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Comment by dugmartin | Hacker News Reader

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...).

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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.

> are you supposed to just stop everything?

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.

> extreme weather is so common

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.

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