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Unidentified Anchor: A series of storms and tornadoes hit parts of the South and Midwest this weekend causing destruction and sadly dozens of deaths. This just a week after tornadoes devastated communities in Mississippi and Alabama.
Anisa Khalifa: Each year, as March fades into April, violent storms unleash dozens of tornadoes across a huge swath of the country. The Midwest is where most of these events occur, but scientists have begun to observe a major shift. Traditional tornado patterns in the US are moving eastward — and the South is directly in the path. I’m Anisa Khalifa. This week on The Broadside, correspondent Elizabeth Friend explores the unique challenges the region faces and finds out how we’re adapting to this emerging threat.
Elizabeth Friend: When Claudius Brewer first heard the wind, he grabbed his cell phone and started recording. From the front porch of his mobile home in Dortches, North Carolina — a small town not too far from our studios here in Durham — he watched as a powerful storm peeled off his roof like a toddler ripping off a bandaid. A wave of debris swept past to his left, tossing planks of wood, pink insulation, and entire walls through the air. The mobile home next door was completely demolished.
From Dortches the tornado traveled nearly 20 miles through Nash and Edgcombe counties, cutting a wide path of destruction. By the time it reached the Pfizer manufacturing plant near Rocky Mount, it had intensified to an EF3 tornado, with wind speeds reaching 150 miles per hour. The plant that produces critical hospital supplies took a major hit. Thousands of pallets of medicine were damaged, along with the roof and storage facilities. Production halted for months.
Claudius Brewer and his neighbors survived the storm that tore apart the Puckett Mobile Home Park. Claudius later told local news reporters from WRAL he’d had no warning before the tornado hit.
Claudius Brewer: It's just amazing the destruction that can happen in a matter of moments.
Elizabeth Friend: Tornadoes like the one that ran through Dortches and Rocky Mount are not a new threat in the South, but a 2018 study published in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science indicates that their frequency in the region is increasing. Dr. Marshall Shepherd is the director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. He’s been tracking this change.
Marshall Shepherd: What the study showed is that, definitely the Great Plains and the typical regions where we expect these big tornadoes still get the most tornadoes in terms of sheer numbers. But in terms of frequency, the trends are increasing. There's more tornadic activity, relatively speaking, in the South than in previous decades.
That certainly has implications because people in the South there's some different things about the southern populations, the geography, the topography, and population density that brings them different challenges for us.
Elizabeth Friend: Marshall says many of the southern states that are now experiencing increased tornadic activity also have elevated poverty levels, large populations of elderly people and communities of color.
Marshall Shepherd: And so the South has a very vulnerable population, relatively speaking, vulnerable infrastructure and housing. And to top that off, the South is not like the Great Plains where you have these large tracts of flat landscape without a lot of trees. So you can sort of see these tornadoes off in the distance or these tornadic storms. The South is very hilly and has quite a few trees. It's very densely populated. So it just places more people at risk.
Now, the question that's naturally out there is, why are we seeing this shift to the south? It's still open for discussion. But there are some thoughts that aspects of changing climate may be shifting overall Jetstream patterns, if you will, and other types of weather patterns that can sort of bring some of that tornado activity more frequently and to the south. Another sort of connection to climate change, as we know the Gulf of Mexico waters are warmer now.
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Unidentified Anchor: NPR’s Greg Allen reports from Miami.
Greg Allen: An ocean buoy operated by NOOA this week in the Florida Keys recorded a water temperature over 101 degrees Fahrenheit. Among the highest readings ever recorded. That’s the temperature of many hot tubs…
Marshall Shepherd: That really feeds some of the energy differences required to get these very strong storms that can produce tornadoes.
Elizabeth Friend: Marshall says these stronger storms are increasingly interacting with another staple of the South: mobile homes and manufactured housing. Nearly 13 percent of people in North Carolina — my home state — live in these types of buildings.
And that presents perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Official tornado warnings tell people in mobile homes: seek shelter in the closest substantial building. But the window of time to react to those warnings is pretty small — about 15 minutes on average. So where are these folks supposed to go during a storm?
Marshall Shepherd: So tornado shelters are always a good option. If you can't get to shelters, I think I see more people investing in their own personal tornado shelters or as the tornado sort of store, storm shelters and so forth in their backyards or in their, perhaps, basements. I host a podcast called Weather Geeks for the Weather Channel. And I had a guest on one time that has a company that makes personal tornado shelters that can be placed in garages or basements or other parts of the house. And so we're starting to see an uptick in that type of supply.
Elizabeth Friend: I'm so fascinated by the idea of these personal shelters, because I wasn't aware of them until recently, and they sort of popped up in my social media ads, and I didn't really take them seriously until I started looking into it.
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Unidentified Narrator: What I've got here is the twister pod, and it's made out of steel, it's 1000 panels and it's engineered to withstand an EF5 tornado…
Elizabeth Friend: Are they really a viable option?
Marshall Shepherd: I think they are, I think, you know, particularly for someone perhaps living out in a space that just has no access to a basement shelter, or can't drive in enough time to get to a storm shelter or whatnot. And I you know, I am not endorsing any particular brand or, or whatnot. But I think there's certainly, you know, options that people should consider and look at and do their research on.
Elizabeth Friend: Dr. Shepherd, According to some recent reporting that I read in the Associated Press, mobile homes or manufactured homes, they only make up about, like 6% of the total housing stock in the US. But they account for 53% of tornado deaths since the mid 90s. And I was so struck by that disparity. And I wonder, is there anything else that can be done to make these types of homes safer?
Marshall Shepherd: As we see this evolve, I think that's going to have to reshape thinking about policy behind design of homes, mobile home structures and so forth, particularly in the South.
I, you know, I don't want to speculate there. But there's a colleague of mine named Dr. Steven Strader at Villanova University that is really the expert in these types of discussions. And I imagine that Steven, and you know, some of the engineers are thinking about that very question, particularly in light of this new research that suggests that the frequency of tornadoes is increasing.
Elizabeth Friend: Stephen Strader is thinking about this. A lot. We’ll talk with him after the break.
As a senior in high school, Stephen Strader was looking for some direction in his life when a tragedy struck close to home.
Stephen Strader: A very close family friend lost her husband in a tornado event that missed my house by about a mile.
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Unidentified Anchor: The storm claimed the lives of more than 20 people, most of them residents of a mobile home park in Evansville, Indiana…
Stephen Strader: 23 people died in that event in Evansville, Indiana and that really struck a chord with me.
Elizabeth Friend: Strader is now an associate professor at Villanova University, in the Department of Geography and Environment.
Stephen Strader: And over the last 15 years or so I've studied how tornadoes and society combine and come together to create these disasters and high fatality events. And I consider myself a hazards geographer, and I study how the changing societal landscape as well as the changing climate are leading to greater impacts on people.
Elizabeth Friend: That research is particularly crucial now. Because while increasing tornado activity in the southeastern United States is a cause for concern, societal changes on the ground are magnifying the problem.
Stephen Strader: We have more people than ever before in the country, we have an expanding what we call built environment footprint, and the cities are growing, people are moving further out away from cities and trying to find that dream piece of land. And that leads to more people being exposed to these events. Unfortunately, in the southeast, what we have is a lot of those residents that live on those rural and what we call ex-urban lands, live in manufactured housing, and manufactured housing has historically performed very poorly during these tornado events, for a number of reasons. And that's just their structural vulnerability. That's the physical vulnerability. The social vulnerability that goes with that are all the economics and the other factors that are related to who the human is or who the people are that are being affected. Those are also critical when we think about people's likelihood of being killed or their survivability in these tornado events.
Elizabeth Friend: Like Dr. Marshall Shepherd, Stephen says purpose built tornado shelters can be effective safe havens for folks that live in manufactured housing. But it’s an expensive option for many people. The most basic models– which look like metal capsules or ultra rugged port-a-potties bolted to the ground– can cost thousands of dollars. So for most people, a public shelter is a more realistic option.
Stephen Strader: But in a lot of these places, particularly in rural North Carolina, rural Alabama, it doesn't matter where, you're 20 minutes away from a community shelter. That doesn't give you enough time to get there. So I tell people that when the tornado watch, comes out before the warning, a couple hours before be ready, and that could be the difference between life and death.
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Unidentified Anchor: Make sure that if you're in the area, you're getting to your safe space, first and foremost. If you've gotta wake the kiddos up, make sure that they get to their safe spaces as well. Bring the pillows with you, bring the mattress with you as well if you want to help protect your head from any of that damage…
Stephen Strader: The biggest issue is that it might be 2, 3am. Because a lot of the tornadoes that the southeast experiences in the Carolinas are overnight events. You know, Tennessee leads the nation in nocturnal tornadoes, where almost half of the tornadoes they receive, or hit the state, are overnight or during the cover of darkness. So that's a big challenge for people, you have to wake up and get going. And then you may be 20 minutes away from the storm, and you may accidentally drive into it. So this is why I say developing a local, personal connection to your neighbors or to your church or any location that you feel comfortable with is a better place to shelter, is your best bet. We've seen success with this. But you have to be ready to act when the tornado watch comes out, not the warning. You have to be ready to go before the warning hits or otherwise you're a sitting duck.
Elizabeth Friend: In the past few decades, new regulations have been put in place requiring manufactured homes to be built to higher standards.
Stephen Strader: Yeah, so you know, in the 1970s, everything was called a mobile home. And then fast forward, post 1970, building standards got a little bit stronger, and we developed manufactured housing. And then really, in 1999, when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, that really changed the requirements for a lot of these manufactured homes to be anchored to the ground, what we call their ground anchoring or how they're tied to the landscape. That keeps them sort of pushed down. And when the tornado comes along, or high winds, they're more stable. Well, that's great until you realize that most of those standards are only along manufactured homes near the coastline up and down the Gulf and the Atlantic coast.
But tornadoes occur in the interior part of the US more frequently. So places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, the Carolinas, they get quite a few tornadoes and the manufactured housing anchorage isn't sufficient for them. And what we do is we see a lot of failures even in homes built in the last 10 years, we've seen where people have been killed in them because of the lack of proper anchoring. So it's a big challenge. And what we're seeing is that even though the standards have gotten better, we're still seeing issues with that ground anchoring. But more importantly, the construction quality is still not up to par for say a permanent home despite otherwise said evidence.
Elizabeth Friend: While that’s a big problem, Stephen says there are groups pushing to improve overall building standards.
Stephen Strader: What we see that's really driving the industry right now are a lot of insurance companies. There's great people in the Carolinas at the Institute for building and housing standards, IBHS group, they're funded entirely by insurance companies who are there to try to work with a group of engineers and meteorologists and scientists to figure out how to build better materials.
And then we see the same thing happening with manufactured homes, we see a lot of nonprofit organizations and local emergency managers working with these groups and saying, hey, you know, your home isn't the safest. And here's how we can check to see if you have the proper anchorage to the ground. And here's how you know we can provide more sheltering for you.
Elizabeth Friend: I'm really fascinated by this intersection of meteorological science and human behavior. You know, it seems like we're getting better and better at predicting weather. But I wonder, do you think that we're also making progress at predicting human responses to these severe weather events?
Stephen Strader: We’ve gotten better over the last hundred years about warning tornadoes, better education, better building structures. But the other end is starting to play a role, which is the societal side, the communication, the vulnerability, understanding what makes a person decide to take shelter has really come along in the last 15 years or so. And it's an exciting time, because when you take a problem and you come at it from all different angles, that's when we're going to start making progress and that's very promising to see.
Elizabeth Friend: Yeah, it strikes me that the only reason we're interested in that tornado is because of the humans it encountered.
Stephen Strader: As cities grow and expand, and we have more homes being built than ever before, we now have more targets to be affected by tornadoes. And if you look at disaster cost over time, you know, a billion dollar disaster was something we didn't talk a lot about 15, 20 years ago. Now it's normal because things have gotten more expensive. Even when you control for inflation, we have more stuff, more homes, more people, there's just more people as a whole to be affected by these events, which means greater impacts. So the human element is as critical if not more critical than the climate change element going forward.
Elizabeth Friend: If we are going to adapt to increasing tornado activity in the region, Stephen says we may need to look beyond the fields of atmospheric science or structural engineering.
Stephen Strader: It's not enough just to talk about how the climate is changing, but our societal vulnerability is changing faster than that. We're seeing greater income disparity between the top 1% and below and that means that a lot of people that could buy the insurance, buy the safety, buy the storm shelter can no longer afford that. And that is a critical aspect to survivability that we can't forget about.
Anisa Khalifa: During the reporting of this story, we reached out to the Manufactured Housing Institute, the only national trade organization representing all segments of the factory-built housing industry. In a written statement, they said:
Today’s manufactured housing is not only the most attainable form of unsubsidized housing in the country, but it is also built to a federal building code that takes into account wind zones and is installed in compliance with rigorous, engineer-approved guidelines.
Although there is no recognized code for tornado safety, the industry is constantly innovating and manufactured homes have gotten substantially heavier and safer over the years through improved engineering. Additionally, MHI and the industry encourages homeowners to regularly inspect the home’s foundation and anchoring.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by Elizabeth Friend. Our editor is Jerad Walker. Wilson Sayre is our executive producer.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.