Florida High School Gets Things SO Wrong During Tornado Threat Students Seriously Endangered

This photo posted to social media last week appears to
show students evacuated to a large free standing room
in a Florida school during a tornado warning. This type
of room is the most dangerous if a tornado hit. The students 
should have been in smaller, windowless interior rooms.

Did a Florida school put a bunch of students in danger last week during a tornado warning?

Judging from some posts on social media, they might have. 

 I do have to a disclaimer, because, Duh! not everything you read in social media is true.  

Not all the facts are in, and I haven't yet seen a response from the school in question. And I don't have it all confirmed through a reliable new source.  But the person who posted the info at least seems at least somewhat credible. 

Given what I saw on X, formerly Twitter the other day, if true, this school put students in the worst possible,  most dangerous place in the school during the tornado warning. And they should have known better. 

Twisters swept through parts of Florida lastWednesday night and Thursday, causing damage from Clearwater on the state's west coast to north of Daytona Beach on the east coast.

The National Weather Service issued numerous tornado warnings, including one for a location north of Tampa.  One student at a high school that was under the tornado warning, showed students evacuated to what appears to be a gymnasium or large common room, facing the walls as a "safety" evacuation.

The student, a weather enthusiast who goes by JakeWx said he knows - like most people in tornado prone areas - that a gymnasium or similar big, open room is the worst place in a school to shelter in a tornado. 

In its tornado safety outline for schools, NOAA has this to say:

DANGER - GYMS and AUDITORIUMS: Large, open-span areas, such as gymnasiums, auditoriums and most lunchrooms can be very dangerous even in weak tornadoes, and should not be used for sheltering people. This sort of room has inherent structural weaknesses and lack of roof support, making them especially prone to collapse with weaker wind loading that more compact areas of the same school building."

NOAA says there's no one size fits all tornado safety protocol for schools, but students in general should be rushed to ground floor or basement rooms away from windows and exterior walls. Interior rest rooms are often good places to shelter. That's what JakeWx thought when his school was under a tornado warning.

"When I tried to go to a bathroom and bring other people with me, they threatened to give me a referral. Not safe at all to be in that spot, if that tornado hit us directly, we would all be dead and it would be the school's fault," JakeWx wrote on X.

Hmm. Getting detention for doing a smart thing. How Florida! 

Snark aside, if indeed this school directed kids into that big room during a tornado warning, I hope this school revisits its severe weather protocol. True, I don't know the structural integrity of the room they were in. Many Florida schools act as hurricane shelters, so the room might have been reinforced. But I still strongly doubt it was the safest place in the school. 

JackWx didn't specify which school he was in. Only that it was north of Tampa. 

El Nino is going to be going strong this winter.  That tends to increase the odds of strong storm systems in the South that can spin off tornado outbreaks. 

Severe weather safety in homes, workplaces and schools has thankfully been getting more attention. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to force this.

In December, 2021, a tornado outbreak caused widespread destruction and deaths. Those deaths included workers at a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky that was leveled by a tornado. Also, six people died when a tornado struck an Amazon warehouse in Illinois.

In both instances, questions were raised about worker tornado safety.  Should Mayfield employees been allowed to leave the plant for safer shelter elsewhere in town?  And did Amazon allow workers there to flee to reinforced rooms inside the sprawling warehouse to make themselves safer?

Let's just say lawsuits are ongoing in the Mayfield incident and in the Illinois Amazon deaths. 

Many schools in tornado and storm prone areas have excellent safety plans for severe weather. But not all of them. In the Florida case last week, the tornado either missed the school or lifted before it got there. No damage or injuries were reported at the school.

However, perhaps schools nationwide should review their plans to make sure they are safer than what appeared to happen last week in Florida. Either that, 

 

More Andover Tornado Footage, This Time From School And City Hall

Snapshot from surveillance video at Prairie Creek 
Elementary School in Andover, Kansas shows
a tornado sweeping a car out of a parking 
lot on April 29 ,2022

 This is a mean thing to say, but last week's tornado in Andover, Kansas was one of the most photogenic twisters I've seen.  

It would have been better, of course, had it not caused such widespread damage.  Last week, I noted Reed Timmer's remarkable drone view of the tornado pulling apart neighborhoods and lofting roofs high into the air before raining debris over otherwise untouched parts of Andover. 

Now the surveillance video is coming out. The City of Andover has released footage of the tornado hitting a school, and skirting along the edges of City Hall property. Every tornado is unique and dramatic in its own way. This tall, skinny tornado seemed like a destructive oddball, but I guess every twister has their quirks.  It's just that this one was so visible to so many. That made it incredibly well documented.

With the videos, we'll start with the Prairie Creek Elementary School footage, since that's the most dramatic. Spoil: The school suffered severe damage, but no kids were in the school at the time as the tornado came through at about 8 p.m. Friday, April 29.

Here's that video, with some explanation below it.  If you can't see this video on you device, click on this hyperlink

The video:

This is some of the clearest surveillance video of a tornado I can remember.  It also illustrates why the wide open property around schools, and the larger rooms within schools, are not the place to be in tornadoes. 

It also shows why it's important to take shelter well before the tornado gets to near where you are. During the first 25 seconds of the video, we're waiting for the tornado to get there, but already, dangerous flying, fast moving debris is raining down.  Then the tornado hits, and quickly moves on to trash a YMCA building across a field. 

A second view, which looks like the front entrance to the school, starts just over one minute into the video. Although this footage turns pink for some reason, you can clearly see the lone car in the parking lot in the upper left of this segment take flight and exit stage left.  

A screen grab from surveillance video of a tornado 
trashing an elementary school lunch room in 
Andover, Kansas last Friday. 

There's another view of what I believe to be a different  viewed from a different angle at about 1:40 in to the video just disappearing as it's blown off to the right. There's an even clearer view of this car getting blown away.

The lesson here is, don't be like those storm chasers that sometimes try to drive into tornadoes. The car you're in can just turn into another airborne missile in a tornado, and you don't survive that. Nobody was in these two particular cars in Andover, fortunately. 

The last part of the video shows a neat and tidy lunch room getting trashed as a glass wall in the back caves in. 

The second video taken from Andover City Hall is a little longer and you can skip ahead during it if you are in a hurry. It shows a benign looking funnel in the distance. But it gets more and more menacing as it draws closer. 

The video is an illustration on how you should not be "confident" a tornado is going to miss you because of its initial direction.  As you can see it sort of goes right to left on the screen in this somewhat speeded up video.  At about three minutes into the video it looks like the tornado will miss City Hall by a wide margin.

But them its path curves back toward the building. It ultimately just misses the structure, but you can also again see how dangerous it is just to be near a tornado. The air fills with debris. Trees in the parking lot snap off and get sucked into the tornado'a maw. 

Click on this link to watch this video, or view below: