Tornados can reach ludicrous wind speeds. There was an F5 tornado that went through part of Birmingham, AL a few years ago and I remember seeing on the news that a wind speed measuring device broke at 328 mph.

While towing a boat back to Ontario yesterday we made a wrong turn on I 75 and wound up in Macon Georgia. I've never seen tornado damage up close. Some buildings were damaged or destroyed while others were untouched. The power was out everywhere.
Even on the interstate you could see where the tornado touched down and ripped trees out of the ground.

In KS, you can tell where the tornado goes by the shelter belts. For those that don't know, they're a row of trees planted along a field to shelter it from the wind. Where the tornado passes, there's a big hole in the shelter belt where the trees are mangled/gone. Funny when you can see hole after hole, all in a line.

The stuff they do is absolutely amazing. I went through Hoisington, KS 6 years ago when 50% or so of the town was leveled. Foundation wiped clean, house next door with minor damage. The boards fired through trees and walls is amazing. In Hoisington, they had to remove something like 3 ft. of the topsoil from the football field and truck in new dirt. That's how deep the debris penetrated. Even today, the part of the town that was hit and rebuilt just looks odd. Part of the town has large, mature trees, then suddenly it's barren.

I'm a big geek for this stuff, as a kid my dream job was to be a tornado chaser. Then I realized that the pay is almost non-existent.

>>>Do you know what was the strength of this tornado was?<<<

I think it was an F3. These were well built homes. Homes in most areas of the US are built to withstand approximately 75MPH with no damage (not even shingle blow-offs). But even an F1 is beyond that. It would be cost-prohibitive to design for tornado speed winds, given that the odds of being hit are very, very low. Houses in northern states are built to similar standards as in Sweden for snow loads, but this doesn't help much in tornadoes.

Here's another one last year that hit in Northern Mich. It was almost more overwhelming than structure damage. I stood way up on a hilltop and you could see this 1/2 mile wide path cut thru the forest. It went for 10 miles or so. It looked like a giant took his sickle and just cut all the pine trees off at about 15 feet high.

This had been a dense mature pine forest. The roads had been cleared by the time I got there ....

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After seeing the damage that can be done by an F5, it becomes obvious that it would be futile to attempt to design a structure to withstand that kind of wind.

The bright side (?) of tornados is that unlike hurricanes, their damage area is relatively small. Even if you live in an area that sees many tornados (as I did for over 20 years), the chances of your particular houses sustaining damage is very small.

We have a saying in my business: "there's nothing like a nice natural disaster ..... in a well-populated area" Those tornadoes that hit out in farm country don't do much for business ..... :D

That is one heck of a wrong turn.

Amazing winds and up-drafts that create huge hailstones. News reported 'softball size' hail falling north of us (un-confirmed). Ouch!

Last weekend it was to our North, but we had strong straight-line winds that took out a tree near the house (missed the house and deck) whew!

Someone in Mid-Missouri found a letter in their yard ...posted to Oklahoma!:eek: