
In 1991, a television crew in Kansas took shelter from a tornado under a highway overpass. The safest location is in a small, windowless room in or near the center of a house. While tornadoes tend to trend from SW to NE the wind within them is traveling in all directions.
The idea behind this myth is that the tornado will pass over a building, pushing any debris away from the southwest and into the northeast corner. Tornadoes in the Southeastern United States tend to travel in a path that trends from the southwest to the northeast.
Highway underpass tornado windows#
Time spent opening windows during the approach of a tornado is time that could be used to seek safe refuge.Īnother inaccurate and potentially dangerous myth is one that involves sheltering in the southwest corner of a house or basement. The pressure would equalize inside the house long before the window are broken. Any windows on an average house would be broken long before pressure had any sort of effect. The vast majority of damage caused by tornadoes comes from wind and debris. There are a number of reasons why this sort of thinking is inaccurate.

The general idea behind this is that opening the windows will allow the atmospheric pressure inside the house to equalize faster with the pressure of the tornado. One of the first big myths about tornadoes is the belief that opening the windows in your home can help mitigate damage done to the structure during a tornado. This article will attempt to debunk some of those myths so that readers may practice safer plans for tornadoes. Many of these beliefs are based off inaccurate scientific assumptions or exceptional events. Some of these myths are almost as old as tornado research itself, while at least one came about as recently as the early 1990s.

There are a number of myths that have come about over the last 150 years. Get under an overpass, open all the windows in your house, tornadoes don't strike the same place twice. Misconceptions and myths about tornadoes have been around for a long time.
