Tornado tough: How to keep your home standing
NEW YORK - When you see a tornado bearing down, the first thing you're told to do is find shelter. But some shelters are built better than others.
Less than 3 percent of American homes have storm shelters. CBS News senior business correspondent Anthony Mason reports such home improvements can save lives.
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When her Tuscaloosa, Ala., home was about to explode around her this past April, Elaine Davis took shelter. "My husband could felt the pressure. There was a big gust of wind and dust. It was just terrifying to me."
A Cold War era atomic bomb shelter, with concrete walls several feet thick, saved them. The neighborhood above them was leveled - just as Joplin, Mo., was on Sunday. Engineers say it's almost impossible to build a house able to withstand a tornado's fury.
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"Tornadoes can come in speeds up to 200 mph and above," says Julie Rochman, President of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. "At some point Mother Nature's physical force will overwhelm even the best engineering."
At a testing facility, two houses were bombarded with hurricane-force winds. Only the structurally reinforced house survived.
Tornado winds can be twice as powerful as those in the test, and attack both vertically and horizontally - like a swirling sledgehammer.
But installing impact resistant windows, or latching the house together at the foundation and joints - with so-called "hurricane ties" - can help keep out the wind and delay a buildup of pressure inside.
"What you're really doing with the construction of a home or business is buying yourself time," Rochman says. "You're giving yourself time to get to an interior safe room or shelter. Because the tornado is going to peel the house apart from the outside."
The starting price of a shelter is around $1,500 and FEMA will pay up to 75 percent of the cost if it meets their standards.
But even in tornado alley, many existing homes have no protection. Engineer David Prevatt headed a National Science Foundation team that studied the Alabama tornado outbreak. "Forty people lost their lives in Tuscaloosa, 5,000 buildings were completely damaged or destroyed," Prevatt says. "Anything we can do to improve, even 10 percent or 15 percent, reduce that number, would be a substantial benefit."
Scientists say we have to do better, because Mother Nature will surely throw her worst at us again.
