"Reverse" chasing (out of a TOR risk area)?

[Jeff House]

That's a great question for Storm Track. Where else is the knowledge base? Agree with Skip that a chaser could/should evacuate. If you can find a safe zone with something fun, make it a family day. Behind the dry line or cold front is the best method if the said boundary is clear. Warm fronts are trickier. Also, get to know your downstairs neighbor. I did in Wichita. Definitely recommend coming to Storm Track for storm avoidance as much as chasing.

Also agree with Jeff Duda. Public is much safer sheltering in place thanks to the law of numbers. EF4-5 tornadoes are about 2% of all tornadoes. Even within an EF5 only small suction vorticy structures create the most catastrophic damage. Odds of dying in traffic are much higher, than sheltering even above ground. Just know the room and why that room ahead of time. Number of walls between the room and outside is important. If a tie between a closet and bathroom, piping in the bathroom may tilt the odds in favor of the bath. Also read safety rules on NWS Norman site; they have stuff I did not think of like using a child carseat for additional baby and toddler protection. If you pre-position the awkward mattress in that room (maybe when the watch is issued) along with other items odds are very good of walking out of even the worst tornado.

Finally I'd invest in a storm shelter. While it is nice to make a bath or closet a safe room during construction, after construction garage shelters are surprisingly affordable. Then you can shelter at home with confidence. Helps resale too. I'm not sure it adds value like a shiny new kitchen, but it might get the home sold faster at a given price. If you count saving 2-3 mortgage payments, maybe the shelter does pay for itself. But you can't put a price on piece of mind when the sirens blow at 3am.

 

[Karen St John]

That's a great question for Storm Track. Where else is the knowledge base? Agree with Skip that a chaser could/should evacuate. If you can find a safe zone with something fun, make it a family day. Behind the dry line or cold front is the best method if the said boundary is clear. Warm fronts are trickier. Also, get to know your downstairs neighbor. I did in Wichita. Definitely recommend coming to Storm Track for storm avoidance as much as chasing.

Also agree with Jeff Duda. Public is much safer sheltering in place thanks to the law of numbers. EF4-5 tornadoes are about 2% of all tornadoes. Even within an EF5 only small suction vorticy structures create the most catastrophic damage. Odds of dying in traffic are much higher, than sheltering even above ground. Just know the room and why that room ahead of time. Number of walls between the room and outside is important. If a tie between a closet and bathroom, piping in the bathroom may tilt the odds in favor of the bath. Also read safety rules on NWS Norman site; they have stuff I did not think of like using a child carseat for additional baby and toddler protection. If you pre-position the awkward mattress in that room (maybe when the watch is issued) along with other items odds are very good of walking out of even the worst tornado.

Finally I'd invest in a storm shelter. While it is nice to make a bath or closet a safe room during construction, after construction garage shelters are surprisingly affordable. Then you can shelter at home with confidence. Helps resale too. I'm not sure it adds value like a shiny new kitchen, but it might get the home sold faster at a given price. If you count saving 2-3 mortgage payments, maybe the shelter does pay for itself. But you can't put a price on piece of mind when the sirens blow at 3am.

Makes having BOTH a shelter and an evac option sound like the right way to go. Speaking for myself, if I am awoken by my weather radio at three am, I am likely not going to be lucid enough (I sleep very deeply) to do anything but make a beeline for shelter. Driving at that time of night *I* might kill someone by accident. Seriously.

But during the day...get outta Dodge (or into it, since I have one of their vans now...)

 

[Scott Taylor]

I think it would be better to have a plan of action that involves going to a pre-determined local shelter, whether that is a friend's house with a basement or a large well-constructed building in a town. I think driving out of the area is overkill and impractical.

Agreed. This is what we do when it looks like tornadic weather may be bearing down on our home town AND my subdivision. My family is usually with or near me (otherwise I'm chasing it)... so when necessary I'll take us a few miles away to my place of business, which has a parking garage with various levels, some under ground. We've had to do this a couple of times over recent years.

 

[Paul Knightley]

It's all about the risk you're prepared to take. Yes, the average chance of a house being hit is very low, but of course, there is a proportional increase on a day when severe weather is likely. Then again, is the risk to your life from a tornado on a high risk day higher or lower than the average risk to your life when you get in a car and drive?

Well, an extremely crude (and very likely, not a particularly comparable) stat analysis suggests that, on average, ~88 people are killed by tornadoes per year in the USA, and around ~35,000 are killed in car wrecks.

With a population (2012) of ~313 million, the tornado risk is 1 in 3556816, whilst the car risk is 1 in 8942. So it could be crudely argued that it's approx 400 times more likely that you'll die in the drive away from your house than by a tornado.

Now I realise this is ridiculously simplistic and there is clearly a much more complex set of factors at play - this is merely to illustrate the point that driving away ahead of a tornado outbreak may be a false economy. However, as Skip says above, those with some knowledge might be able to something in the relative short-term when storms are approaching, you know that the roads are clear and you're pretty confident that you're not going to wind up in a more serious situation. A big part of it probably depends on what you have available as shelter at home - if you have an underground, well-engineered room, or indeed a solid interior room, you may well be best staying. Indeed, the idea of having to be 'below ground' as a violent tornado moves over an area is clearly not true for everyone, otherwise death tolls from such tornadoes would be much higher. Being inside must still be a better bet, all considered, than being caught in a car if the flee is last minute - of course, I imagine chasers would not leave it until the last minute.

 

[MClarkson]

With a population (2012) of ~313 million, the tornado risk is 1 in 3556816, whilst the car risk is 1 in 8942. So it could be crudely argued that it's approx 400 times more likely that you'll die in the drive away from your house than by a tornado.

In specific situations you can refine those stats quite a bit. Lets say it requires 500 round trip miles to evacuate in a day ahead mode, and the average American drives 15k miles per year, making this 1/30th of the yearly risk or about 1 in 300,000 (1/10k*1/30) chance of dieing in a car crash. And you are evacuating from a high risk that is probably going to kill about 10 people in a metro area of about a million, for 1 in 100,000 chance of dieing in the tornado. So in the upper end regions of tornado threats, it might make sense to evacuate even from a ~day ahead forecast. Although it is close. Obviously once you get to the mesoscale time frame and have a big hook echo just upstream from you and you know what you are doing, the odds swing massively in favor of evacing.