NSSL scientist works with FEMA in the aftermath

Chuck Doswell, NSSL scientist, had the experience of walking through the tornado destruction with a team of engineers. With his permission, excerpts from some of his personal thoughts are included below.

"As it turns out, I was selected to participate in the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) for the tornadoes of 03 May 1999, sponsored by FEMA, one meteorologist among a diverse group of engineers and other related disciplines. It has been our job to walk the paths of some of the tornadoes, including the F-5 tornado that hit parts of the Oklahoma City metroplex (including Moore, Del City, and Midwest City). We also looked at Mulhall, Oklahoma; Haysville, Kansas; and Wichita, Kansas. . . ."

"We spent Tuesday through Saturday looking at the impacts of tornadoes in several cities. The tracks have certain common factors. I am acutely aware by now of the smell of a tornado track. This musty smell is hard to describe and I don't know its origins. Perhaps it's the smell of wet ceiling tiles, paper, rotting food, and insulation. . . .Everywhere, the rubble has a monotonous sameness: shattered framing lumber, shards of insulation, broken glass, drywall boards, shelving units, refrigerators, shingles, collapsed brick veneer, jagged leafless branches from trees. . . .Vehicles in various stages of destruction sit in heaps or intrude where vehicles were never intended to be. . . .I'm also struck by the huge amount of "stuff" that fills the rubble piles: toys, Christmas decorations, magazines, vases and lamps (mostly broken), televisions, boxes of baseball cards, food from pantries (jars of pickles, bags of chips, cans of beans, spice bottles), stuffed animals, video cassettes, compact discs, photos in frames, decorative items of all sorts and descriptions. . . . These, after all, are real people, with 'stuff' that looks a lot like my 'stuff'."

The goals of BPAT, in walking through the damage, were to: (1)Determine if there were ways to mitigate damage by modifying construction methods; (2)Address the question of saving lives in violent tornadoes where F4-F5 events sweep foundations clean; (3)Validate basic assumptions underlying above ground shelter designs that FEMA approved and Texas Tech developed.

Chuck, again in his thoughts says,

"The real problem with this situation. . . a violent (F4 or F5) tornado in a population center within "Tornado Alley". . . is finding appropriate shelter. . . .For most of the victims of the Oklahoma City tornado, they survived by doing just what we have been telling folks to do. . . . Unfortunately, in violent tornadic winds, even interior walls are swept away, such that there is no safety from those extreme winds except below ground ... OR, in a specially-reinforced interior room solidly attached to the foundation/slab. . . .Finally, it has become clear that these special shelters work (one of them functioned perfectly in the OKC [Oklahoma City] tornado disaster area, in spite of the rest of the house being swept clean)."