My wife, at work in a school on the Peninsula south of SF and north of San Jose, just texted me:
“We are locked down due to Tornado warning. Everything is offline.”
WTF? We don’t get those here. Tornados terrify me; earthquakes you can prepare for….
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Ok, tornadoes in a location that experiences frequent earthquakes would suck.
The simplest remedy for tornadoes is the equivalent of a bomb shelter – hardened box built into the ground. Of course, if the ground is shaky that would complicate things…
Yeah, problem is there are generally no such things as basements out here.
Warning was cleared a bit ago, thank goodness!
I believe it’s not considered an actual tornado unless sighted by a Meteorologist. But I think they saw one in Sunnyvale out by the Baylands a few years back – that was the first in like 100-years. Between the bay and the mountains and the moisture we just don’t have the correct atmospherics for tornado formation.
Guy beat me to it, but you can prepare for tornadoes too… just requires a lot of digging ;).
Oops, I stand corrected! A twister came down and tore up a gardener’s maintenance yard in Santa Rosa, and a funnel cloud was sighted off Ocean Beach.
Houses built pre-1940 have basements, until PG&E torches ’em with their exploding gas-mains…
I blame George Bush.
Tornado >watchwarning< means either "a tornado has been spotted visually or a strong storm displays rotation on NEXRAD". We had an EF-1 very close to where I work several weeks ago – beat up some of our remote electronics pretty badly and took out power for a large part of the city.
Okay…that didn’t come out right. Watch=conditions are right for tornado formation. Warning=a tornado has been spotted visually or a strong storm displays rotation on NEXRAD.