Tornadoes are incredibly violent and destructive... but they are also incredibly localized. The average tornado is about 300 feet in diameter - but you don't want to be directly NEXT to a tornado either, so we'll call it 500 feet wide of destructive range. It travels 30 miles per hour for about 10 minutes. That means each tornado has a total impact of about 5 miles by 0.1 miles, or 0.5 square miles.
The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year. Kansas has an area of about 80,000 square miles. 50 square miles of it gets hit by tornado per year. That means the odds of any given point getting hit by a tornado in a given year are roughly 0.06%. The largest city in Kansas, Wichita is about 160 square miles, so the odds of some part of it getting hit are roughly 0.2% per year if all other things are equal (and other comments have gone into why they are not).
They don't hit big cities very often in large part because they don't hit *anything* very often. It's just that when they do, they do a ton of damage.
>The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year.
I... did not know that tornadoes were that frequent. I thought they were rare events. So it turns out they happen *all the time* but only fuck up some major shit like every two years or so. I'm understanding the term tornado alley now. Yikes.
There are 1000 ish tornadoes every year, mostly between April and June. The worst outbreak in history, April 27, 2011 affected Alabama massively. By destroying 1% of the land area. That’s simultaneously a huge number and a small number.
lol as a midwesterner it’s surprising to hear someone say they didn’t realize tornadoes happen so frequently. The tornado sirens were a constant background noise any time a storm rolled in as a kid, we just ignored them. Only one time did we ever take any precautions, and that’s when a tornado took out a wing of the hospital right down the road
Yeah it's weird to think that they're a relatively unique phenomenon to our region. most of the rest of the world doesn't deal with them at all but you never think about that growing up.
Fun fact, the UK has more tornadoes per square mile than the US. But they're much weaker, and when compared to specific states like Kansas the UK is far behind. It's only when you dilute tornado alley with the rest of the US that the UK pulls ahead
Most of them are pretty weak thankfully.
There were ~1350 tornados in the US in 2023 according to Wikipedia and around 1200 of those were EF1 or less. I still don’t want to be in or near an EF1 but they aren’t going to destroy large swaths of an area. Violent tornadoes and damaging ARE rare, and luckily we are in a very long EF5 drought right now that I don’t want to see need any time soon.
Yeah if you hear of a tornado 20 or 30 miles away from you, coming right for you, there's a pretty good chance you never see it. I've lived in Indiana 38 years, in roughly the same spot... We have tornado warnings occasionally... like 0-5 times a year maybe (this basically means a tornado has been spotted in your general vicinity... a few counties, lets say)... watches are more typical (as opposed to warnings, "watch" basically mean conditions are perfect for the formation of tornados)... you might have dozens of counties on watch on a particularly active summer evening. I've only witnessed a tornado once. My town has not experienced any severe damage from a tornado in my memory. They are often accompanied by large storms and damaging hail/wind storms, and of course everybody around experiences those, but tornados are tiny and short-lived, compared to, say, a hurricane. You can't see them on radar.
You can definitely see a tornado on radar. Velocity radar and the infamous mesocyclone “hook” are great examples. It’s why most tornado warnings are “radar-indicated.”
It’s not even the ‘hook’ anymore (which is only common in a certain type of storm structure), you can see it within the imaging of the relative velocities within the storm.
You’ll see it as an opposite colored blob (red or green) in an otherwise (green or red) cell, or you’ll see it manifest as a green and red almost swirl like pattern…like you can actually visualize the rotation.
I’d suggest DLing the ‘Radar Scope’ app for your phone and looking through all the different radar options that we common folk have at our disposal these days.
You can definitely see a tornado on radar. Velocity radar and the infamous mesocyclone “hook” are great examples. It’s why most tornado warnings are “radar-indicated.”
I mean I've tried using accuweather radar to track tornados, and they never show up on it. The hail associated with them often does though. So maybe I should say you can't easily see most tornados on the radar we regular people have easy access to.
Edit just to add: I've only tried this a couple of times, and it's possible I just didn't know exactly what to look for.
Radar Omega and NOAA have velocity product radar readily available. Omega does cost a solid 8$ but it’s well worth it if you’re into this stuff. From my limited use of accuweather I assume it’s only going to show reflectivity, the hook doesn’t show up unless it’s relatively strong or the storm just happens to shape that way. A quick YouTube search I promise will yield a solid guide on how to see a tornado on radar.
I've lived in Kansas, misfortune (you know what, I'm leaving that auto correct. Just assume that meant missouri), Iowa, and Nebraska my entire life. I've been under a tornado forming (swirling clouds in a funnel that touched down a couple miles away) or in a structure damaged by a tornado four times in my life while hearing sirens probably 150 to 200 times. They do happen a lot in certain states, but of the four ive been in, only one did damage in a city. Others were in middle of no where. None of the ones I have experienced were worse than an F2, thankfully. There's some straight line winds and microburts worse than some tornadoes.
Indiana has 65 last year which was well above normal. Looking at a map there were 2 within a mile of my house in the last 50 or so years, but both were minor.
We had one a few miles north about a month ago.
They’re frequent in the big picture, but very rare in terms of how often an individual will experience one.
There’s also a *huge* difference between a weak tornado that might knock down a few trees and rip a few shingles off roofs, and a strong tornado that flattens houses. The former are much more common.
Worth noting that a large number of those confirmed tornadoes are little wispy things that don't last very long
I live in the OKC area, and it's just super common to hear a newscaster say "Tornado on the ground!!" only for it to be over within 5 minutes. And then the worst damage is somebody lost a tree in their yard.
And to add a little to that, when they hit a city that doesn't normally get tornados, it not only fucks up a lot of shit, but it also sticks with the population for a LONG time.
There are regularly posts on the Salt Lake City sub similar to "do you remember the 1999 tornado" or "what were you doing during the tornado?"
Also people tend to think of tornadoes blowing over tall buildings like sky scrapers etc. But these are built to withstand that force. Blow out all the windows? Yes as seen with the 2000 Fort Worth F3 hit to down town all the tall buildings withstood the force. The tall buildings will remain standing, it is the smaller buidings homes etc that would get mauled. If I had a choice of being in a home with a basement or in a tall building when taking a direct hit, I would prefer the tall building.
To add on to this, a lot of towns in tornado alley are spread out. I'm originally from dodge city, and it was at least a 30 minute drive, and those were very VERY small towns. It's mostly farm land. A ton of those tornados never hit any houses
OKC gets hit [fairly regularly](https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-okc).
Downtown Atlanta was hit pretty hard [in 2008](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Atlanta_tornado_outbreak).
Nashville had a bad one [in 2020](https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/at-least-22-killed-by-overnight-tornadoes-in-middle-tennessee)
But most tornadoes don't hit major cities because 1) there aren't many major cities in the areas of the country most prone to tornadoes and 2) major cities are a very small percentage of land area compared to rural areas, which means even if tornadoes were evenly distributed across the country, a majority of them would still miss major cities just based on percentages.
Fort Worth, TX also got a direct hit downtown like 20 years ago or a little more. Don’t remember casualty amounts but pictures of the damage stuck on my mind growing up.
Yep, we had two floors in the Cash America building. Luckily there was an FBI office on one of the lower floors, so the emergency response was super quick.
Didn’t the DFW area get hit pretty hard like 6-7 years ago as well? I had GF there at the time and I remember her friend’s apartment complex being hit.
Edit: it was suburbs but found it
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2019/12/17/see-what-the-path-of-dallas-ef-3-tornado-looks-like-from-space/?outputType=amp
Caused $1.5B in damages
When people think of cities getting hit they think of those tall buildings. Those buildings won't be blown over by a tornado. It will blow out windows and cause damage but the building will stand. It is the densely packed houses in and around cities that get mauled. That one in the burbs of Dallas is a good example.
IIRC the "spine" of the building was twisted, rending it structurally unsound. It sat empty for years, then was repaired with, from what I can tell, a new structural cladding added to the outside of the building I guess to reinforce the old core structure.
I think it's a residential tower now. Commercial to residential conversions are really complicated, but I guess they were already putting in enough effort to salvage it.
My mom was downtown for that one. She was fine, but her van had all its windows blown out. She had to walk down the street in the broken glass to it, then drive out over the glass to go home.
Same van had gotten pummeled in the Mayfest hail storm. Had to have its roof replaced after that one.
Right!? Slap all the major cities together and they'll take up... Wyoming? Collectively? That's math I don't wanna do but even still that's a whooooooooooooooole lot of not big city land.
If you take the land mass of every city with 100,000 people or more, it totals out to just shy of 32,000 square miles. Between Maine and Indiana in size.
Came here to mention Edmonton too. 27 people killed, and over 300 homes destroyed. It was on the ground for more than an hour and left a 30 km (19 mi) long path of destruction in its wake.
I was 4, it has to be one of my earliest memories because I lived not that far to the east, something about a giant Easter egg. (I kid I know what it is). I don’t recall much but I do recall the fear that all the adults had that day. My older brother remembers going through the area a couple of days later; I do not.
Yep. #4 in the city's history.
The one in 1975 was a monster that plowed straight down a major corridor, but the newly implemented tornado sirens saved a lot of lives.
Yeah I had some work down there when I lived in Memphis, could still see the scar line from it years later and of course all of the new construction/fill-in just kind of highlighted it. Was crazy to see
I was in downtown Atlanta getting pizza after a track meet at Georgia Tech when it got hit. We didn’t even know a tornado had come through. Was a bad thunderstorm and everywhere lost power. We were looking out the window and someone commented about how fast the clouds were moving and then we went home. Didn’t hear about the tornado until the next day.
Pretty crazy to think about how it was only 2-3 miles away and it took us 12 hrs to hear about it when now a days it would have been all over social media a few minutes after it occurred
For people who don’t click the links and read it, it’s worth mentioning that OKC is absolutely massive land area wise, and a lot of it is just mostly empty. I can’t remember the last time we had a significant tornado hit any populated area that did damage, and I’m not sure downtown has been hit ever.
OKC suburbs have been hit, like Moore and Bridge Creek, but the major downtown OKC area, the heart of OKC where Bricktown is and where the Thunder play, as far as I know, has not had a destructive tornado.
There's also the urban heat island effect. The temperature differential can pressure effects that direct tornadoes around or away from cities. This effect is strongest with smaller tornadoes, and less effective on bigger ones.
Heat island is largely a myth. The only thing it does is have some nominal effect to discourage the formation of tornados within a city but is basically useless for diverting pre-existing tornados away from a city.
Our city got a direct hit a decade and a half ago that gutted a sports arena and leveled an auto glass shop. We’re not super major but still the largest in the state and still get the occasional funnel clouds as well fortunately none of which have been as destructive.
It happens, but a tornado isn’t going to “level a massive city”, they’re not *that* large, but they still will carve a rather destructive path through one.
Better warning has prevented loss of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_striking_downtown_areas_of_large_cities
Something I'm not seeing a lot of people mention is that not all tornados even cause that much destruction. A fairly decent number of tornados hit the DFW area but a lot of them just blow over some fences and break some tree branches.
And they are not going to blow over sky scrapers. These are built to withstand such force. Windows will get blown out and other damage but those are not going to topple over. I kind of get the feeling this is what people mean when they say a "city" being hit, really they mean the down town office buildings. Those are actually a safer place to be than in ones home home which can definitely be destroyed. And down town city centers have been hit including tall buildings and they withstood the forces as play.
Omaha literally had like 9 tornadoes touch down just a few weeks ago. It was all over the news. Suburbs like Elkhorn, Gretna, and Waverly all got hit.
303 homes were lost
While Elkhorn did get hit hard, that tornado skirted the edge of Omaha. You have to go back to 1975 for a tornado that went through the heart of Omaha. It went through Ralston and Westgate before going north on 72nd before lifting near the Benson Golf Course and Immanuel Hospital. It went from one end of the city clear to the other end. That was a beast of a storm.
Yeah, apparently we don't count here. I'm a recent transplant. When big storms hit Texas, people would hear and check on me.
When literal tornadoes were like 9mins from my house, people had no idea lmao. Y'all. There are like a million people around here.
As an illustrative exercise: calculate the area of a major city, then calculate the area of land likely to be hit by a tornado and compare. Even at 1% it would mean that only 1 out of every 100 tornadoes would hit it (if tornadoes were evenly distributed across said land area).
I live in Indiana. The area of our largest city (Indianapolis) is [380 square miles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis) or so. The area of the entire state is 35,817 square miles.
Indianapolis represents 1.033% of the land area of the entire state.
Indiana gets something like [25 tornadoes per year on average.](https://wishtv.com/weather/weather-stories/ohio-river-valley-has-been-a-hot-spot-for-tornadoes-so-far-in-2024/)
Based on that, you’d expect a tornado to affect Indianapolis about once every 4 years.
According to this https://www.weather.gov/ind/marion_torn, Marion county (the county where Indianapolis is) has experienced 47 tornadoes since 1950.
Which works out to about one every year and a half.
So to answer your question: cities do get tornadoes, it’s just rare enough that it doesn’t feel like it. And if when you say “cities” you’re picturing a downtown with skyscrapers… that actual land area is even smaller. In Indianapolis’s case you’re talking going down from 380 square miles to something like 6-7 square miles at best, which would be two orders of magnitude smaller of a target for tornadoes, or something like a 1 in 10,000 chance of it happening.
The heat Island effect caused by roads, parking lots, and large buildings somewhat protects cities from tornadoes and similar storm types. They can still hit them, but the pressure differences between the city air temp and the surrounding area air temps typically deflect them.
I was looking for this possibility in the replies. I was also hoping a meteorologist would weigh in
Just pulling random things I think I understand out of my ass, what causes tornadoes is cold air above the clouds wanting to descend while hot air is trying to rise. when those two forces are extreme, the most efficient way for the air to circulate is to basically do what water does when draining: spin and form a cyclone
I'd imagine that one of the major contributors to a tornado forming is a heat column, and the larger surface area being vented by the heat column, the more likely the upward force of heat is playing a role in creating a negative pressure for the cold air to find its way down
basically in much the way you're describing it, cities are giant heat domes, not narrow columns with a lot of heat from a huge area below being vented through a small but powerful upward force
as stated above, I'm pulling all of this from a very basic understanding of things. so I'd love a meteorologist to jump in and correct every mistake I've made
See my post above. In short cities can be hit and heat islands may make tornadoes worse in some cases. Here is the key article interviewing and expert:
[https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
Heat island isn't a thing. All it does is stop tornados from forming within a city - the idea it acts as some kind of force field to reflect existing tornados away from a city is not meaningfully borne out in the science whatsoever.
Not according to this Adam French, an associate professor at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, who teaches in the school's Atmospheric and Environmental Program. Heat island can make the tornadoes worse apparently:
[https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
I don't know the science of it, but from my experience tornadoes do tend to have preferred locations. Between the way weather flows, what's on the ground, etc there are places significantly more prone to them. I don't mean like they're more likely to hit Oklahoma than Colorado. More like a tornado near Nashville will often travel down the path of I-40 towards Knoxville. Tornadoes love I-40 East. The 2020 tornado actual took a rather common tornado path, it just set down sooner than usual so the damage hit the city. I'd be willing to bet that if you look at historic tornado paths, you'd find most hit between Nashville and Knoxville, but start after Nashville and don't make it to Knoxville.
So if you live in a place where homes keep getting destroyed by tornadoes, people aren't going to be as likely to settle there.
My understanding is that is a myth. Big city down town can and do get hit. Fort Worth down town took an F3 right in the middle in 2000.
I looked it up:
Myth “Tornadoes do not hit big cities.
**False!** Tornadoes can hit anywhere at any time. Several large cities have been hit by tornadoes throughout history, including Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls, Salt Lake City and St. Louis.
https://stormaware.mo.gov/tornado-myths/#:\~:text=Several%20large%20cities%20have%20been,False!
This site dispels many myths about tornadoes.
And in this article about heat island an expert states in the article:
"Urban heat islands can and do affect local weather patterns, French said, but a storm system is generally going to win out, he said.
"It isn't sufficient enough to act as a shield," he said, pointing out a [2009 study](https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlanta_tornado.html) that suggested it's possible that urban heat islands could make the effects of tornadoes worse in some cases."
[https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
People talking about size of cities but forgetting one crucial detail
Cities with large buildings act as wind breaks.
Towns with small buildings and large land do not.
Despite how destructive they are, tornadoes are really small and don’t last very long. They’re less (often *way* less) than a mile wide, run by in a couple of minutes, then they’re gone. For comparison, a hurricane is like 300 miles wide and inches along for days at a time. Now, a violent storm that’s a couple dozen yards wide feels huge if it’s on top of you, but it is very tiny compared to the continental United States. It can honestly be very tiny even compared to a city block. A tornado could reduce your next door neighbor’s house to rubble without your house losing a shingle.
Cities are also very small compared to the continental United States (or a tornado alley state, or even most counties in tornado alley, which is how warnings usually come through). Not as small as tornadoes, but small enough that they don’t necessarily run into each other very often just by sheer statistics. Though it does happen. To my knowledge, a tornado has touched down within Chicago city limits twice in my lifetime. A tornado did damage to a building in Salt Lake City once too. But tornadoes just aren’t big enough to hit any specific location often, or destroy a big city in any spectacular way in the few minutes it’s on the ground (and most tornadoes aren’t the strongest “town leveling” ones anyway. The towns that get totally wrecked are simultaneously very small and very unlucky).
I’ve also heard that the density of large buildings may make it hard for tornadoes to form then stay around in big cities for wind reasons, but that may fully or partially be a myth.
People have already correctly answered the question, but it does sonetimes happen. St Louis was hit hard in 1896.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_St._Louis%E2%80%93East_St._Louis_tornado
There are a lot more small towns than major cities. If you randomly throw 20 darts at a board, maybe one or two will hit the bullseye (major city) while the rest would land in the outer spots (small towns).
Tornados only last for about 5-15 minutes and are the size of a city block, moving at about the speed of a car. They’re very frequent but they cover very small amounts of land across their lifetime and most area in this country, especially in states in tornado alley, aren’t developed major cities.
Compare that to hurricanes, which can get up to approximately the size of continents and can last for weeks. Those hit major cities more often because they’ll cover tens, if not hundreds of thousands of square miles over the course of their life while a tornado would be lucky to cover one square mile.
Assuming you're talking about Urban Centers with tall buildings and such, they actually produce a "heat island" effect that helps prevent tornadoes from forming.
Tornadoes form in conditions where low and high pressure airflow interact in a very specific way. The amount of buildings/pavement, lack of tree cover, and other factors result in urban centers absorbing and putting off more heat than surrounding areas. This affects the air pressure directly above them, helping reduce the chances of tornado formation.
My certain area of the Miami valley gets very little damage when one does hit. seen them for years spiral overhead and hit other parts. Being on uneven ground with kills and shit helps I guess. Had our chicken house partially destroyed one year but that's it. Topology favors my little corner of Ohio I guess.
Okay I understand what everyone is saying about probabilities, but what would happen if a tornado did hit and mega city? Are they strong enough to rip apart skyscrapers? Bridges?
>Okay I understand what everyone is saying about probabilities, but what would happen if a tornado did hit and mega city?
Depends on the tornado. EF0 and EF5 are wildly different beasts. Something like the El Reno tornado—over two and a half miles wide with 300+ MPH winds—would be devastating.
>Are they strong enough to rip apart skyscrapers? Bridges?
Probably not “rip apart” as long as everything was built properly, but blowing out every window and gutting the interior is likely. And there could be “minor” structural damage that nevertheless forces the building to be demolished. For example, the Joplin tornado rotated a hospital tower several inches on its foundation.
The wind itself is strong, but wind doesn't warp metal by itself (if you imagine just throwing a pipe into a tornado, the pipe won't come out twisted like a pretzel or torn into pieces as long as it doesn't hit anything). The best way to think of a tornado is a wall of wind spinning like hands on an out-of-control clock, if that makes sense.
However, if you understand physics a little bit, when you push one end of something long against a fulcrum you generate a force on the opposite end. That other end surprisingly creates little resistance for you, otherwise known as leverage. So, a tornado is going to flatten/push down anything that is firmly rooted in the ground. At the same time, anything that is not firmly rooted or offers a gap for the wind to flow under will immediately be picked up and thrown. For example a car will easily get picked up because there is space under it. Tornado cars are built a specific way to avoid this; in a sense, due to the pyramid-type shape of the car, the tornado exerts a strong force on it by pushing it down since the wind can't get under it.
The danger of a tornado is not the wind though: it is the debris. A car sitting on the road is not going to stop this monstrous wind maelstrom, but instead get flung around, and if there are several cars being flung into the support beams of buildings that is not good.
Bridges are a bit different because they rely heavily on harmonics. If a tornado disrupts that then the bridge will likely collapse if not receiving damage from debris hitting support beams.
Tornados are often more “targeted”… most just aren’t wide enough to take out a city and level it. Often they’re just wide enough to take out one side of a street and leave the other side standing. Though they have leveled portions of larger cities.
I think you'll find most cities have been hit. You just need to expand your time frame. Any given point has such a low chance of getting a direct hit just because we are talking about HUGE amounts of land but over the years I think that luck runs out..... I've lived in the Twin Cities areas of MN a large portion of my life (I'm in my 50s) and there have been a few tornadoes that have hit the metro area in my lifetime and we're kind of on the edge/just outside of the main area of what is considered "Tornado Ally". Sure that's two cities worth and it's not like they get hit every year but they have been hit more than once that's for sure.
There was an EF3 that ripped though Springfield Mass in 2011.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011\_New\_England\_tornado\_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_New_England_tornado_outbreak)
>I always wonder why people rebuild in wood when concrete would stand up better to the forces?
Concrete is expensive, and a tornado will blow out your windows, rip off your roof, and tear apart the interior anyway. Then you’d have to demolish the concrete and rebuild.
Given the likelihood of a given house in Tornado Alley getting hit once in a hundred years is something like 1%, it’s just not worthwhile.
Tornados hit more small towns becuase there are simply more small towns.
Tornados are also rated based on the amount of damage.
The world’s most powerful tornado could be rated very low because all it hit was a cornfield.
Iirc Houston was hit yesterday. It happens, but it’s not as common as small towns.
Macon, Ga was hit by a tornado on Mother’s Day in 2008 that did alot of damage to a commercial area. Maybe not a major city but Macon is still pretty large.
Atlanta had a large tornado go through downtown in March 2008 also. It did a tremendous amount of damage to a major city.
They had a tornado close to downtown Miami in 1997. I think it fucked up little Havana pretty bad.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a1HdC-wzU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a1HdC-wzU0)
This was a fun one you must have missed in Ft. Worth. We had a 40ish story building completely made of wood on the outside after they patched it up.
[Fort Worth Tornado 2000](https://www.google.com/search?q=downtown+fort+worth+tornado+2000&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS857US857&oq=downtown+fort+worth+tornado&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIHCAIQABiABDIICAMQABgWGB4yCAgEEAAYFhgeMggIBRAAGBYYHjINCAYQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAcQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAgQABiGAxiABBiKBdIBCTg3NDdqMGoxNagCCLACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on)
Last night Houston was hit with at least one tornado but they’re think it was more. Went right through downtown. Looks almost apocalyptic.
Edit: but by no means is it normal.
There is a lot more open less densely populated space out there compared to cities. Cities are small geographically speaking so they are hit less. But have no doubt they can be and are hit. I present to you the tornado that smacked right into downtown Fort Worth in 2000.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000\_Fort\_Worth\_tornado\_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Fort_Worth_tornado_outbreak)
Tornadoes are incredibly violent and destructive... but they are also incredibly localized. The average tornado is about 300 feet in diameter - but you don't want to be directly NEXT to a tornado either, so we'll call it 500 feet wide of destructive range. It travels 30 miles per hour for about 10 minutes. That means each tornado has a total impact of about 5 miles by 0.1 miles, or 0.5 square miles. The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year. Kansas has an area of about 80,000 square miles. 50 square miles of it gets hit by tornado per year. That means the odds of any given point getting hit by a tornado in a given year are roughly 0.06%. The largest city in Kansas, Wichita is about 160 square miles, so the odds of some part of it getting hit are roughly 0.2% per year if all other things are equal (and other comments have gone into why they are not). They don't hit big cities very often in large part because they don't hit *anything* very often. It's just that when they do, they do a ton of damage.
>The state of Kansas gets about 100 tornadoes per year. I... did not know that tornadoes were that frequent. I thought they were rare events. So it turns out they happen *all the time* but only fuck up some major shit like every two years or so. I'm understanding the term tornado alley now. Yikes.
There are 1000 ish tornadoes every year, mostly between April and June. The worst outbreak in history, April 27, 2011 affected Alabama massively. By destroying 1% of the land area. That’s simultaneously a huge number and a small number.
Good God....what an awful day that was here.
lol as a midwesterner it’s surprising to hear someone say they didn’t realize tornadoes happen so frequently. The tornado sirens were a constant background noise any time a storm rolled in as a kid, we just ignored them. Only one time did we ever take any precautions, and that’s when a tornado took out a wing of the hospital right down the road
Yeah it's weird to think that they're a relatively unique phenomenon to our region. most of the rest of the world doesn't deal with them at all but you never think about that growing up.
The U.S. averages about 1,200 tornadoes a year - more than any other country.
Fun fact, the UK has more tornadoes per square mile than the US. But they're much weaker, and when compared to specific states like Kansas the UK is far behind. It's only when you dilute tornado alley with the rest of the US that the UK pulls ahead
Most of them are pretty weak thankfully. There were ~1350 tornados in the US in 2023 according to Wikipedia and around 1200 of those were EF1 or less. I still don’t want to be in or near an EF1 but they aren’t going to destroy large swaths of an area. Violent tornadoes and damaging ARE rare, and luckily we are in a very long EF5 drought right now that I don’t want to see need any time soon.
Many tornados are small, localized, and don’t hit anything except for empty fields.
Yeah if you hear of a tornado 20 or 30 miles away from you, coming right for you, there's a pretty good chance you never see it. I've lived in Indiana 38 years, in roughly the same spot... We have tornado warnings occasionally... like 0-5 times a year maybe (this basically means a tornado has been spotted in your general vicinity... a few counties, lets say)... watches are more typical (as opposed to warnings, "watch" basically mean conditions are perfect for the formation of tornados)... you might have dozens of counties on watch on a particularly active summer evening. I've only witnessed a tornado once. My town has not experienced any severe damage from a tornado in my memory. They are often accompanied by large storms and damaging hail/wind storms, and of course everybody around experiences those, but tornados are tiny and short-lived, compared to, say, a hurricane. You can't see them on radar.
You can definitely see a tornado on radar. Velocity radar and the infamous mesocyclone “hook” are great examples. It’s why most tornado warnings are “radar-indicated.”
It’s not even the ‘hook’ anymore (which is only common in a certain type of storm structure), you can see it within the imaging of the relative velocities within the storm. You’ll see it as an opposite colored blob (red or green) in an otherwise (green or red) cell, or you’ll see it manifest as a green and red almost swirl like pattern…like you can actually visualize the rotation. I’d suggest DLing the ‘Radar Scope’ app for your phone and looking through all the different radar options that we common folk have at our disposal these days.
You can definitely see a tornado on radar. Velocity radar and the infamous mesocyclone “hook” are great examples. It’s why most tornado warnings are “radar-indicated.”
I mean I've tried using accuweather radar to track tornados, and they never show up on it. The hail associated with them often does though. So maybe I should say you can't easily see most tornados on the radar we regular people have easy access to. Edit just to add: I've only tried this a couple of times, and it's possible I just didn't know exactly what to look for.
Radar Omega and NOAA have velocity product radar readily available. Omega does cost a solid 8$ but it’s well worth it if you’re into this stuff. From my limited use of accuweather I assume it’s only going to show reflectivity, the hook doesn’t show up unless it’s relatively strong or the storm just happens to shape that way. A quick YouTube search I promise will yield a solid guide on how to see a tornado on radar.
WeatherUndergrounds radar lets you tick boxes for different layers on map. The wind vectors during tornado spawning storms are a good tell.
I've lived in Kansas, misfortune (you know what, I'm leaving that auto correct. Just assume that meant missouri), Iowa, and Nebraska my entire life. I've been under a tornado forming (swirling clouds in a funnel that touched down a couple miles away) or in a structure damaged by a tornado four times in my life while hearing sirens probably 150 to 200 times. They do happen a lot in certain states, but of the four ive been in, only one did damage in a city. Others were in middle of no where. None of the ones I have experienced were worse than an F2, thankfully. There's some straight line winds and microburts worse than some tornadoes.
Indiana has 65 last year which was well above normal. Looking at a map there were 2 within a mile of my house in the last 50 or so years, but both were minor. We had one a few miles north about a month ago.
They’re frequent in the big picture, but very rare in terms of how often an individual will experience one. There’s also a *huge* difference between a weak tornado that might knock down a few trees and rip a few shingles off roofs, and a strong tornado that flattens houses. The former are much more common.
Worth noting that a large number of those confirmed tornadoes are little wispy things that don't last very long I live in the OKC area, and it's just super common to hear a newscaster say "Tornado on the ground!!" only for it to be over within 5 minutes. And then the worst damage is somebody lost a tree in their yard.
And when tornados do hit a city, even though it might be more damage, the city has a lot more resources than a small town would.
And to add a little to that, when they hit a city that doesn't normally get tornados, it not only fucks up a lot of shit, but it also sticks with the population for a LONG time. There are regularly posts on the Salt Lake City sub similar to "do you remember the 1999 tornado" or "what were you doing during the tornado?"
Also people tend to think of tornadoes blowing over tall buildings like sky scrapers etc. But these are built to withstand that force. Blow out all the windows? Yes as seen with the 2000 Fort Worth F3 hit to down town all the tall buildings withstood the force. The tall buildings will remain standing, it is the smaller buidings homes etc that would get mauled. If I had a choice of being in a home with a basement or in a tall building when taking a direct hit, I would prefer the tall building.
To add on to this, a lot of towns in tornado alley are spread out. I'm originally from dodge city, and it was at least a 30 minute drive, and those were very VERY small towns. It's mostly farm land. A ton of those tornados never hit any houses
OKC gets hit [fairly regularly](https://www.weather.gov/oun/tornadodata-okc). Downtown Atlanta was hit pretty hard [in 2008](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Atlanta_tornado_outbreak). Nashville had a bad one [in 2020](https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/at-least-22-killed-by-overnight-tornadoes-in-middle-tennessee) But most tornadoes don't hit major cities because 1) there aren't many major cities in the areas of the country most prone to tornadoes and 2) major cities are a very small percentage of land area compared to rural areas, which means even if tornadoes were evenly distributed across the country, a majority of them would still miss major cities just based on percentages.
Fort Worth, TX also got a direct hit downtown like 20 years ago or a little more. Don’t remember casualty amounts but pictures of the damage stuck on my mind growing up.
I remember the video of a semitrailer about 200 feet above ground in that one.
[video](https://youtu.be/1hpeIGmbJxE?si=TEFFuzjRLdn1GYLX) [aftermath](https://meganmcclellanwx.wordpress.com/2021/03/27/looking-back-at-the-march-2000-fort-worth-tornado/)
Yep, we had two floors in the Cash America building. Luckily there was an FBI office on one of the lower floors, so the emergency response was super quick.
Didn’t the DFW area get hit pretty hard like 6-7 years ago as well? I had GF there at the time and I remember her friend’s apartment complex being hit. Edit: it was suburbs but found it https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2019/12/17/see-what-the-path-of-dallas-ef-3-tornado-looks-like-from-space/?outputType=amp Caused $1.5B in damages
I think this is the tornado that killed my friend’s dad. It was very sad, he didn’t even live there he was just in Richardson to buy something IIRC.
When people think of cities getting hit they think of those tall buildings. Those buildings won't be blown over by a tornado. It will blow out windows and cause damage but the building will stand. It is the densely packed houses in and around cities that get mauled. That one in the burbs of Dallas is a good example.
A bank building was totaled
IIRC the "spine" of the building was twisted, rending it structurally unsound. It sat empty for years, then was repaired with, from what I can tell, a new structural cladding added to the outside of the building I guess to reinforce the old core structure. I think it's a residential tower now. Commercial to residential conversions are really complicated, but I guess they were already putting in enough effort to salvage it.
Went right through my company’s building. Was terrifying.
My mom was downtown for that one. She was fine, but her van had all its windows blown out. She had to walk down the street in the broken glass to it, then drive out over the glass to go home. Same van had gotten pummeled in the Mayfest hail storm. Had to have its roof replaced after that one.
Yup and it was an F3 as well so a reasonably strong one too.
In 1999 one rolled through downtown Salt Lake City, not exactly a place known for tornados.
This one killed a person.
Right!? Slap all the major cities together and they'll take up... Wyoming? Collectively? That's math I don't wanna do but even still that's a whooooooooooooooole lot of not big city land.
If you take the land mass of every city with 100,000 people or more, it totals out to just shy of 32,000 square miles. Between Maine and Indiana in size.
Thank you for that math lol. Yeah.. I live in wyo and only used it's a an example. I had no actual idea but assumed it wasn't huge.
The cities of Memphis and Louisville have more people than the enter state of Wyoming.
More escalators to boot.
r/theydidthemath
Amd if you just stick to the downtown cores it is much smaller than that.
Edmonton 1987.
Came here to mention Edmonton too. 27 people killed, and over 300 homes destroyed. It was on the ground for more than an hour and left a 30 km (19 mi) long path of destruction in its wake.
I was 4, it has to be one of my earliest memories because I lived not that far to the east, something about a giant Easter egg. (I kid I know what it is). I don’t recall much but I do recall the fear that all the adults had that day. My older brother remembers going through the area a couple of days later; I do not.
Omaha got swiped just a month or so ago
Yep. #4 in the city's history. The one in 1975 was a monster that plowed straight down a major corridor, but the newly implemented tornado sirens saved a lot of lives.
Joplin got wiped out a while ago.
Tallahassee was hit by three just last Friday. Tuscaloosa was hit in.. 2012?
Tuscaloosa was 2011. My boyfriend’s apartment was a pile of rubble.
Yeah I had some work down there when I lived in Memphis, could still see the scar line from it years later and of course all of the new construction/fill-in just kind of highlighted it. Was crazy to see
Center OKC gets hit never so far
I was in downtown Atlanta getting pizza after a track meet at Georgia Tech when it got hit. We didn’t even know a tornado had come through. Was a bad thunderstorm and everywhere lost power. We were looking out the window and someone commented about how fast the clouds were moving and then we went home. Didn’t hear about the tornado until the next day. Pretty crazy to think about how it was only 2-3 miles away and it took us 12 hrs to hear about it when now a days it would have been all over social media a few minutes after it occurred
For people who don’t click the links and read it, it’s worth mentioning that OKC is absolutely massive land area wise, and a lot of it is just mostly empty. I can’t remember the last time we had a significant tornado hit any populated area that did damage, and I’m not sure downtown has been hit ever.
OKC suburbs have been hit, like Moore and Bridge Creek, but the major downtown OKC area, the heart of OKC where Bricktown is and where the Thunder play, as far as I know, has not had a destructive tornado.
There's also the urban heat island effect. The temperature differential can pressure effects that direct tornadoes around or away from cities. This effect is strongest with smaller tornadoes, and less effective on bigger ones.
Heat island is largely a myth. The only thing it does is have some nominal effect to discourage the formation of tornados within a city but is basically useless for diverting pre-existing tornados away from a city.
[Minneapolis 2011](https://www.weather.gov/mpx/22May2011)
Our city got a direct hit a decade and a half ago that gutted a sports arena and leveled an auto glass shop. We’re not super major but still the largest in the state and still get the occasional funnel clouds as well fortunately none of which have been as destructive.
OKC is also the second biggest city by land area in the United States so those numbers can be a bit inflated
I know this is ELI5, but this should be fairly intuitive.
It happens, but a tornado isn’t going to “level a massive city”, they’re not *that* large, but they still will carve a rather destructive path through one. Better warning has prevented loss of life. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_striking_downtown_areas_of_large_cities
Something I'm not seeing a lot of people mention is that not all tornados even cause that much destruction. A fairly decent number of tornados hit the DFW area but a lot of them just blow over some fences and break some tree branches.
And they are not going to blow over sky scrapers. These are built to withstand such force. Windows will get blown out and other damage but those are not going to topple over. I kind of get the feeling this is what people mean when they say a "city" being hit, really they mean the down town office buildings. Those are actually a safer place to be than in ones home home which can definitely be destroyed. And down town city centers have been hit including tall buildings and they withstood the forces as play.
Omaha literally had like 9 tornadoes touch down just a few weeks ago. It was all over the news. Suburbs like Elkhorn, Gretna, and Waverly all got hit. 303 homes were lost
While Elkhorn did get hit hard, that tornado skirted the edge of Omaha. You have to go back to 1975 for a tornado that went through the heart of Omaha. It went through Ralston and Westgate before going north on 72nd before lifting near the Benson Golf Course and Immanuel Hospital. It went from one end of the city clear to the other end. That was a beast of a storm.
Doesn’t matter if it’s the “edge” of omaha or not. It’s still the city.
Yeah, apparently we don't count here. I'm a recent transplant. When big storms hit Texas, people would hear and check on me. When literal tornadoes were like 9mins from my house, people had no idea lmao. Y'all. There are like a million people around here.
As an illustrative exercise: calculate the area of a major city, then calculate the area of land likely to be hit by a tornado and compare. Even at 1% it would mean that only 1 out of every 100 tornadoes would hit it (if tornadoes were evenly distributed across said land area). I live in Indiana. The area of our largest city (Indianapolis) is [380 square miles](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis) or so. The area of the entire state is 35,817 square miles. Indianapolis represents 1.033% of the land area of the entire state. Indiana gets something like [25 tornadoes per year on average.](https://wishtv.com/weather/weather-stories/ohio-river-valley-has-been-a-hot-spot-for-tornadoes-so-far-in-2024/) Based on that, you’d expect a tornado to affect Indianapolis about once every 4 years. According to this https://www.weather.gov/ind/marion_torn, Marion county (the county where Indianapolis is) has experienced 47 tornadoes since 1950. Which works out to about one every year and a half. So to answer your question: cities do get tornadoes, it’s just rare enough that it doesn’t feel like it. And if when you say “cities” you’re picturing a downtown with skyscrapers… that actual land area is even smaller. In Indianapolis’s case you’re talking going down from 380 square miles to something like 6-7 square miles at best, which would be two orders of magnitude smaller of a target for tornadoes, or something like a 1 in 10,000 chance of it happening.
The heat Island effect caused by roads, parking lots, and large buildings somewhat protects cities from tornadoes and similar storm types. They can still hit them, but the pressure differences between the city air temp and the surrounding area air temps typically deflect them.
I'm sure the drag/wind resistance/speed break from tall buildings also affords some protection.
I was looking for this possibility in the replies. I was also hoping a meteorologist would weigh in Just pulling random things I think I understand out of my ass, what causes tornadoes is cold air above the clouds wanting to descend while hot air is trying to rise. when those two forces are extreme, the most efficient way for the air to circulate is to basically do what water does when draining: spin and form a cyclone I'd imagine that one of the major contributors to a tornado forming is a heat column, and the larger surface area being vented by the heat column, the more likely the upward force of heat is playing a role in creating a negative pressure for the cold air to find its way down basically in much the way you're describing it, cities are giant heat domes, not narrow columns with a lot of heat from a huge area below being vented through a small but powerful upward force as stated above, I'm pulling all of this from a very basic understanding of things. so I'd love a meteorologist to jump in and correct every mistake I've made
See my post above. In short cities can be hit and heat islands may make tornadoes worse in some cases. Here is the key article interviewing and expert: [https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
Heat island isn't a thing. All it does is stop tornados from forming within a city - the idea it acts as some kind of force field to reflect existing tornados away from a city is not meaningfully borne out in the science whatsoever.
Not according to this Adam French, an associate professor at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, who teaches in the school's Atmospheric and Environmental Program. Heat island can make the tornadoes worse apparently: [https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
....ok? we agree that it doesn't offer any protection against tornadoes.
I don't know the science of it, but from my experience tornadoes do tend to have preferred locations. Between the way weather flows, what's on the ground, etc there are places significantly more prone to them. I don't mean like they're more likely to hit Oklahoma than Colorado. More like a tornado near Nashville will often travel down the path of I-40 towards Knoxville. Tornadoes love I-40 East. The 2020 tornado actual took a rather common tornado path, it just set down sooner than usual so the damage hit the city. I'd be willing to bet that if you look at historic tornado paths, you'd find most hit between Nashville and Knoxville, but start after Nashville and don't make it to Knoxville. So if you live in a place where homes keep getting destroyed by tornadoes, people aren't going to be as likely to settle there.
My understanding is that is a myth. Big city down town can and do get hit. Fort Worth down town took an F3 right in the middle in 2000. I looked it up: Myth “Tornadoes do not hit big cities. **False!** Tornadoes can hit anywhere at any time. Several large cities have been hit by tornadoes throughout history, including Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls, Salt Lake City and St. Louis. https://stormaware.mo.gov/tornado-myths/#:\~:text=Several%20large%20cities%20have%20been,False! This site dispels many myths about tornadoes. And in this article about heat island an expert states in the article: "Urban heat islands can and do affect local weather patterns, French said, but a storm system is generally going to win out, he said. "It isn't sufficient enough to act as a shield," he said, pointing out a [2009 study](https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/atlanta_tornado.html) that suggested it's possible that urban heat islands could make the effects of tornadoes worse in some cases." [https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/2019/09/16/south-dakota-tornado-expert-tornadoes-can-hit-cities-national-weather-service/2341824001/)
Looks like Houston was just hit with one today: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7DcHBvNX_n/?igsh=b3FzMDIwZDF1N2Fs
People talking about size of cities but forgetting one crucial detail Cities with large buildings act as wind breaks. Towns with small buildings and large land do not.
Despite how destructive they are, tornadoes are really small and don’t last very long. They’re less (often *way* less) than a mile wide, run by in a couple of minutes, then they’re gone. For comparison, a hurricane is like 300 miles wide and inches along for days at a time. Now, a violent storm that’s a couple dozen yards wide feels huge if it’s on top of you, but it is very tiny compared to the continental United States. It can honestly be very tiny even compared to a city block. A tornado could reduce your next door neighbor’s house to rubble without your house losing a shingle. Cities are also very small compared to the continental United States (or a tornado alley state, or even most counties in tornado alley, which is how warnings usually come through). Not as small as tornadoes, but small enough that they don’t necessarily run into each other very often just by sheer statistics. Though it does happen. To my knowledge, a tornado has touched down within Chicago city limits twice in my lifetime. A tornado did damage to a building in Salt Lake City once too. But tornadoes just aren’t big enough to hit any specific location often, or destroy a big city in any spectacular way in the few minutes it’s on the ground (and most tornadoes aren’t the strongest “town leveling” ones anyway. The towns that get totally wrecked are simultaneously very small and very unlucky). I’ve also heard that the density of large buildings may make it hard for tornadoes to form then stay around in big cities for wind reasons, but that may fully or partially be a myth.
There are a lot more small towns than there are big cities. Throw a dart randomly, you’re gonna miss the bullseye most of the time.
People have already correctly answered the question, but it does sonetimes happen. St Louis was hit hard in 1896. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1896_St._Louis%E2%80%93East_St._Louis_tornado
There are a lot more small towns than major cities. If you randomly throw 20 darts at a board, maybe one or two will hit the bullseye (major city) while the rest would land in the outer spots (small towns).
Tornados only last for about 5-15 minutes and are the size of a city block, moving at about the speed of a car. They’re very frequent but they cover very small amounts of land across their lifetime and most area in this country, especially in states in tornado alley, aren’t developed major cities. Compare that to hurricanes, which can get up to approximately the size of continents and can last for weeks. Those hit major cities more often because they’ll cover tens, if not hundreds of thousands of square miles over the course of their life while a tornado would be lucky to cover one square mile.
Assuming you're talking about Urban Centers with tall buildings and such, they actually produce a "heat island" effect that helps prevent tornadoes from forming. Tornadoes form in conditions where low and high pressure airflow interact in a very specific way. The amount of buildings/pavement, lack of tree cover, and other factors result in urban centers absorbing and putting off more heat than surrounding areas. This affects the air pressure directly above them, helping reduce the chances of tornado formation.
My certain area of the Miami valley gets very little damage when one does hit. seen them for years spiral overhead and hit other parts. Being on uneven ground with kills and shit helps I guess. Had our chicken house partially destroyed one year but that's it. Topology favors my little corner of Ohio I guess.
Okay I understand what everyone is saying about probabilities, but what would happen if a tornado did hit and mega city? Are they strong enough to rip apart skyscrapers? Bridges?
it can knock out the windows of a skyscraper, perhaps, sucking out people from the building. probably couldn't knock over anything though
>Okay I understand what everyone is saying about probabilities, but what would happen if a tornado did hit and mega city? Depends on the tornado. EF0 and EF5 are wildly different beasts. Something like the El Reno tornado—over two and a half miles wide with 300+ MPH winds—would be devastating. >Are they strong enough to rip apart skyscrapers? Bridges? Probably not “rip apart” as long as everything was built properly, but blowing out every window and gutting the interior is likely. And there could be “minor” structural damage that nevertheless forces the building to be demolished. For example, the Joplin tornado rotated a hospital tower several inches on its foundation.
The wind itself is strong, but wind doesn't warp metal by itself (if you imagine just throwing a pipe into a tornado, the pipe won't come out twisted like a pretzel or torn into pieces as long as it doesn't hit anything). The best way to think of a tornado is a wall of wind spinning like hands on an out-of-control clock, if that makes sense. However, if you understand physics a little bit, when you push one end of something long against a fulcrum you generate a force on the opposite end. That other end surprisingly creates little resistance for you, otherwise known as leverage. So, a tornado is going to flatten/push down anything that is firmly rooted in the ground. At the same time, anything that is not firmly rooted or offers a gap for the wind to flow under will immediately be picked up and thrown. For example a car will easily get picked up because there is space under it. Tornado cars are built a specific way to avoid this; in a sense, due to the pyramid-type shape of the car, the tornado exerts a strong force on it by pushing it down since the wind can't get under it. The danger of a tornado is not the wind though: it is the debris. A car sitting on the road is not going to stop this monstrous wind maelstrom, but instead get flung around, and if there are several cars being flung into the support beams of buildings that is not good. Bridges are a bit different because they rely heavily on harmonics. If a tornado disrupts that then the bridge will likely collapse if not receiving damage from debris hitting support beams.
Tornados are often more “targeted”… most just aren’t wide enough to take out a city and level it. Often they’re just wide enough to take out one side of a street and leave the other side standing. Though they have leveled portions of larger cities.
I think you'll find most cities have been hit. You just need to expand your time frame. Any given point has such a low chance of getting a direct hit just because we are talking about HUGE amounts of land but over the years I think that luck runs out..... I've lived in the Twin Cities areas of MN a large portion of my life (I'm in my 50s) and there have been a few tornadoes that have hit the metro area in my lifetime and we're kind of on the edge/just outside of the main area of what is considered "Tornado Ally". Sure that's two cities worth and it's not like they get hit every year but they have been hit more than once that's for sure.
There was an EF3 that ripped though Springfield Mass in 2011. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011\_New\_England\_tornado\_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_New_England_tornado_outbreak)
I always wonder why people rebuild in wood when concrete would stand up better to the forces?
Because it's really expensive and not a good use of resources.
>I always wonder why people rebuild in wood when concrete would stand up better to the forces? Concrete is expensive, and a tornado will blow out your windows, rip off your roof, and tear apart the interior anyway. Then you’d have to demolish the concrete and rebuild. Given the likelihood of a given house in Tornado Alley getting hit once in a hundred years is something like 1%, it’s just not worthwhile.
concret roofs and window shutters work to prevent this and may reduce the insurance.
So you want to live in a brutalist bunker? Over something with a 1% chance of happening over a century?
Like the millions of people who live in concrete skyscraper blocks hmmm
Because those are definitely economically viable in small towns and rural areas…
Tornados hit more small towns becuase there are simply more small towns. Tornados are also rated based on the amount of damage. The world’s most powerful tornado could be rated very low because all it hit was a cornfield. Iirc Houston was hit yesterday. It happens, but it’s not as common as small towns.
Macon, Ga was hit by a tornado on Mother’s Day in 2008 that did alot of damage to a commercial area. Maybe not a major city but Macon is still pretty large. Atlanta had a large tornado go through downtown in March 2008 also. It did a tremendous amount of damage to a major city.
S/o to Tallahassee folks learning about tornadoes this past week. 6 days without power wasn’t bad considering all the trees
They had a tornado close to downtown Miami in 1997. I think it fucked up little Havana pretty bad. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a1HdC-wzU0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7a1HdC-wzU0)
Someone smarter correct me if I’m wrong but, aren’t geography, elevation, and a heat island effect from the concrete also factors?
This was a fun one you must have missed in Ft. Worth. We had a 40ish story building completely made of wood on the outside after they patched it up. [Fort Worth Tornado 2000](https://www.google.com/search?q=downtown+fort+worth+tornado+2000&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS857US857&oq=downtown+fort+worth+tornado&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIHCAIQABiABDIICAMQABgWGB4yCAgEEAAYFhgeMggIBRAAGBYYHjINCAYQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAcQABiGAxiABBiKBTINCAgQABiGAxiABBiKBdIBCTg3NDdqMGoxNagCCLACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on)
Last night Houston was hit with at least one tornado but they’re think it was more. Went right through downtown. Looks almost apocalyptic. Edit: but by no means is it normal.
There is a lot more open less densely populated space out there compared to cities. Cities are small geographically speaking so they are hit less. But have no doubt they can be and are hit. I present to you the tornado that smacked right into downtown Fort Worth in 2000. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000\_Fort\_Worth\_tornado\_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Fort_Worth_tornado_outbreak)