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Comment by octopoc | Hacker News Reader

There are many tornadoes where I live and most of the houses don’t have basements. Directly in the path of the tornado, houses built on a slab were completely gone, leaving only a clean slab. This happened to a few entire neighborhoods.

But, tornadoes here follow similar paths over a fifty year period. When I bought my house I found a hole in the fifty year tornado map and I’ve never had one come near me. Every couple decades the patterns may shift to other patterns, but generally speaking both the new patterns and old patterns have all happened in the last fifty years.

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That’s devastating. I wonder why houses in such areas are not required to provide underground shelter, or at least be built more solidly.

You cannot reasonably build solidly enough to withstand a high-level tornado unless you're talking underground bunkers, which are not an acceptable answer.

Is it not?

For a few decades the Swiss required building concrete nuclear fallout bunkers for every resident. This was relaxed only recently, but presumably it was doable for five decades. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-bunker/swiss-relax-...

So you can be in a bunker above ground. At that point you're quibbling.

That’s a bit defeatist, though? Efforts have been made, eg https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

It seems a concrete dome would also work if digging a bunker is too expensive. Yes it’s not pretty, but not being afraid of dying during the next hurricane season must be worth something. A small dome can’t cost much.

Sure. Building a reinforced shelter for tornadoes, nuclear attack, etc. may make sense. Historically, in the US Midwest that meant going into the basement. But you don't live there.

It's not a problem, people just don't want to pay for it.

https://www.icfmag.com/2012/09/tornado-resistant-concrete-ho...

There aren't many natural disasters a sufficient amount of reinforced concrete can't fend off.

Many places the basement would be under the water table or have to be carved out.

After the 2011 tornadoes in the Southeast US, many communities built above-ground shelters (think "bunker"), with the downside being going any distance to a shelter is likely to be more dangerous than staying where you are. Also, many homeowners bought smaller above-ground shelters (think "steel pill-box").

> I found a hole in the fifty year tornado map

What was your source for this information?

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