We are more vulnerable to tornadoes than ever before | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on July 10, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: Picture the devastation left behind in the path of a tornado: crumpled mobile homes, roofs ripped off, broken and shredded trees. Now imagine that, multiplied by 1,000 and that’s just in the U.S., just this year. Our vulnerability is only going to grow from here. How can we mitigate the loss of life and property we face from these extreme acts of nature? Stephen Strader, severe weather expert and associate professor at Villanova University, joins The Excerpt to share how we can protect ourselves from tornadoes.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Sara Ganim:

Hello, and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Sarah Ganim filling in for Dana Taylor.

Picture the devastation left behind in the path of a tornado, crumpled mobile homes, roofs ripped off, broken and shredded trees. Now imagine that multiplied by a 1,000, and that's just here in the United States and just this year, plus our vulnerability is only going to grow from here. How can we mitigate the loss of life and property that we face from these extreme acts of nature? Here to dig into what's going on is Stephen Strader, severe weather expert and associate professor at Villanova University. Thanks for joining us, Stephen.

Stephen Strader:

Thank you for having me.

Sara Ganim:

The fact that we've seen more than 1,000 tornadoes so far this year is quite shocking. Is the increase this year simply an anomaly or are tornadoes becoming more frequent?

Stephen Strader:

We have to be careful and think about first the difference between weather and climate. We always say that weather is what you get, climate is what you expect. Climate happens over long time periods when we average out weather days and weather conditions. This year is above average, but the past few years we've been below average. This year doesn't really speak to any trend in terms of increasing tornadoes. In fact, if you look at the entire period of record for tornadoes, we really haven't seen a change in the number of tornadoes across the United States, particularly when we look at those damaging and devastating tornadoes that we care most about.

Sara Ganim:

You're part of this team that published research recently about societal vulnerability to tornadoes. What does that term mean and what's the significance of your research?

Stephen Strader:

If we look at those regions where we've seen those environments change over the last 40 years or so, one factor of disaster is the tornado itself. Where tornadoes occur doesn't always necessarily align with disaster. For instance, a tornado in the middle of a field, we don't call it a disaster because it doesn't hit anything. But take that same tornado and you put it over the top of a developed landscape or a subdivision or a school or a manufactured housing park, now we're talking about death, destruction, and damages.

When we think about disasters, particularly tornado disasters, they're a function of the tornado itself and where it occurs and how strong it is, but also who it hits and what type of people it hits. In other words, we have to look at societal effects as well. I like to think of this as the two-headed monster or the two sides to the same disaster coin. We have the environment or the actual event, the tornado itself, but we have people and how we build and where we build. Those socioeconomic factors and who people are often dictate how severe a disaster is.

Sara Ganim:

Are there parts of the country that we should tell people to relocate from because of the risk?

Stephen Strader:

No. Think that's a bit extreme and it's not going to be successful. If I say we don't need to live in the Southeastern United States or in places like Northern and Central Mississippi, those individuals are already living in vulnerable conditions as a whole. By that I mean that they tend to be lower income. They tend to have greater odds of being hurt or affected during tornado events. What I do tell people is we need to invest in infrastructure and better prepare for these events. What we've seen time and time again is those that take shelter from tornadoes tend to fare pretty well. The issue becomes is a lot of people don't have necessary shelter that is adequate to survive tornadoes. What we always try to tell people to do is plan for the tornado and have a place to shelter before the event occurs.

Sara Ganim:

What do you think it would take to have more homes and buildings be able to stand up to the force of tornadoes?

Stephen Strader:

Well, a lot of it depends on the housing type and the structure type. For instance, I think of big box stores or factories. They're not built to withstand the strongest of strong tornadoes. They're built to serve a specific function. Whereas you think about manufactured housing, those manufactured homes tend to produce more fatalities or lead to more deaths. That's because of how those homes are either not anchored to the ground or inefficiently anchored or incorrectly anchored to the ground. By that I mean is manufactured housing is really only about 6% of the US housing stock. But when you look at tornado deaths, they're a factor in over 50% of tornado deaths. That's lot of times not really the structure, it's how it's tied to the ground. If you're in your manufactured home and the tornado picks it up and moves it and throws it, you're inside of it.

What we try to do is focus on engineering solutions and designing cheaper and better ways to make sure that homes can withstand these tornadic winds and the debris that goes along with them. But that's where it ties into social science, which is not everybody can afford that. Not everybody knows about that. That's where it gets tricky is we know the solutions. We could build tornado-proof homes today, but the cost and where you build them and how you build them and who pays for it is always a societal factor, not a tornado factor.

Sara Ganim:

How does climate change factor in here? Does it factor into the frequency and location of tornadoes?

Stephen Strader:

Not necessarily the frequency that we've seen so far. I would say that the science with climate change and severe weather is in its infancy. When we think of physics and chemistry and all these old scientists, we think of very old long time periods, hundreds of years ago. Severe weather science has really only been around since maybe the 1960s and '70s. We're just now starting to see some of these things.

A lot of it is because we're so dependent on technology. For instance, tornadoes are very small relative to the size of a hurricane. I mean, the widest tornado ever was two and a half miles wide. Hurricanes, 10 times that. Our models and how we look at climate change have not been good enough, and our computers haven't been good enough to see where climate change might influence these tornado events. We're just now getting there.

What we have seen so far is not really a change in the number of tornadoes, but the number of days that support severe weather. That would include tornadoes, wind, and hail. We've seen an uptick in those. That's because there's more energy and heat and humidity or moisture in the atmosphere to work with. Well we don't know if that's going to accelerate, if it's going to level off, we don't know if it's going to start decreasing. There's a lot of questions we're answering. In terms of the spatial location of where tornadoes are occurring, we have seen more activity in the eastern half of the US, but we don't know necessarily what that means for the long term, 10, 20 years down the road.

The one thing that can be sure though is aside from climate change is that our society is beginning to sprawl. All you have to do is think about your hometown and what it looked like when you grew up and then when you're a kid and now what does it look like now. Most of the time these cities are expanding and there's more things and homes and businesses to hit than ever before, which also influences those impacts. We have to think about this very critically.

Sara Ganim:

Is there anything that's making it more difficult to predict tornadoes?

Stephen Strader:

I wouldn't say more difficult. We're getting better. We've had increasing technology. Better doppler radar coverage is one thing that we could improve. There's field campaigns going on to study these severe weather events. There's a lot of people working on this, and we've gotten better over the years.

The hard part is that when we talk about safety to a tornado, a lot of times it doesn't come down to the people receiving a warning. We are told that the tornado struck without warning. That's not happening as much as it used to. That's because people are getting the wireless emergency alerts. They are hearing it from a friend. They have social media, which has been huge in getting the word out for tornado warnings, but we can't force that person to take shelter. That's the hard part is no matter what, it comes down to a personal decision for someone to take the warning seriously and have a plan of action.

I, as a person who's an interdisciplinary scientist, a meteorologist and a geographer, I tend to think about, okay, does that person make the decision out of not understanding the threat or do they make that decision because they can't? I worry a lot about that single mother that lives in Mississippi in a manufactured home, multiple kids, they have a car that may not start. Tornado's in the middle of the night coming towards them at 60 miles per hour. The deck is just stacking against them to staying safe. We have to be aware of not pointing the finger, but help people before and after these events to make resilience stronger.

Sara Ganim:

What is the best way to keep yourself safe if you must shelter in place?

Stephen Strader:

I would say that the number one thing that you can do for yourself is have a NOAA Weather radio. Those weather radios aren't like your run-of-the-mill FM radios. There is an alarm clock to wake you up in the middle of the night. When there's a tornado warning in your vicinity, it wakes you up, and then you can get to your shelter.

What I always tell people is have a plan of action. If your neighbor is a permanent home in a basement, strike an agreement with them to go use their shelter, run into their basement when you can. Make sure that you have a place where all your kids are going to meet. You want to put yourself in the lowest level possible and put as many walls between you and the tornado because there's debris and cover yourself. Basements are great for that, interior closets and bathrooms.

But you want to make sure that you have multiple ways to receive the warning. Don't rely on the sirens. Sirens are not meant to be heard indoors. They are repurposed from the Cold War. If you're inside asleep, you're not going to wake up from it. You need to have your cell phone, wireless emergency alert, a NOAA weather radio, and ultimately have connection to the outside. You need to be aware of the threats that you could be facing. Preparation is key.

Sara Ganim:

Are there other trends and patterns that meteorologists watch for that can help the public?

Stephen Strader:

Forecasting severe weather is a succession of lead-up time. By that I mean that we have great forecasters at the Storm Prediction Center that forecast 3, 4, 5 days out, even more than that saying, "Hey, if you live in the Midwest, you need to be aware of potential severe weather in five days." Then the morning of, we start forecasting even more. We're narrowing it down into locations. Then as the event starts occurring, we issue tornado warnings. There's this secession of messaging that is heightened as we go throughout time as the tornadoes or severe weather gets closer and closer. We tend to tell people that you should be weather-aware during these times and pay attention to the responsible parties and put your faith, or at least put your trust into the National Weather Service as that's the leading body here that's issuing these warnings.

Sara Ganim:

What concerns you the most about the risk of tornadoes going forward?

Stephen Strader:

What worries me is our infrastructure and how we're not investing in it as much as we should. We see a lot of homes that are being built now that aren't built as well as the homes 40 years ago. Along with that, I worry about how much we're sprawling away from our cities. We have more people, more homes. I mean, all you have to do is look at the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, the Oklahoma City suburbs, Chicago suburbs. These are all tornado-prone locations. A tornado that went through those areas in 1950 isn't going to hit anything, but that same area is now a subdivision. It's now a school, it's a business. I worry about those intangible factors that we don't think about. They're not going to catch the media's attention because what are we going to do, tell people you can't have a house? It's tough. We have to invest in how we're building and in the quality at which we're building. That's easier said than done.

Sara Ganim:

Stephen, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.

Stephen Strader:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Sara Ganim:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Rae Green, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Ganim, filling in for Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.