch, but some people around here are acting like they’re a very common occurrence when they absolutely are not.
That's an interesting map. What does "Initial WOU only" mean? According to NWS, "WOU" is Watch Outline Update. Does that mean that as storms track east and they expand the watch, they don't include those updated regions?
I live in an area shown on that map as having only been under 2 tornado watches in 2021, and I know with certainty that my area has been under more than 2 tornado watches this year. Frequently the watches are issued further west and expanded to cover my area, though.
(edit) This map seems to be more what I would expect:
https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/20ytora.png
My estimate of a few dozen was a bit high, but still this graph shows a large part of the country that averages around 10 or more watches per year. I think my point still stands, though, that people aren't going to put life on hold and take shelter every time there's a tornado watch issued.
A tornado, as someone else put it, is a razor blade cutting across the landscape. The best predictor of whether or not you'll survive a tornado is if you're in that very thin path of destruction. And that path is not known until very, very short time horizons before the event.
As far as a manager knows, the factory is as risky a place to be in a tornado as wherever the workers' homes are. Actually, you can make some cases for the factory being less risky than homes: if the home is a trailer park, well, that is almost certainly toast in a tornado; additionally, workers are going to be awake at the factory versus at home, and are therefore more able to respond to a tornado siren going off.
(This does make some assumptions about the factory having appropriate tornado shelter, and having reasonable policies around what to do in event of tornado warning. I don't have enough information to know if those assumptions hold, but if they don't hold, I would ABSOLUTELY castigate the company for failing those assumptions.)
"We can't save human lives by not forcing them to come into work at the threat of firing and loss of livelihood because we might accidentally save a life that wasn't in danger if we let employees make that risk assessment for themselves by giving them the option to choose."
As far as the manager knows its none of their fucking business because the employee should be the one who makes that call about their personal safety, not their manager, and said employee can't freely make that call if they face reprisal or loss of promotion for doing so.
You're clearly trying to use this tragedy to push some sort of anti-capitalist mission, so I know you will not be willing to see anyone else's point of view. For the benefit of others, though, here is the map the NWS issued showing areas of concern:
Note that tornados occurred that night in areas well beyond just the red zone. So, to be "safe" (though being home is not necessarily safer - not everyone has basements and many people live on 2nd-floor apartments, etc.), should we have told everyone at least in the "ENH" area (covering major portions of 6 states) to stay home and in their basement for the whole night?
As someone else said, "evidence you have never lived in the midwest."
That enhanced area covers St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and Memphis. Millions and millions of people that you expect to spend the night in their basements (many of which don't even have a basement), on the still-very-remote chance they may get hit by a tornado. Even in this abnormally bad outbreak, we're talking about just 100s of people impacted. The risk is just not high enough for that kind of response.
Stay home, yes. The point of staying at home is to be near your basement if you have one, so the part about staying in your basement all night is silly.
We've had people telling us to stay home for two years to dodge a particularly dangerous cold, so if the idea that not having a single night shift during such a rare and predictable weather situation is supposed to be shocking on its face, I'm not feeling it.
There's no rational business reason to keep a factory operating during extreme weather. All those candles they manufactured? Destroyed by the storm. And now an entire shift of your workforce is wiped out.
Fair, but let's say they sent everyone home and 3 of the people died in their homes from the tornado. Would we be outraged that the company sent them home in such foul weather?
I think there is no win for the business or the families in any of the outcomes. We know so little about what the Business actually knew and what type of protection or preference these individuals had in the moment. I also think any reasoning about a solution is not making space for the individuals who lost their lives. The number of comments and how quickly this is moving off the first page of HN speaks volumes about the sentiment of the this community.
Down thread someone lists the average tornado warning time as 9 minutes. With 9 minutes warning, most people would be just getting to their cars with some still on the plant floor getting their stuff to go home.
They had 20 minutes per the article, in that time frame you would have a traffic jam in the parking lot as everyone tried to leave down the 2 lane road that services the factory.
Look about 300mi x 170mi area. If you take Jones burro as the center, its 120mi to the edge, technically if everyone could evacuate at 60mph you could get everyone out in 2 hours.... but with NWS tornado warnings have a False Alarm Rate (FAR) of roughly 70% you probably won't get that many people to evacuate at all unless you make it mandatory. Then it will take much longer than 2 hours to get people out.
I'm talking about not forcing them to come in to work for a 3rd shift overnight run that can most definitely be delayed by a shift for a weather pattern known to create high numbers of tornadoes.
> Was there any government advisory telling people that it was highly recommended to head home that the factory ignored?
That you are asking this question suggests to me that you have no experience with tornadoes whatsoever.
Vehicles are probably the worst place you can be in a tornado: they offer poor protection from the flying debris of a tornado, and are liable to themselves become part of the debris [1]. Most tornado warnings, especially the more extreme warnings, include messages that say something along the lines of "if you're in a car, GET OUT NOW and get to shelter."
The government would not recommend that people head home in event of a tornado warning. Tornado warnings are issued only on evidence of a tornado, which is way too short notice (think 15 minutes if you're lucky) for anyone to attempt to change their location to somewhere else.
[1] It's worth noting that one of the pictures I've seen of this tornado is a box truck impaled by a tree. Or maybe a tree impaled by a box truck--they are both in places that they shouldn't be, so it's hard to tell who struck whom.
In the case of Mayfield, some of the answers seem to be:
1. Quite extreme. NWS had been highlighting the potential for a significant outbreak of severe weather for at least a day at that point. My local WFO (KIND) referred to the system’s potential as “exceptionally dangerous,” which is not language that NWS forecasters use haphazardly.
2. Mayfield had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH.[0] I’ve noted elsewhere that this tweet wasn’t a formal warning, of course, but it was a strong heads-up that something big was in the offing. At the very least, local emergency managers should have been aware of this and monitoring the situation very closely.
3. The tweets from KPAH regarding the storm and naming Mayfield specifically were pretty strong. Add to this the actual warnings themselves, which were Particularly Dangerous Situation warnings. A Tornado Emergency warning was also issued as it became clear Mayfield was in the crosshairs. Those are the strongest warnings in the NWS’s arsenal.
The first tornado warning on that cell was issued around 6pm CST, and the tornado almost immediately became destructive. Forecasters knew that the cell was entering a convective environment that was highly conducive for the cell to persist and even strengthen. (The various Mesoscale Discussions that the SPC issued for this cell make that clear.) So, between that knowledge and the track that the cell was on, KPAH was able to determine that Mayfield was in serious danger hours beforehand.
So, the possibility at least existed that plant managers could have known what was coming. One question might be what the local emergency management agency did to disseminate these warnings to the community. Most people, unless they’re weather nerds, probably aren’t reading mesoscale discussions from SPC or forecast discussions and tweets from their local WFO. But I’d expect emergency management to be doing so and then making determinations about how to respond to that information.
So, it’s hard to say precisely how much plant managers knew, but it’s possible that they could have known well ahead of time. It’s also possible that they believed it to be more prudent to keep people in the plant rather than sending them home to structures that may well have been much less sturdy.
> 2. Mayfield had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH.[0] I’ve noted elsewhere that this tweet wasn’t a formal warning, of course, but it was a strong heads-up that something big was in the offing. At the very least, local emergency managers should have been aware of this and monitoring the situation very closely.
I think the author of that blog post made a time zone error. He is referencing this tweet in support of "2.5 hours warning":
https://twitter.com/NWSPaducah/status/1469503102218760194
but Twitter tells me that tweet was sent at 9:03pm CT, not 7:03pm (Twitter would show him 7:03pm if he's on the west coast which I believe he is). So that would be more like 20-25 minutes warning (which is still impressive for a tornado), not 2.5 hours.
You’re right that Cliff made a time zone error, which consequently undermines at least some of my points. The lead time was still fairly significant (and there were other indications that enhanced monitoring of the situation was warranted), but that certainly isn’t the same as 2.5 hours’ worth of advanced notice!
What are the current building codes and operating regulations regarding tornadoes?
I would think that every commercial/industrial structure in a tornado-prone area should have a shelter that is capable of holding the occupancy capacity plus some extra. When a Tornado Watch is issued there should be periodic facility announcements stating so, describing where the shelter is, and prepping everyone that if the klaxon goes off they should drop what they're doing and go to the shelter.
When a Tornado Warning happens, a klaxon should go off and it should be expected that everyone drops what they are doing and heads to the shelter.
How far off am I from what is mandated? (Or if I'm missing something, what is reasonable?)
"What is reasonable" is the question. The vast majority of buildings are never in the direct path of a tornado. Is it worth the substantial costs of having a basement bunker large enough for all potential occupants, that will almost certainly never be needed in the lifetime of the building?
The expectation seems to be that the right thing to do in a tornado is to go into a shelter, so probably? Especially if the costs of adding such shelters are much lower for new construction. I would guess that basements or office areas in large warehouses could be reinforced relatively easily to create a tornado shelter in an otherwise skin-on-structure building.
I haven't done the math though, so perhaps it would be burdensome. Then again we end up doing an awful lot of security theatre for the vanishingly small risk of air travel terrorism, due to people's perceptions of not being in control. Maybe being corralled by corporate micromanagement for market-bottom wages falls in a similar place.
It's a good question. A reasonable/decent employer would have immediately sent everyone home for safety reasons alone. A factory has to be one of the least safe places to be in a natural disaster, and candles themselves can be fairly heavy and typically live in glass. I just hope these folks didn't suffer too badly, and honestly I hope the families take legal action against the business.
I suspect an even worse place to be during a tornado is a car on the road, which is where the workers would probably be if the employer sent them home. Some things just aren't preventable.
Not necessarily...110 people in a factory, say you have 30 minutes notice(article says 20!).
Stopping the line : 5~10 minutes
Collect stuff : 5 minutes
Get to cars: 5 minutes
Get out of gate: 5~10 minutes
Oh look, now the news articles would all be asking why didn't the factory make the workers shelter in place instead of sending them out into a dangerous situation.
A reasonable/decent employer has emergency plans appropriate for their area and trains their staff on them.
If you've worked in a production factory you know it doesn't take 5-10 minutes to shut down. Nearly all machines/facilities have emergency/instant shutdown capabilities. Looking at the size of this operation in the picture, I don't think it's 5 minutes to the parking lot or 5 minutes to get out either.
A well prepared company would have already gone through a tornado evacuation scenario with staff ahead of time. I'll take my chances trying to drive away from a disaster with 15 minutes lead time versus hoping I survive the full impact of the tornado. Maybe I've watched too many stormchasers on twitter, but they're all alive and in cars/vans.
My 5~10 minutes figure was for stopping work on the line. Yes, the equipment has e-stops but you still have to get the worker to notice and engage them.
Jill driving the forklift in shipping and receiving will probably notice the alarms and stop quickly but she might not be able to just walk away, she might have to reposition so she is not trapping someone else.
James doing candle wick QC with his headphones on might not notice as fast.
People will often ignore alarms if they don't see others around them acting.
>Another reason that people do not respond to disaster signs is that they do not want to deviate from what others are doing. Humans are very social creatures and we tend to take our lead from other people. If the majority of people are not responding to warning signs then we will tend to conform to that behavior and follow their lead - no matter how dangerous it is. For example during a fire at
a restaurant diners continue with their meal as if nothing was wrong. One diner even commented that “it was a bit uncomfortable really. The smoke and the sirens of fire engines.” http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/9573/1/Human%20Behaviour%20Paper%202...
Factories are all about routine and repetition, this can lead to a failure to act.
I sincerely hope you are never put in a situation where you have to consider evacuating versus sheltering in place and potentially taking a direct hit by a tornado, but PLEASE do not take your chances in a car.
Footage from storm chasers is absolutely not representative of what you will almost certainly experience if you try to outrun a tornado in a car. If you're very, very lucky you might be in an area with no trees, a clear and obvious tornado with obvious apparent motion, and knowledge of the local roads which would allow you to quickly pick a single direction to drive in. More likely, though, you (a) won't know where the tornado is in relation to you, (b) won't be able to see it because it's rain-wrapped, and (c) won't be in a place where you can obviously drive quickly in a single, straight line to avoid its path. This doesn't even include other risks like intense winds reasonably far from the tornadic circulation which could roll your vehicle, debris, lightning, hail (especially if you wind up on the wrong side of the storm and core punch), etc.
It isn't often that stormchasers perish in tornadoes, but it can and does happen, even to the best of them [1]. Storm chasers generally go to great lengths using significant knowledge, past experience, and real-time data to carefully position themselves in relation to not only the storm they are targeting, but other storms in the area in order to control their risk and overall safety.
I'm a meteorologist and I grew up in the midwest, and while were absolutely drilled on tornado safety, "evacuations" were never part of that preparation.
Again, I sincerely hope you never have to call upon the information from this post.
All the storm chasers I've seen are out in the country too, where they have long sight lines and long, straight roads that they can drive very fast on if needed to get away. Plus they are hopefully experienced enough to stay out of the path and instead try to be on the side of it. Plus, don't most of them have cars that they've added armor and stuff to, both to protect from debris and to add weight so they are less likely to get blown over?
No, the vast majority of chasers do not have such modifications to their vehicles, and with the exception of custom-built rigs like Reed Timmer's, these would do nothing to prevent harm during a tornado encounter.
The point is that the stormchasers are biased towards chasing in environments where all of these antecedents are there. You don't see much chaser videography from, say, the Ozarks or into the SE because the terrain is far more difficult and less amenable to good footage. These things also make it more dangerous. SW Kentucky would be a terrible place to chase.
There's no such thing as "tornado evacuation". You take cover immediately. If you're already in a building, you absolutely do not leave.
In this particular case it seems they maybe had 10-15 minutes of warning. Usually it is less than that. And, in the moment no one would have known how much warning they had. The only rational response is to find the sturdiest place in the building you're already occupying and get there. Every commercial building I've ever been in has these places designated - they're usually the bathrooms, stairwells, and interior hallways.
You'll never, ever see NWS or anyone else official recommend that you go get in a car and drive somewhere in the case of a tornado. The only thing they ever say is "take shelter now", "move to an interior room", "get underground", etc. If you were in a mobile home or some other obviously-unsafe place, then maybe you'd leave to find something better but even then the recommendation would be to lay in a ditch or something, not to get in your car and drive around. A car is one of the worst possible places to be in a tornado.
I'd say a car might be safer than being exposed on open flat ground. At least it's a steel cage around you. But maybe the second-to-last place you want to be.
That's just always what I was taught, but I suspect in general if you're in a car without nearby access to a building, you're in bad shape no matter what you do. FWIW:
"If you’re in a vehicle, Do NOT try to outrun a tornado
* Don’t try to outrun a tornado. Drive to the closest shelter. The least desirable place to be during a tornado is in a motor vehicle. Cars, buses, and trucks are easily tossed by tornado winds.
* If you’re unable to make it to a safe shelter, either get down in your vehicle and cover your head and neck or leave your vehicle and seek shelter in a low-lying area such as a ditch or ravine.
* Stay away from highway overpasses and bridges."
None of the other scenarios, such as being in a mobile home, mention anything about getting in a car.
It is absolutely not - the car could very easily be rolled by a wind gust, and the cabin crushed with you in it. It's counter-intuitive but you'd probably be safer lying flat on the exposed ground, with as low a profile as possible to avoid any lofted debris flung your way.
0 minutes - No one should even think about shutting down gracefully in an emergency. GO. NOW. Your facility should have an emergency shutdown procedure. We do and it's called hit the emergency stop buttons and GTFO.
> Collect stuff : 5 minutes
0 minutes. Leave it. EMERGENCY.
> Get to cars: 5 minutes
How far is your car and how big is this building? Granted my shop is small but I can get to my car in 30 seconds from my office at top speed. Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot (If you can safely stand outside). We did, and actually simulated an emergency, found issues with the routes, iterated and retested. We are in fact prepared. Are you?
> Get out of gate: 5~10 minutes
This is the hard part. Not only do you have to fight your fellow employees but also hoards of other cars especially if you work in an industrial park. If you have a 4x4 use it and let the landscapers worry about the shrubbery and grass you tore up getting the fuck outta dodge. Drive through chain link fences if you have to. Just GO. NOW!
IMO your comment seems to be imagining some a individualist hero do-anything-at-all-costs scenario ("top speed"), rather than the sluggish herd behavior that engineers design for. For example people are going to take some time to realize they need to take an alarm seriously, take a few minutes to collect their effects, shuffle to their cars, say goodbye to their coworkers, they will wait in traffic lines, etc.
I strongly agree there needs to be institutional concern paid to tornadoes, but I don't think planning for workers to bug out in their cars is the right approach.
> IMO your comment seems to be imagining some a individualist hero do-anything-at-all-costs scenario ("top speed"), rather than the sluggish herd behavior that engineers design for.
Indeed this is just your opinion. And the whole individualist hero do anything quip is unnecessary reactionary nonsense. This is about being prepared for an emergency in your facility which entails quickly and safely getting to an exit.
> For example people are going to take some time to realize they need to take an alarm seriously, take a few minutes to collect their effects, shuffle to their cars, say goodbye to their coworkers, they will wait in traffic lines, etc.
Are they doing this during a fire? They most certainly should not be.
> ... but I don't think planning for workers to bug out in their cars is the right approach.
This isn't about going George Castanza and pushing old ladies to the floor to get to a fire exit. This is about knowing or having a plan in place and taking it seriously. Maybe your company provides it, maybe you have to figure it out yourself. Point is, always be prepared.
> Are they doing this during a fire? They most certainly should not be
I've been in a few situations where a fire alarm is going off in a large building, and it created no sense of urgency. One was a shopping mall, with people milling about, half-wondering what the noise was, thinking as long as they could see an exit and didn't see a fire it was fine. Even being one who generally doesn't follow herds, I stayed in that state longer than I should have in retrospect. That's human nature, and a major reason of why companies do fire drills.
> Maybe your company provides it, maybe you have to figure it out yourself. Point is, always be prepared.
Yes, of course. Ultimately you are responsible for your own safety. Always be prepared. The problem arises if you take this philosophy as a given and assert that a large group of people will be individually prepared, as a license to avoid figuring out the institutional-scale problem. That is what I'm taking issue with here.
Based on what I've read about the timeframe of tornadoes, I think a corporate policy of having people leave the building and go to their cars is a recipe for a mass casualty event in the parking lot. Given how heavily corporate micromanagement directs people at such jobs (security checkpoints, timeclocks, timing bathroom breaks, prohibiting cell phones, etc), I think the scalable way to handle tornadoes is for the same management structure to direct people into designated shelters within the building.
And sure if I were in such a position, I certainly wouldn't want to just trust management to take care of me in a top-down way. But I also wouldn't want management to use my option to individually prepare as an excuse to slack off on their facility preparation.
> Based on what I've read about the timeframe of tornadoes, I think a corporate policy of having people leave the building and go to their cars is a recipe for a mass casualty event in the parking lot.
I was originally talking about emergencies in general. Not to specifically evacuate during a tornado.
During the 11th September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center people took the time to shut down their computers before exiting.
This is why every time you fly, they tell you during an emergency situation to leave your belongings on the plane. They are priming you so that if an event occurs you do not go into normal "leave plane mode".
> This is why every time you fly, they tell you during an emergency situation to leave your belongings on the plane. They are priming you so that if an event occurs you do not go into normal "leave plane mode".
How is this different than my point of "Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot ..." ?
My original response is to the comment saying that the managers should have let the workers go home when they realized there was a tornado...
>A reasonable/decent employer would have immediately sent everyone home for safety reasons alone.
I detailed a believable timeline to how long it would take to do that and what would likely happen.
>"Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot ..."
Completely agree and from comments in other parts of the thread, it seems like the company did in fact have a procedure that they did follow but it still lead to tragedy.
Your previous comment indicates you would try and leave, which is ultimately your choice but also goes against all the expert advice of what to do in a tornado.
I like to play a little game with myself whenever I enter a new building to determine what evac routes/shelter locations are available for different scenarios when ever I enter a new building. I think it is a good thing to think about/practice but other people have other things on their mind.
The factory where I work has actually been hit by a tornado before I came to work here. One of the stories that they talk about is how they had to pull the VP of Sales or Finance back into the shelter(a stairwell) because he was trying to go into the lobby and secure the front doors that were being blown open by the wind.
> Your previous comment indicates you would try and leave, which is ultimately your choice but also goes against all the expert advice of what to do in a tornado.
I was not specifically speaking about a tornado but emergencies in general where evacuation is necessary (such as a fire).
This really doesn't feel like the right question. The only safe(ish) place in a tornado is being in a building or bunker rated for a tornado. The technology exists. I think I would ask:
- Are insurance companies incentivizing building certified shelters by lowering insurance for those that get said building certifications? This question also applies to residential homes.
- Are state and federal governments incentivizing building certified shelters by giving tax breaks to businesses that get said building certifications and have them inspected annually?
- Are any construction companies providing services to retrofit buildings in tornado prone locations? If there is money to be made I believe this would become a thing.
Whether people are working, eating or sleeping I think is not as relevant as mitigating the root cause of a well known risk and incorporating that into business cost and offsetting the retrofit with tax exemptions and write-offs. If you want your folks to keep working during a tornado, then design the building to handle one. Switzerland somehow managed to address this issue for an even less likely risk, as nearly all homes have a fallout bunker.
Sure, and people make risk judgements every day. We get in our cars and drive. That decision assumes a risk of death or serious injury. Is it worth risking death to drive to the store for a pint of ice cream? Not in the abstract, but we all do it. Life isn't perfectly safe, and cannot be made so for anything approaching reasonable economic tradeoffs.
They have been on my mind. As awful as the tornadoes are, that’s not why though. I know it’s a reality of the world we live in, but while most of us would have been at home warm and well fed, these poor souls were manufacturing fucking candles overnight. We can keep telling ourselves that creating tech will improve the world and maybe it will, I hope it does, but in a factory overnight making candles, what’s wrong with all of us.
They had 2 days of warning that friday night was gonna bring a fuck ton of tornadoes because thats how obvious the weather pattern was.
You're playing fast and loose with risk definitions, and arguing that until loss of life was guaranteed the employer had no responsibility to not force employees to risk their life.
The entire region knew this was gonna be a bad storm in advance. Bosses and managers choose deadlines over human safety. They should be held criminally liable for that choice.
> You're playing fast and loose with risk definitions, and arguing that until loss of life was guaranteed the employer had no responsibility to not force employees to risk their life.
Not at all, I am just reading the article which makes no mention of this event being a serious risk more than 20 minutes in advance. Possibly you have better sources, but you should provide a link with the source.
I've not heard whether or not this factory had any shelter or not. If not, then IMO they should hang the owners in public and then get busy making sure nobody else has to suffer this lack of neglect.
However, it's tough to have a shelter-in-place that covers every eventuality. We have a large warehouse with about 100 people, and it's in "Tornado alley". Our shelter only covers to ~175mph winds, and to go higher that that was alarmingly expensive. Whether we like it or not, there is always a cost/benefit calculation on things like this.
> Charley Mcgregor, a training manager at the candle factory since August, said for a major storm their emergency plan was to shelter in place in a bathroom hallway in the back of their production floor. Mcgregor said everyone was evacuated to that hallway when the sirens went off on Friday night, and she said all employees were accounted for in the hall.
For folks saying you can't really predict tornadoes, I grew up in the Midwest so I hear what you're saying, but this was different. I look at weather every day in an operational context and I can tell you that everyone who knows anything about weather saw this coming days beforehand. The low that produced these storms was a monster--one of the biggest, if not the biggest, I've ever seen that wasn't a hurricane. The cold front stretched all the way from Canada to the southern tip of Mexico. But aside from its strength, its behavior was basically textbook, and it had been marching across the US all week. There were headlines the day before about tornadoes coming. So this wasn't a surprise.
Do you support shutting down businesses for the duration of any Tornado Watch?
If you only support shutting down businesses during Tornado Warnings, then what should the Candle Factory have done differently? Because they had a shelter, and the employees were in it.
I don't have an opinion on the risk management decision made here because I don't know anything about the building. Just wanted to "clear the air," if you will, on the weather because I saw a lot of comments that made it sound like people thought this was a run-of-the-mill Midwestern tornado.
> Do you support shutting down businesses for the duration of any Tornado Watch?
That depends on the risk factors for each businesses. How quickly can you get your employees to safety if a tornado warning comes? How secure is your tornado shelter?
It also depends on how big the storm system was, this one was massive.
Yep. I'm from not too far from there, but in FL now, I always check the weather there especially in the winter to see how cold it gets as I consider moving back.
I remember seeing high 71, low 65. First thought was LOL that's a mistake, but confirmed it at another site. Then saw next day low of 29. I remember telling my wife how crazy that was, and they're gonna get bad winds or tornados.
I know all these people saying "this happens every week in the midwest", "you only get 10-15 minutes warning" meant well -- but from everything I was reading about the lead-up to this disaster -- something in those retorts just didn't add up.
Part of the problem is tornado watches are very commonplace in the midwest. Business never close because of them. Little league games would be canceled, you'd keep an eye on the weather, would stay inside, etc., but its not like a hurricane.
If this was an atypical storm that meteorologists saw coming well in advance, then the emergency alert system should have been activated with a warning that made it clear that this was not like a normal storm--shelter in place or something like that.
But in the ~30 years I spent in the midwest we never had anything like that happen--preemptive shutdown for tornadoes.
Just throwing it out there, but in the past 10 years there has been a trend in some parts of the country (Oklahoma, Dixie Alley, etc) to shut down events and hold students from school when significant severe weather outbreaks are expected, usually a "MODERATE" or a "HIGH" probability convective outlook from the SPC. But this is always in deference to timing - e.g. closing school because the event is expected to be ramping up around the time when children may be on buses at the end of the day.
It's a reasonable precaution that a municipality can choose to make. But I can't think of an instance of such cancellations and closures occurring for overnight storms.
> But I can't think of an instance of such cancellations and closures occurring for overnight storms.
Yes, this article points out some of the very reasons why overnight tornadic activity is much more common (and deadly) on the "edges" of (the expanding) tornado alley (the Southeast US and the states such as Indiana and Ohio often referred to as "midwest" for historic reasons rather than accurate geographic ones) than more centrally in it (Texas, Oklohoma, most of the rest of the Great Plains) where daytime storms are more common.
Thank you for this. This was an exceptionally well forecasted system, and it was clear the potential danger was significant. It was one of the few outbreaks I’ve seen that was as clearly advertised beforehand. I’m just a hobbyist weather nerd, but I couldn’t believe some of the language coming out of SPC and some of the local WFOs in advance of the event.
I'll own up to not being the most eloquent writer - I'm not, and don't think I did, argue for banning all work outside of normal hours - I just wanted to say that it didn't sit well with me that there are people making candles in a factory overnight. If they were making vaccines and well compensated, I would understand, but candles - it just triggered a huge sense of unfairness to me and I wanted to voice it. The tech bit was just to connect it back to the HN audience where we sometimes dilute ourselves in thinking that if we just create new tech, everything in the world will improve; I was trying to argue it likely won't but I'll grant you that I didn't convey that well at all. The last thing I'll say is that a candle factory can choose to operate overnight because their employees are basically serfs, they don't have much of a choice.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] thread> “It appears most were sheltering in the place they were told to shelter,” the governor, Andy Beshear, said. “I hope that area was as safe as it could be, but this thing got hit directly by the strongest tornado we could have possibly imagined.”
You can only take so many precautions when tornadoes are in the neighborhood, because although the devastation where a large one touches down can be severe, the area is limited and the path is unpredictable.
Also:
> A company spokesperson said Sunday that eight of the 110 workers on the overnight shift Friday are confirmed dead and another eight are missing. For most of Sunday, the authorities had feared that more than 70 of those shift workers were missing [...]
RIP for those who have passed; it's good to hear that they are fewer that we thought.
One of those precautions is to not make your employees come in to work.
Having your employees stay home doesn't help at all. Many of them will be living in the same danger zone, and in fact many will be living in buildings that are less capable of withstanding a tornado.
Single floor factory building built on a concrete slab vs house with a basement.
You really think the factory will win in terms of human safety?
Oh, but of course, thats the whole point of weaseling around the term 'withstanding a tornado'.
I'm sure the factory building will withstand it better, in terms of how much of it will be remaining in the after math, but I'm also sure that the house with a basement is gonna be safer for the humans.
Hitting any nearby trailer parks or houses on slabs would have seen a significantly higher death toll in comparison.
I live in the midwest and dont have a basement- geography and money dictates whether you do or whether you just have a surface level concrete slab.
Everybody knew some shit was gonna go down.
At the very least giving your employees the option of staying home without fear of reprisal is minimum necessary for a clear conscience.
I saw amazon was hit in this storm, knowing somebody who got fired for calling out because a tree blocked the only road out of their area, I guarantee there were people who only showed up because they feared being fired and they wanted to stay home during this but couldn't.
Companies need to answer for those lives.
Edit: Someone else commented elsewhere that the current average lead time on TOR warnings is 9 minutes, so I stand corrected. Some of this probably depends on the storm mode associated with the tornado.
For a supercell, the radar signatures are pretty clear and distinct, so it’s easier to provide earlier warnings. A tornado embedded in a QLCS is more difficult to detect, so I’d expect advanced notification to be more difficult.
[0] See, e.g., https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor...
So, no, local authorities aren’t going to sound the sirens based on a tweet over two hours in advance of an event (nor was anyone suggesting they should have done), but emergency managers should have been well aware in advance of the first warning issuance that a very dangerous tornado was on its way.
[0] https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/vtec/#2021-O-NEW-KPAH-TO-W...
When the Joplin tornado hit, we lived "in the path" of where it was expected to go (tracking WSW)/ We hunkered down... but the storm ended up going 15 miles south of us. This was just in a short period of time (maybe 20 minutes).
A lot can change in hours. Storms can dissipate or strengthen with frightening speed. Directions can change.
That morning the TV news had a map over the local "heartland" area (Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri, Northern Kentucky and Southwest Indiana) showing likely severe impacts with likely tornadoes.
So, they knew the risk was there. That said, nobody that grows up here expected that big of a storm in December. It isn't "tornado season" so a lot of folks didn't take it seriously. I know didn't take it too seriously and I've been through an F4 tornado as a kid that did a lot of damage to my town (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion,_Illinois_tornado_outbr...).
The people who died in their homes: what if they had gone to work and been spared? We only hear about the deaths, but people working or going to school during storms (anyone remember Moore, OK?) happen.
Yes.
OR! at the least! not force your employees to come in at the threat of firing if they don't.
Let them have the freedom to choose their own personal risk factor.
Well, it would be a different matter if these factories and warehouses had tornado shelters that were fit for purpose.
After all, it would be pretty absurd to believe that extreme weather is so common that factories and warehouses need to keep working through it; and yet at the same time so uncommon that factories and warehouses don't need adequate shelters.
Threats of extreme weather are common, but the number of storms that are truly deadly or cause destruction of this magnitude can be a bit over-hyped.
The truth is most people get notifications about warnings and then nothing happens and over time they shrug it off or don't take it seriously.
Tornados like this one are a statistical risk you take by living in that part of the planet. We can't engineer practical structures that can survive them. The only mitigation is to live somewhere that doesn't have severe tornados.
There's a question of whether or not its worth it, especially the maintenance costs. But if tornadoes in the region only give 15 minutes of warning, then a very strong "safehouse" of some kind is probably the best option.
Maybe the group would get trapped in the safehouse and be nearly starving after 2 or 3 days. But the rescuers might find them in time?
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I'm not necessarily saying that its easy to build a 110-person bunker. But if you have 110 workers, then surely that's something you need to consider as a preventative / safety measure?
The devastation is awful but at least they got out with their lives. They can rebuild.
The building was roughly 340'x300', if the shelter was in the center the longest inside distance would be 200' but they also had material storage outside, up to 380' away as the crow flies(aka. gonna be longer).
They will be literally running for their lives but Bob is 45 and has been smoking since he was 15. Jim is in a wheelchair.
Discussion is not only needed for the higher-level of thought, but also for lower-level of thought. To get the ignorant caught up on the subject.
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Furthermore, the above post is my first post in the topic entirely. I don't think I personally should be wearing anyone's patience out yet.
Go eat a dick.
Nobody wants to listen to your holier than thou attitude.
Regardless of where I or anybody else does or doesn't live, I have a seat at the table on how much companies should be allowed to put human lives in danger by expecting they come in to work during inclement weather, because I am a human.
I don't give a fuck how much rich capitalists on hackernews think the expectation that candle making and amazon orders can stop for a night during an abnormal weather event is unreasonable.
I don't give a fuck how much they think me being an outsider makes my opinion worthless.
If you are gonna argue that this loss of life to make fucking candles and ship fucking widgets is necessary for the midwest heartland way of life:tm: then I think your opinion is worthless
(hi dang)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes but if they're at work, the employer is responsible for their basic safety. Asking them to sit in a sheet-metal-on-slab building during an EF3 storm is neglectful.
Sending them home to shelter with their families, whatever they do there, would maybe have been the better plan.
The house does not need to survive for the humans in it to be safer then if they were in a sheet metal box with no basement.
I think that should be up to the employees to decide, not their manager, and sure as hell not you.
Every news station in the region was warning of this storm, but i guess if you look it from a capitalist prospective why take the risk that you accidentally needlessly save a human life at the expense of some profits by canceling the unneeded 3 AM FUCKING MIDNIGHT SHIFT, when you can count on people on hacker news to justify the human cost of your business.
Tornado warnings are acute, cover a very small area (by weather standards), and come with only minutes notice (and usually only last for 10-30 minutes). Tornado warnings just mean "shelter in place now". There is not time from a warning to do things like drive home from work or cancel a shift. If someone gets a warning as they are about to leave for work, they usually would just shelter without needing to be contacted by work. Due to the size of tornado warning areas, it's likely that a warning at your house may not cover your place of employment or vice-versa. If an employer penalizes an employee for being late because they were sheltering due to a tornado warning, then that is something that they deserve to be criticized for.
Everybody in the region knew this was different, this wasn't a fucking tornado watch, you are being really fucking dishonest when you try to frame it that way.
This was a severe weather warning that predicted the not just the level of conditions needed for form a tornado, but the conditions needed to form a massive storm of tornado.
Everybody knew this, and managers choose their bosses profit over their employees lives.
Simple as that.
Trying to lump this situation in with the worse of unpredictable tornado storms isn't gonna change that fact.
They didn't because that isn't the case.
Not really, no: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/2021_torww_to_date.png
The map is a little difficult to read, but I don’t believe “any given location” has reached even 10 watches in 2021. 171 total have been issued, which seems like a lot at first, but generally multiple watches are going to be issued on one day, so there are relatively few days a year on which TOR watches are being issued, even in areas where they are likelier to be issued.
Life shouldn’t shut down because of a TOR watch, but some people around here are acting like they’re a very common occurrence when they absolutely are not.
I live in an area shown on that map as having only been under 2 tornado watches in 2021, and I know with certainty that my area has been under more than 2 tornado watches this year. Frequently the watches are issued further west and expanded to cover my area, though.
(edit) This map seems to be more what I would expect: https://www.spc.noaa.gov/wcm/20ytora.png My estimate of a few dozen was a bit high, but still this graph shows a large part of the country that averages around 10 or more watches per year. I think my point still stands, though, that people aren't going to put life on hold and take shelter every time there's a tornado watch issued.
As far as a manager knows, the factory is as risky a place to be in a tornado as wherever the workers' homes are. Actually, you can make some cases for the factory being less risky than homes: if the home is a trailer park, well, that is almost certainly toast in a tornado; additionally, workers are going to be awake at the factory versus at home, and are therefore more able to respond to a tornado siren going off.
(This does make some assumptions about the factory having appropriate tornado shelter, and having reasonable policies around what to do in event of tornado warning. I don't have enough information to know if those assumptions hold, but if they don't hold, I would ABSOLUTELY castigate the company for failing those assumptions.)
As far as the manager knows its none of their fucking business because the employee should be the one who makes that call about their personal safety, not their manager, and said employee can't freely make that call if they face reprisal or loss of promotion for doing so.
https://twitter.com/NWSSPC/status/1469445198501408774
Note that tornados occurred that night in areas well beyond just the red zone. So, to be "safe" (though being home is not necessarily safer - not everyone has basements and many people live on 2nd-floor apartments, etc.), should we have told everyone at least in the "ENH" area (covering major portions of 6 states) to stay home and in their basement for the whole night?
Yes.
That enhanced area covers St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and Memphis. Millions and millions of people that you expect to spend the night in their basements (many of which don't even have a basement), on the still-very-remote chance they may get hit by a tornado. Even in this abnormally bad outbreak, we're talking about just 100s of people impacted. The risk is just not high enough for that kind of response.
We've had people telling us to stay home for two years to dodge a particularly dangerous cold, so if the idea that not having a single night shift during such a rare and predictable weather situation is supposed to be shocking on its face, I'm not feeling it.
There's no rational business reason to keep a factory operating during extreme weather. All those candles they manufactured? Destroyed by the storm. And now an entire shift of your workforce is wiped out.
They had 20 minutes per the article, in that time frame you would have a traffic jam in the parking lot as everyone tried to leave down the 2 lane road that services the factory.
They had 2 days warning. not 20 minutes.
Comment say that Mayfield had about 2.5 hours of warning based on this blog: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor...
If you look at the area encompassed by the tornado watch, should they have evacuated it in it's entirety? https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEji0sqQJqWo...
Look about 300mi x 170mi area. If you take Jones burro as the center, its 120mi to the edge, technically if everyone could evacuate at 60mph you could get everyone out in 2 hours.... but with NWS tornado warnings have a False Alarm Rate (FAR) of roughly 70% you probably won't get that many people to evacuate at all unless you make it mandatory. Then it will take much longer than 2 hours to get people out.
You are talking about massive areas with small amounts of time: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhcPxy7gbyr... is roughly 430 square miles for something that is small and fast moving.
I'm talking about not forcing them to come in to work for a 3rd shift overnight run that can most definitely be delayed by a shift for a weather pattern known to create high numbers of tornadoes.
That's easy to say in hindsight, but it depends on a few factors IMO.
> How extreme was the expected weather that day?
> How much of a lead time did the area have that actual tornadoes were coming?
> Was there any government advisory telling people that it was highly recommended to head home that the factory ignored?
> If they acted immediately, would there have been enough time for all people to get home?
> Were the workers informed of the situation, and did they prefer to head home or stay there?
That you are asking this question suggests to me that you have no experience with tornadoes whatsoever.
Vehicles are probably the worst place you can be in a tornado: they offer poor protection from the flying debris of a tornado, and are liable to themselves become part of the debris [1]. Most tornado warnings, especially the more extreme warnings, include messages that say something along the lines of "if you're in a car, GET OUT NOW and get to shelter."
The government would not recommend that people head home in event of a tornado warning. Tornado warnings are issued only on evidence of a tornado, which is way too short notice (think 15 minutes if you're lucky) for anyone to attempt to change their location to somewhere else.
[1] It's worth noting that one of the pictures I've seen of this tornado is a box truck impaled by a tree. Or maybe a tree impaled by a box truck--they are both in places that they shouldn't be, so it's hard to tell who struck whom.
1. Quite extreme. NWS had been highlighting the potential for a significant outbreak of severe weather for at least a day at that point. My local WFO (KIND) referred to the system’s potential as “exceptionally dangerous,” which is not language that NWS forecasters use haphazardly.
2. Mayfield had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH.[0] I’ve noted elsewhere that this tweet wasn’t a formal warning, of course, but it was a strong heads-up that something big was in the offing. At the very least, local emergency managers should have been aware of this and monitoring the situation very closely.
3. The tweets from KPAH regarding the storm and naming Mayfield specifically were pretty strong. Add to this the actual warnings themselves, which were Particularly Dangerous Situation warnings. A Tornado Emergency warning was also issued as it became clear Mayfield was in the crosshairs. Those are the strongest warnings in the NWS’s arsenal.
The first tornado warning on that cell was issued around 6pm CST, and the tornado almost immediately became destructive. Forecasters knew that the cell was entering a convective environment that was highly conducive for the cell to persist and even strengthen. (The various Mesoscale Discussions that the SPC issued for this cell make that clear.) So, between that knowledge and the track that the cell was on, KPAH was able to determine that Mayfield was in serious danger hours beforehand.
So, the possibility at least existed that plant managers could have known what was coming. One question might be what the local emergency management agency did to disseminate these warnings to the community. Most people, unless they’re weather nerds, probably aren’t reading mesoscale discussions from SPC or forecast discussions and tweets from their local WFO. But I’d expect emergency management to be doing so and then making determinations about how to respond to that information.
So, it’s hard to say precisely how much plant managers knew, but it’s possible that they could have known well ahead of time. It’s also possible that they believed it to be more prudent to keep people in the plant rather than sending them home to structures that may well have been much less sturdy.
[0] See https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor...
> [0] See https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor...
I think the author of that blog post made a time zone error. He is referencing this tweet in support of "2.5 hours warning": https://twitter.com/NWSPaducah/status/1469503102218760194 but Twitter tells me that tweet was sent at 9:03pm CT, not 7:03pm (Twitter would show him 7:03pm if he's on the west coast which I believe he is). So that would be more like 20-25 minutes warning (which is still impressive for a tornado), not 2.5 hours.
You’re right that Cliff made a time zone error, which consequently undermines at least some of my points. The lead time was still fairly significant (and there were other indications that enhanced monitoring of the situation was warranted), but that certainly isn’t the same as 2.5 hours’ worth of advanced notice!
Thanks again for catching that.
I doubt that a group of bosses with tophats and thin cigars took a red pen to the tornado-shelter budget, while laughing at the pathetic worker class.
There was no need to have your workers working during a predicted massive tornado storm.
I would think that every commercial/industrial structure in a tornado-prone area should have a shelter that is capable of holding the occupancy capacity plus some extra. When a Tornado Watch is issued there should be periodic facility announcements stating so, describing where the shelter is, and prepping everyone that if the klaxon goes off they should drop what they're doing and go to the shelter.
When a Tornado Warning happens, a klaxon should go off and it should be expected that everyone drops what they are doing and heads to the shelter.
How far off am I from what is mandated? (Or if I'm missing something, what is reasonable?)
I haven't done the math though, so perhaps it would be burdensome. Then again we end up doing an awful lot of security theatre for the vanishingly small risk of air travel terrorism, due to people's perceptions of not being in control. Maybe being corralled by corporate micromanagement for market-bottom wages falls in a similar place.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/06/16/tor...
I suspect an even worse place to be during a tornado is a car on the road, which is where the workers would probably be if the employer sent them home. Some things just aren't preventable.
Stopping the line : 5~10 minutes
Collect stuff : 5 minutes
Get to cars: 5 minutes
Get out of gate: 5~10 minutes
Oh look, now the news articles would all be asking why didn't the factory make the workers shelter in place instead of sending them out into a dangerous situation.
A reasonable/decent employer has emergency plans appropriate for their area and trains their staff on them.
A well prepared company would have already gone through a tornado evacuation scenario with staff ahead of time. I'll take my chances trying to drive away from a disaster with 15 minutes lead time versus hoping I survive the full impact of the tornado. Maybe I've watched too many stormchasers on twitter, but they're all alive and in cars/vans.
Jill driving the forklift in shipping and receiving will probably notice the alarms and stop quickly but she might not be able to just walk away, she might have to reposition so she is not trapping someone else.
James doing candle wick QC with his headphones on might not notice as fast.
People will often ignore alarms if they don't see others around them acting. >Another reason that people do not respond to disaster signs is that they do not want to deviate from what others are doing. Humans are very social creatures and we tend to take our lead from other people. If the majority of people are not responding to warning signs then we will tend to conform to that behavior and follow their lead - no matter how dangerous it is. For example during a fire at a restaurant diners continue with their meal as if nothing was wrong. One diner even commented that “it was a bit uncomfortable really. The smoke and the sirens of fire engines.” http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/9573/1/Human%20Behaviour%20Paper%202...
Factories are all about routine and repetition, this can lead to a failure to act.
Footage from storm chasers is absolutely not representative of what you will almost certainly experience if you try to outrun a tornado in a car. If you're very, very lucky you might be in an area with no trees, a clear and obvious tornado with obvious apparent motion, and knowledge of the local roads which would allow you to quickly pick a single direction to drive in. More likely, though, you (a) won't know where the tornado is in relation to you, (b) won't be able to see it because it's rain-wrapped, and (c) won't be in a place where you can obviously drive quickly in a single, straight line to avoid its path. This doesn't even include other risks like intense winds reasonably far from the tornadic circulation which could roll your vehicle, debris, lightning, hail (especially if you wind up on the wrong side of the storm and core punch), etc.
It isn't often that stormchasers perish in tornadoes, but it can and does happen, even to the best of them [1]. Storm chasers generally go to great lengths using significant knowledge, past experience, and real-time data to carefully position themselves in relation to not only the storm they are targeting, but other storms in the area in order to control their risk and overall safety.
I'm a meteorologist and I grew up in the midwest, and while were absolutely drilled on tornado safety, "evacuations" were never part of that preparation.
Again, I sincerely hope you never have to call upon the information from this post.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Samaras
The point is that the stormchasers are biased towards chasing in environments where all of these antecedents are there. You don't see much chaser videography from, say, the Ozarks or into the SE because the terrain is far more difficult and less amenable to good footage. These things also make it more dangerous. SW Kentucky would be a terrible place to chase.
There's no such thing as "tornado evacuation". You take cover immediately. If you're already in a building, you absolutely do not leave.
In this particular case it seems they maybe had 10-15 minutes of warning. Usually it is less than that. And, in the moment no one would have known how much warning they had. The only rational response is to find the sturdiest place in the building you're already occupying and get there. Every commercial building I've ever been in has these places designated - they're usually the bathrooms, stairwells, and interior hallways.
You'll never, ever see NWS or anyone else official recommend that you go get in a car and drive somewhere in the case of a tornado. The only thing they ever say is "take shelter now", "move to an interior room", "get underground", etc. If you were in a mobile home or some other obviously-unsafe place, then maybe you'd leave to find something better but even then the recommendation would be to lay in a ditch or something, not to get in your car and drive around. A car is one of the worst possible places to be in a tornado.
https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/tornadoes/during.html
"If you’re in a vehicle, Do NOT try to outrun a tornado
* Don’t try to outrun a tornado. Drive to the closest shelter. The least desirable place to be during a tornado is in a motor vehicle. Cars, buses, and trucks are easily tossed by tornado winds.
* If you’re unable to make it to a safe shelter, either get down in your vehicle and cover your head and neck or leave your vehicle and seek shelter in a low-lying area such as a ditch or ravine.
* Stay away from highway overpasses and bridges."
None of the other scenarios, such as being in a mobile home, mention anything about getting in a car.
0 minutes - No one should even think about shutting down gracefully in an emergency. GO. NOW. Your facility should have an emergency shutdown procedure. We do and it's called hit the emergency stop buttons and GTFO.
> Collect stuff : 5 minutes
0 minutes. Leave it. EMERGENCY.
> Get to cars: 5 minutes
How far is your car and how big is this building? Granted my shop is small but I can get to my car in 30 seconds from my office at top speed. Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot (If you can safely stand outside). We did, and actually simulated an emergency, found issues with the routes, iterated and retested. We are in fact prepared. Are you?
> Get out of gate: 5~10 minutes
This is the hard part. Not only do you have to fight your fellow employees but also hoards of other cars especially if you work in an industrial park. If you have a 4x4 use it and let the landscapers worry about the shrubbery and grass you tore up getting the fuck outta dodge. Drive through chain link fences if you have to. Just GO. NOW!
I strongly agree there needs to be institutional concern paid to tornadoes, but I don't think planning for workers to bug out in their cars is the right approach.
Indeed this is just your opinion. And the whole individualist hero do anything quip is unnecessary reactionary nonsense. This is about being prepared for an emergency in your facility which entails quickly and safely getting to an exit.
> For example people are going to take some time to realize they need to take an alarm seriously, take a few minutes to collect their effects, shuffle to their cars, say goodbye to their coworkers, they will wait in traffic lines, etc.
Are they doing this during a fire? They most certainly should not be.
> ... but I don't think planning for workers to bug out in their cars is the right approach.
This isn't about going George Castanza and pushing old ladies to the floor to get to a fire exit. This is about knowing or having a plan in place and taking it seriously. Maybe your company provides it, maybe you have to figure it out yourself. Point is, always be prepared.
I've been in a few situations where a fire alarm is going off in a large building, and it created no sense of urgency. One was a shopping mall, with people milling about, half-wondering what the noise was, thinking as long as they could see an exit and didn't see a fire it was fine. Even being one who generally doesn't follow herds, I stayed in that state longer than I should have in retrospect. That's human nature, and a major reason of why companies do fire drills.
> Maybe your company provides it, maybe you have to figure it out yourself. Point is, always be prepared.
Yes, of course. Ultimately you are responsible for your own safety. Always be prepared. The problem arises if you take this philosophy as a given and assert that a large group of people will be individually prepared, as a license to avoid figuring out the institutional-scale problem. That is what I'm taking issue with here.
Based on what I've read about the timeframe of tornadoes, I think a corporate policy of having people leave the building and go to their cars is a recipe for a mass casualty event in the parking lot. Given how heavily corporate micromanagement directs people at such jobs (security checkpoints, timeclocks, timing bathroom breaks, prohibiting cell phones, etc), I think the scalable way to handle tornadoes is for the same management structure to direct people into designated shelters within the building.
And sure if I were in such a position, I certainly wouldn't want to just trust management to take care of me in a top-down way. But I also wouldn't want management to use my option to individually prepare as an excuse to slack off on their facility preparation.
I was originally talking about emergencies in general. Not to specifically evacuate during a tornado.
During the 11th September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center people took the time to shut down their computers before exiting.
This is why every time you fly, they tell you during an emergency situation to leave your belongings on the plane. They are priming you so that if an event occurs you do not go into normal "leave plane mode".
Here are two great resources to learn about people: https://www.fastcompany.com/90390969/human-behavior-in-crisi... http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/9573/1/Human%20Behaviour%20Paper%202...
> This is why every time you fly, they tell you during an emergency situation to leave your belongings on the plane. They are priming you so that if an event occurs you do not go into normal "leave plane mode".
How is this different than my point of "Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot ..." ?
>A reasonable/decent employer would have immediately sent everyone home for safety reasons alone.
I detailed a believable timeline to how long it would take to do that and what would likely happen.
>"Your shop should have implemented and tested an evacuation procedure and designated safe meeting spot ..."
Completely agree and from comments in other parts of the thread, it seems like the company did in fact have a procedure that they did follow but it still lead to tragedy.
Your previous comment indicates you would try and leave, which is ultimately your choice but also goes against all the expert advice of what to do in a tornado.
I like to play a little game with myself whenever I enter a new building to determine what evac routes/shelter locations are available for different scenarios when ever I enter a new building. I think it is a good thing to think about/practice but other people have other things on their mind.
The factory where I work has actually been hit by a tornado before I came to work here. One of the stories that they talk about is how they had to pull the VP of Sales or Finance back into the shelter(a stairwell) because he was trying to go into the lobby and secure the front doors that were being blown open by the wind.
I was not specifically speaking about a tornado but emergencies in general where evacuation is necessary (such as a fire).
/s
- Are insurance companies incentivizing building certified shelters by lowering insurance for those that get said building certifications? This question also applies to residential homes.
- Are state and federal governments incentivizing building certified shelters by giving tax breaks to businesses that get said building certifications and have them inspected annually?
- Are any construction companies providing services to retrofit buildings in tornado prone locations? If there is money to be made I believe this would become a thing.
Whether people are working, eating or sleeping I think is not as relevant as mitigating the root cause of a well known risk and incorporating that into business cost and offsetting the retrofit with tax exemptions and write-offs. If you want your folks to keep working during a tornado, then design the building to handle one. Switzerland somehow managed to address this issue for an even less likely risk, as nearly all homes have a fallout bunker.
> The 110 workers on the night shift had about 20 minutes warning that a powerful tornado was bearing down.
You're playing fast and loose with risk definitions, and arguing that until loss of life was guaranteed the employer had no responsibility to not force employees to risk their life.
The entire region knew this was gonna be a bad storm in advance. Bosses and managers choose deadlines over human safety. They should be held criminally liable for that choice.
Not at all, I am just reading the article which makes no mention of this event being a serious risk more than 20 minutes in advance. Possibly you have better sources, but you should provide a link with the source.
However, it's tough to have a shelter-in-place that covers every eventuality. We have a large warehouse with about 100 people, and it's in "Tornado alley". Our shelter only covers to ~175mph winds, and to go higher that that was alarmingly expensive. Whether we like it or not, there is always a cost/benefit calculation on things like this.
> Charley Mcgregor, a training manager at the candle factory since August, said for a major storm their emergency plan was to shelter in place in a bathroom hallway in the back of their production floor. Mcgregor said everyone was evacuated to that hallway when the sirens went off on Friday night, and she said all employees were accounted for in the hall.
That's why. Dumb article, do people think tornadoes are the same thing as hurricanes or something?
Leaving the building to race home is probably the most dangerous thing you can do.
Source: I grew up in a moderate tornado zone.
Tornado warning, tornado watch, or just severe weather warning?
Unless it’s an actual tornado warning, it’s business as usual.
Thats the problem.
I didn’t mean business strictly as in Business.
If you only support shutting down businesses during Tornado Warnings, then what should the Candle Factory have done differently? Because they had a shelter, and the employees were in it.
That depends on the risk factors for each businesses. How quickly can you get your employees to safety if a tornado warning comes? How secure is your tornado shelter?
It also depends on how big the storm system was, this one was massive.
It would depend on the severity -- and shelter capabilities at the business site -- of course.
I remember seeing high 71, low 65. First thought was LOL that's a mistake, but confirmed it at another site. Then saw next day low of 29. I remember telling my wife how crazy that was, and they're gonna get bad winds or tornados.
The air was super heavy and muggy, and it was almost eerily calm that day. I even looked to my husband and said "this is gonna be a bad one" that day.
Luckily my area got missed for the majority of it, but unluckily it did hit other areas nearby.
Thanks the detailed clarification.
I know all these people saying "this happens every week in the midwest", "you only get 10-15 minutes warning" meant well -- but from everything I was reading about the lead-up to this disaster -- something in those retorts just didn't add up.
If this was an atypical storm that meteorologists saw coming well in advance, then the emergency alert system should have been activated with a warning that made it clear that this was not like a normal storm--shelter in place or something like that.
But in the ~30 years I spent in the midwest we never had anything like that happen--preemptive shutdown for tornadoes.
It's a reasonable precaution that a municipality can choose to make. But I can't think of an instance of such cancellations and closures occurring for overnight storms.
Yes, this article points out some of the very reasons why overnight tornadic activity is much more common (and deadly) on the "edges" of (the expanding) tornado alley (the Southeast US and the states such as Indiana and Ohio often referred to as "midwest" for historic reasons rather than accurate geographic ones) than more centrally in it (Texas, Oklohoma, most of the rest of the Great Plains) where daytime storms are more common.