Moore Moore, How Do You Like It?

What does it take to get a city to actually change its building code? There’s an expression, “lightning never strikes the same place twice.” That’s a myth. Much like the false belief that if a big storm hits your town it won’t happen again anytime soon. Try telling that to the people in Moore Oklahoma, where they’ve had 8 tornadoes since 1999, four of them EF4 and EF5 strength.

A powerful EF5 hit Moore on May 20th, 2013, killing 24 people and destroying 300 homes. The tornado caused $2 billion dollars worth of damage. Moore is a great little community with many people who have spent their entire lives living there, but they needed to do something proactive to stop having to rebuild so many homes and buildings. So they commissioned a study to see how they could build things differently.

Chris Ramseyer is an engineer at The University of Oklahoma. He was part of a group that studied the damage from the 2013 tornado and they learned that the damage from the strongest winds in a major tornado only extends a certain distance from the center. The farther you go on each side, the lower the wind speed. They realized they didn’t have to build to withstand a powerful EF4 or EF5, but rather a lower wind speed of an EF2, which is up to 135mph.  That wind speed covers 85% of all tornadoes and about 90% of an EF5 path.  A report was presented to community leaders that suggested adopting a stronger building code. This included a number of changes such as the type of nails they can use, better anchoring of the foundation, bracketing the roof to the walls, and putting in stronger garage doors. The old garage doors were only wind rated to around 50mph, and all the experts tell us if the garage door goes, so does the roof, and likely the entire house.

There’s nothing like changing the building code and getting a real-life test of how it works. On March 25th, 2015, Moore was hit by an EF2 tornado that followed the same path as the deadly 2013 tornado. It went right through a new development under construction and there was very little damage. Meanwhile, when that tornado hit older homes built from the 1950s and 60’s several of them lost their roofs.  Moore is a great example for every city that deals with tornadoes or other disasters. Make the code stronger and avoid having to rebuild entire neighborhoods.

Something important that Ramseyer points out is that improving your home with the new code will reduce the amount of damage from a tornado but it’s not designed to save your life.  That means people need storm shelters to seek protection when tornadoes strike. We interviewed several people in Moore that never thought they needed a storm shelter until the 2013 tornado struck. After that many residents put them in. However, there are a lot of people who still don’t have a shelter, community leaders estimate only 30-35% of the population has them, which means everyone else either has confidence they can get somewhere safe or are betting it won’t happen again. Some may see this as a winning bet with the odds in their favor, but history tells us otherwise…