The Survival Guide › Tornadoes
🌪Tornadoes
You get minutes, not hours. Everything that matters has to be decided in advance.
What actually kills people. Most tornado deaths are from flying debris and from structures failing around people. Mobile and manufactured homes are dangerously overrepresented: they offer almost no protection at any tornado strength, however well they are anchored.
Before
- Decide your safe place now — lowest floor, innermost room, no windows. A basement, or a bathroom or cupboard under the stairs.
- If you live in a mobile home, find out tonight where the nearest permanent shelter is and how long it takes to reach.
- Get alerts that will wake you. A large share of tornado deaths happen at night.
- Keep shoes and a torch in the safe place. You may be walking out over broken glass and timber.
During
- Go immediately on a warning — do not wait to see it, and do not go outside to look.
- Put as many walls between you and the outside as you can, and get under something sturdy.
- Cover your head and neck. A bicycle or motorcycle helmet is a genuinely good idea.
- Leave a mobile home for a permanent building or a ditch. A mobile home is not a shelter.
- If you are caught in a car with no building nearby, a low ditch away from the vehicle beats staying in it.
After
- Stay out of damaged buildings.
- Assume every line is live and every gas smell is real.
- Text rather than call so the networks stay open for emergency traffic.
- Watch for nails, glass and unstable walls. Most injuries after a tornado happen during the clean-up.
The thing people get wrong
“Shelter under a motorway overpass.”
An overpass is one of the worst places you can be. The gap under the deck accelerates the wind through it, the structure offers no protection from debris travelling at that speed, and stopping there blocks the road for everyone behind you. A low ditch, lying flat, is genuinely safer.
On this site now: Live storm structure and radar ›
The rest of the guide
Sources: National Weather Service, FEMA, CDC and CPSC. Informational only, and no substitute for what your local emergency services tell you on the day — when officials say go, go.