Mike Gilles, a former president of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association, said that he built safe rooms in all his custom homes, and that even many builders who build speculatively now make them standard.
But asked whether the government should require safe rooms in homes, he said, “Most homebuilders would be against that because we think the market ought to drive what people are putting in the houses, not the government.”
If electrical and plumbing codes didn’t come from “the government”, how did they arise? Did the Gospel of Mark mention circuit breakers and grounded outlets? Where does the Torah speak to pressure relief valves in gas water heaters?
Also, too: it’s too bad that only Stalinists want saferooms at schools like Plaza Towers Elementary. If the free market had demanded them, perhaps there would be a few more kids alive today.
jibeaux
Clearly, a house with electrical or plumbing problems is one for the free market. You new at this or something?
Elizabelle
I am thinking that the insurance industry is going to have a lot to say about building standards and safe rooms.
Further, you get a lot of stimulus spending out of a natural disaster.
Frankensteinbeck
I’m all for government building codes, but why would we want safe rooms to be mandatory in domestic housing?
MomSense
At least the schools should have had them!
Litlebritdifrnt
Sorry to go totally OT so early but my UK sources twitter feed is blowing up right now because a person has been shot and killed in Britain (Woolich). Eighty a day are shot and killed in this country and we never hear a peep about it. One person is shot and killed in the UK and it is breaking news for all of the organizations (Guardian, Telegraph BBC etc.). Something to think about.
Gin & Tonic
@Elizabelle: This isn’t the first tornado. Whatever the insurance industry has had to say has long since been said.
Frankensteinbeck
@MomSense:
Schools in tornado zones, I can see. It’s a government building your children have to be in. The government can reasonably be expected to shoulder the cost and because of their power over you should be expected to go all the way on precautions.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Site Issue: I just noticed that the Categories dropdown is attempting to be as wide as the largest string it contains. Because of that, it gets chopped off by the box it’s in. While you don’t need the arrow to make it drop down, it looks funky.
Firefox on windows.
maya
You forgot to mention Feng Shway foundations. Those have been the rage for some time even here on the left coast for hippie/yuppie/libertarian/ owner-builders. Makes for a fun ride when entering some two storey houses.
srv
We hate government more than we love our children.
Although the hood doesn’t look that old, Plaza Towers is apparently pretty old. You’d think though that an F4 went through the hood in ’99, they’d maybe all get together and do some real planning.
But I guess not. God Will Provide.
greennotGreen
If houses rebuilt in flood plains are required to be built on stilts or on top of garages, it seems reasonable that houses built in a place called Tornado Alley might be required to have safe rooms or storm cellars.
Gin & Tonic
@Frankensteinbeck: Kind of tangential, but no governmental entity anywhere in the US can compel your children to attend the public schools in their jurisdiction. You can always send them to private school or home-school them.
maya
@Elizabelle:
Why? If no one survives who’s going to file a claim? Safe rooms have no relevance to profit. They’re just for sissies. Or gun storage.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Elizabelle: You might think so, but remember that county where the fire department let two houses burn down because the county residents had not paid the security deposit? You would think after the first one that the insurance company would have required it, but they didn’t.
If you’re dead, the insurance won’t have to pay to have your home rebuilt.
NCSteve
@Frankensteinbeck: The question is whether they ought to be mandatory in the most tornado-prone state in the union, not whether they ought to be mandatory everywhere. And as to “why,” I’d say it’s for the same reason hurricane clips are mandatory for roofs in Florida and earthquake resistance is mandated by the building code in California: because the point of building codes is to make houses safer from both the man-made perils created by human avarice and the natural perils inherent in whatever conditions prevail in a locality.
Tim F.
Not sure that it makes sense to make those mandatory. You cannot mandate people to have a basement or live in a home large enough to have a ‘safe’ room, and no doubt each contractor/cutsomer makes up his own mind about how ‘safe’ a safe room needs to be. There’s no real way to make trailer homes safe. Maybe schools should have them, but it is hard to see how you could mandate it for private homes. Incentives from your insurance company (health/life insurance perhaps) would work better.
MikeJ
@Gin & Tonic: Usually insurance for protecting your stuff is different from insurance for protecting your life. If the whole family is killed in a tornado they may not have to pay off at all.
greennotGreen
@maya: I tried to google “feng shui foundation” to try to understand what that was, but the piles of BS were bad for my qi, so I had to quit.
SatanicPanic
If the market is so great at making people do things, then isn’t the market just another coercive force that Libertarians should hate?
Patrick
Yes, the market. The same market that allowed BP enormous oil spill to happen. I am as big of a proponent of free markets/capitalism as the next guy. But what will it take for people like Mr Gilles to understand that free markets are not Nirvana. They need to be regulated. Otherwise, you end up with what happened in OK. Or BP’s oil spill. Or the health insurance market etc etc
Raven
After re-financing, going through the historic preservation “certificate of appropriateness” , getting a permit we now have waited a week to see what the city is going to say about the fact that their sewer line runs right under the footprint of our addition. Just fucking swell.
Butch
I visited the City of Moore’s website to see what it had to say about tornado safety – it’s a really startling mixture of shifting responsibility away from the city and a “you’re on your own” attitude.
Frankensteinbeck
@NCSteve:
Reading this article, note that no above ground safe room would be sufficient. You’re specifying that every domestic residence have a basement. All of them. This is a gigantic increase in the already considerable cost of buying a home, which is unfairly hard to do on the low end already. In return, it is highly unlikely for any individual house to be hit by a tornado, where any house in a hurricane zone is almost guaranteed to be hit by a hurricane eventually.
Suzanne
@Tim F.: Uh, no, it’s not hard. There’s minimum room sizes for dwellings in the IBC, and construction standards for each construction and occupancy type.
I do architecture. This is something that could be put in the IBC very easily. I’m sure some municipalities would try to get out of some of those requirements, but tough shit. Building owners are always trying to get around the Code. Fuck them.
? Martin
@MikeJ: Exactly. Home insurers push for regulations that protect the property, not the inhabitants. Life insurers push to protect the inhabitants. Often the same business, the life guys will ask the property guys what the cost is, do the math, and determine it’s not worth pushing for in this case. 24 life claims on 5,000 homes isn’t skewed enough to the life side to go anywhere.
Put me down for mandating shelters in public buildings and within xxx yards of all homeowners. No need for a zillion individual shelters. A number of large group shelters are a lot cheaper and would work just as well provided people can get to them within time of the warnings. Sounds like if every school, fire, police station had one, that’d do it for most places there.
Hoodie
Makes more sense to increase structural strength requirements for new homes to reduce damage at the fringes of the tornadoes, build more public shelters to save lives and require builders to include public shelters for new developments over a certain number of units. New developments are often in outlying areas, away from existing safety infrastructure. Kind of like some areas require funding of schools or securing of water rights before allowing a development to proceed.
Davis X. Machina
@SatanicPanic:
Only the government can coerce.
What feels like coercion when, say, a corporation does it, is just the result of a contractual, albeit unequal, relationship that you and the corporation both freely entered into.
Frankensteinbeck
@? Martin:
This makes complete sense to me.
maya
@greennotGreen: Sorry. The early pioneer pot smoking hippies here, later evolving into staunch, libertarian, free market yuppies (they always had that potential), almost always built their non-code houses on the cheapest material, e.g. non-presssure treated wood posts and beams. Now they demand that their lack of foresight be grandfathered into new general planning ordinances. Idiots. Bigger idiots buy those houses at inflated prices and then have to invest mightily into perimeter foundations. This is earthquake country.
Mark-NC
Ditto @ MomSense says:
I think you’ve got this right. Personal residences should not be required to have safe rooms – but public places like schools absolutely should.
Joey Maloney
@Frankensteinbeck: You know, all new residential construction in Israel has to have a safe room. Of course, it’s there to be safe from missiles, not weather.
someguy
Cellars are a great idea. Well, you know, except for people like the 7 who drowned in one the other day, because their house blew down, the cellar flooded and they were trapped in it.
StringOnAStick
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
You know, I wonder about that. If the destroyed home had a mortgage on it, I suspect that some suit somewhere is going to demand it be rebuilt in order to satisfy the financial entity that owns the mortgage, even if the owners didn’t survive.
Who knows though, things get weird when you are dealing with property destruction. I have a friend whose house was burned to the ground (arson) over a year ago, and he is still in the middle of the very complicated insurance dance. Pro tip: take photos of the interior of every room in your house and store them off-site, showing all your stuff, and pay the extra bit for “full replacement”. If you have a policy for say $200,000 of home contents, they will make you verify the prior existence of every single item until you hit the $200,000 limit, after which they will simply cut you a check. The process of verifying every single item and what it cost consumes HUGE amounts of time, time you’ll love having to devote to this project while you are trying to start life over with just the clothes on your back.
Capri
What forced car manufacturers to install seatbelts? IIRC, the automobile makers were against them. Something over rode their objections.
It’s the same thing here – the actual builder is going to be the last person in favor of this.
Alex S.
This thread deserves a Moore award.
Gin & Tonic
@? Martin: There’s no actuarial sense in having life insurers do anything about building standards for residences. If they are insuring your life, then they’d have to have an opinion on the building standards for your office, the gym, wherever else you happen to spend a chunk of your time. Much of the time you are not actually in your residence. They can base premiums on behaviors (do you smoke, do you skydive, etc.), on age, on overall health, but that’s about it.
Also, a life insurance policy (if payments are current) will eventually have to pay off, inevitably. A property-casualty policy, on average, will not.
Elizabelle
@? Martin:
agree w your comment 25; second para
and include a multifamily shelter for each xx number of homes; additional shelters as development increases
Villago Delenda Est
@Patrick:
I guarantee that a reading of The Wealth of Nations will not do it, because it is more likely that I will be named Tsar of the All the Russias than Mr. Gilles will ever read it.
Gin & Tonic
@StringOnAStick: The mortgage holder doesn’t give a shit whether a destroyed house is rebuilt or not, as long as the loan is paid off. That’s the primary reason for the existence of homeowners insurance anyway – to protect the bank from loss.
Roger Moore
From insurance companies. Most of the building and electrical codes are written by the National Fire Protection Association, which is basically an insurance industry trade association. State and local governments usually adopt the NFPA standards with some local variation (e.g. emphasizing protection against specific local standards), but the standards are written by a private association.
It’s actually a reasonable public/private partnership. Insurance companies have a strong interest in promoting safety, since reduces covered risk, and the knowledge needed to write good codes. Local governments have the power to enact and enforce codes as a matter of law, but not necessarily the knowledge to write them. By teaming up, they can create and enforce good rules that benefit everyone.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@someguy: And that’s sad, and there are also cases where seatbelts actually made a situation worse, and someone died. I don’t see safe houses or cellars being required, but way more often than not, they are safe.
Punchy
Any idea of the real number of deceased kids? 2 days ago it was 20. Then it was 7. Today I heard 4. As I asked earlier, why cant the media get it right, or even approximately close? They just throw out huge numbers for eyeballs? If so, that’s disgusting.
Keith
So you want saferooms required in homes or in public schools? Big difference.
Southern Beale
I eagerly await the death of this ridiculous “free hand” worldview. I think a few more disasters like this, Katrina and West, Texas will put the nail in the coffin.
Amir Khalid
I’m putting on my curious-foreigner hat now.
If your building is in a tornado zone, surely you need a tornado shelter, or at least access to a communal one. Just like if you have electricity supply, you need circuit breakers. It’s not a philosophical or political issue, or a matter of consumer taste; it’s a safety issue. No local government would let you build a house without safe electricity supply. Why should one let you build a house with nowhere safe to go in a tornado?
Suffern ACE
@Punchy: Zombies. No one wants to mention that those people are coming back to life.
I am a little confused by these numbers. These are supposed to be official counts from the medical examiner. That was how they were reported. I am now assuming that these are “sources close to the medical examiner.”
max
@greennotGreen: If houses rebuilt in flood plains are required to be built on stilts or on top of garages, it seems reasonable that houses built in a place called Tornado Alley might be required to have safe rooms or storm cellars.
And the answer to this is the answer to Elizabelle’s suggestion from the other day. People in Tornado Alley have known for a long time that you want to have a storm shelter. All the old farmhouses have one, not least because it’s useful for storage for food too. However, the newer suburbs and urban homes don’t have them. This is a known problem and people who know about tornadoes are always urging people to get one so they don’t goddamn die.
As usual, when this kind of situation pops up, the real estate guys show up and start complaining about government interference, and then some old fuck gets up and start complaining about how he already pays too much in taxes to educate those little bastards and this is a commie plot, and then the Baptists weigh in about how God will take you when it’s your time and building requirements are a tool of the darkies and the devil and then it descends into a whole lot of mouthing off.
Always been like that, and will continue to be so as there is no accounting for stupid. People back in the 50’s wanted to build a bunch of bomb shelters but it got shot down on account it cost too much money and it looks bad (etc. etc.). Never you mind that because of the way everyone was acting, a whole lot of bombs were likely to arrive any minute. Because bomb shelters are obviously Stalinist. Etc.
So, to the first approximation, nothing will be done, just like nothing is being done about the aquifers being sucked bone dry, and nothing will be done about much of anything else either. Assholes like Coburn are true believers that government is evil unless it’s giving money to rich people, and therefore it’s perfectly fine to fuck people every chance you get, and all the elites of the plains states are totally onboard with this, which is why nothing gets done. (In spite of the fact that there are plenty of people, probably a strong majority, who might wish to do things.)
max
[‘And that’s what’s the matter with
KansasOklahoma.’]gene108
Building codes did not cause houses to be wired for electricity or plumbing. I bet those things were originally done in a very haphazard way, when people, who could afford it started getting wires and plumbing run throughout their homes.
A few electrical house fires later and blocked sewage lines and building codes were born.
But the government didn’t force people to initially install electrical wiring in their homes, as well as plumbing. That was the free market.
Of course tornadoes have only recently been hitting Oklahoma, so it will take a little while for the free market to adjust to the new demand for storm shelters.
Teresa
In the minds of many so called free market minded people “Let the market decide.” only applies when it involves people needlessly suffering, getting sick, dying and/or injured.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid:
why indeed?
it’s oklahoma, jake
Roger Moore
@maya:
The heirs who inherit the property. Also, if somebody is critically injured, they may have a very extensive claim. If they’re visiting somebody else’s property, they may have a very large liability claim, which could easily exceed the actual medical claim of the property owner since it can include lifetime disability, pain and suffering, etc. Insurance companies may not get storm shelters included in the building codes, but I could imagine them offering discounts to homeowners in tornado prone areas who have them.
jl
I don’t know whether shelters in single unit residential structures are good idea in tornado country. I think even more intrusive regulations are a good idea in earthquake country, but that might be different since when a big one hits, there is a systematic hazard over hundreds of square miles, but I think damage from tornadoes is much more localized.
I wonder how ‘the market’ would replace federal disaster relief, and if there were not federal disaster relief, whether that would would result in a regional economy that would suit this former president of the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association,
I really don’t know what the effects would be, and am curious.
I think in hurricane country, it the lack of aid would have a noticeable effect on the economy, since larger hurricanes and storms are frequent and cover large areas.
mistermix
@Keith: Both if they’re in Tornado Alley.
As someone upthread noted, seat belts were mandated over the objections of car manufacturers and a lot of car buyers. To use the market speak that free marketers never want to use, the government regulates goods and services sold in the market. One of its roles is to determine the minimum standards for a safe good sold in the market, such as food, a car and a house.
Also, too: trailer parks should have public shelters, by law. The shelter doesn’t have to be in the house if you can get to it within a couple of minutes.
Edited to add: the cost of one serious injury pays for a safe room many times over, and the odds are that the taxpayers will end up footing the bill for treating the injury in one way or another if the injured person doesn’t have insurance.
Cassidy
All the military housing at Fort Sill has a tornado room built into it that also happens to be your pantry. It’s just smart.
Villago Delenda Est
One of the more compelling reasons for fire and electrical codes is that frankly, we don’t care if you are so blase about your own safety that you don’t build to code, but your neighbor might be. Because your fire started by substandard wiring might spread next door.
This was the original reason for a public fire department in Philly…the fire doesn’t just affect you, it definitely can spread (fire don’t give a flying fuck about property lines) and affect others. So it’s a communal asset. You’ll note in that Tennessee case, the fire department was present to insure that the neighbor’s property (who had paid for the service) did not catch fire from the libertarian fuckwit’s display of his freedumb.
kc
Why do they need “safe rooms” iffen they got guns?
Villago Delenda Est
@kc:
Tornadoes are notorious for not giving a flying fuck (literally) about your man card.
Cassidy
@jl:
Ten dollar bottles of water.
SatanicPanic
@Davis X. Machina: Surely you’re not suggesting they have ideological blinders on? Libertarians are the unSHEEPLE of the world, that’s not possible.
MattR
Personally, I think examining the wisdom, effectiveness, cost, etc of a government imposed rule/law mandating safe rooms is a red herring. The real issue is whether the government should impose such a rule if they reach the conclusion that it is wise, cost effective and will save lives (as opposed to letting the market control that decision)
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
Common sense does not apply to people who keep electing cretinous shitstains like Coburn and Inhofe to the United States Senate.
Also, the tornado is never going to happen to THEM.
srv
Moore Mayor calls for shelters in all new homes
http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2013/05/22/experts-say-oklahoma-tornado-power-dwarfs-hiroshima-bomb-as-residents-face-long/
jl
@Amir Khalid: That’s a good question. Shouldn’t there be shelters people can get to within the fifteen minute or so warning time that I hear about? I guess depends on the likelihood of any residential area being hit by a tornado. What is the probability.
I’m used to thinking earthquakes and fires and landslides here in Satan’s own left coast. You know a big earthquake is coming, it’s just a matter of when, and when it comes there will be same hazard created over a wide area. Landslides are so localized and idiosyncratic, most of the risk assessment is left to civil engineers, and whether you can afford one who can put something that satisfied (or puts one over on) an insurance company, from what I know about it. Fire hazards are can be ameliorated with risk reduction strategies, and and the mix of idioscyncratic and widespread systematic risk is in between earthquake and the way it is handled (free market versus government thug s) is in between.
I wonder what that probability is of a random location in Tornado Alley suffering property damage from a tornado.
Fwiffo
Actually, the Bible really contains some stuff that could be interpreted as building codes (Ezekiel 13:10-16), advising that building a wall with untempered mortar is likely to invoke God’s wrath. But it’s probably just a metaphor combined with some difficult translation.
maya
@kc: To store them gunz in. Kids, wives and critters are left to the whims of Geezuz.
Soonergrunt
The proper response to this is that the government can require safe room or shelters or retrofits for any home for which the government will be the loan backer.
So any loan backed by FHA or VA (and that’s the majority of them) would require those. That wouldn’t require any changes to the building codes, and it’s not something the builders or anyone else for that matter could do fuck all about. If you want to sell your home, you will put a shelter in it.
We didn’t build with a shelter in the design because the Builder said we could get the same thing cheaper if we did it ourselves afterwards. Our builder has never built with upright safe rooms, and the in ground type (which are the best) can be done as a drop-in retro-fit. That’s what we’re going to do.
The state and federal government have programs for grants to put shelters in houses here, and our credit union has a 0% interest loan for shelters.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: Building codes are mostly twitted by the International Code Council. NFPA us fire and life safety only. Building codes are about much more than that—interior environment and dimensions, plumbing fixture counts, energy usage, etc.
celticdragonchick
@max:
I have seen lots and lots of complaints about the water table, hard Mississippian carbonates two feet below grade, red clay…you name it. Too fucking expensive and difficult to build storm shelters…never mind the 900 car underground garage beneath the Cox Convention Center.
Fine, limestone is a bitch to dig in, but it isn’t a crystalline igneous/metamorphic basement complex, fer crying out loud. People have been dealing with hard sedimentary rock for thousands of years. If they were trying to dig into the Southern California batholith, I might concede the point…but complaining about everyday limestone?
Also, Moore put up a two million dollar bond in 2011 to have teh awesomest highschool football bleachers evuh…so it is obvious they have money to spend on the things they actually want.
jl
Why can I not edit my own comment, again, after this marvelous metamorphosis and giganano revisioning of the blog techno-guts?
That is one ‘microsofty’ aspect of site rebuilds, glithches deep in the weeds are constants, over which different color schemes and graphic gizmos are slapped. I don’t comment at many blogs, but from my limited experience, it is the same elsewhere.
Soonergrunt
@Cassidy: we’re not actually seeing that going on here.
For all of the crap that people here talk about socialism and government regulation, the state Corporation Commission is hell for leather enforcing some pretty rigid state laws about price-gouging.
Of course, every year some teabagger type in the legislature introduces a bill to repeal all the anti-gouging laws. They might succeed one day, but it won’t be this year or the next.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: We have bond programs here to help people buy shelters. They almost always pass with overwhelming support in local elections.
jl
@Soonergrunt: thanks for your info, Soonergrunt.
” the state Corporation Commission is hell for leather enforcing some pretty rigid state laws about price-gouging. ”
That a leftover from what Oklahoma was a progressive Dem state?
Bighorn Ordovian Dolomite
@Tim F.:
You can mandate that mobile home parks have central shelter areas (this is mandated in MN, I don’t know about OK) and you can mandate that underground shelters be built near homes too small to contain one–I think there are a lot of storm shelters out in the yard in some areas of tornado alley.
And I’d think you might be able to make code requirements for shelter space in new-built apartment buildings. I can see the reasonable objections, but I dont’ think the solutions are completely unworkable or anything
celticdragonchick
@Soonergrunt:
It would be helpful if the schools had the same consideration, I think. You live there, so you know the political topography better than most.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Oklahoma would have neighborhood shelters in less than six months if you told the residents that the shelters are the perfect place to hide the white women when the mud people revolt.
celticdragonchick
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Not really funny under the circumstances.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@celticdragonchick:
Then don’t laugh. I’ll be crushed, but I’ll live on.
jl
Before wide and quick availability of information to public and insurance companies, flat out lying to people about the extent of the hazard was a cute “free market’ approach to solving these types of problems.
I remember reading that market tactic was used for the San Francisco 1906 earthquake, when local authorities decided to divide their own estimates of property damage and deaths by a factor of ten before they released them.
I think that tactic still goes on with regard to building in localized flood planes around the country.
Trollhattan
Evidently they don’t even require sill plate flanges, so wall systems are just basically nailed on like any old place. This is easy, inexpensive stuff and evidently the contractors don’t care to be bothered–even freedum lovin’ Florida requires hurricane clips in roofing systems. Et tu, Oklahoma? Safe housing should not be another cultural divide.
Morning paper quoted an Oklahoma contractor whinging that adding basement shelters would add four-thousand dollars to the price of the house. Since I’m sure he was highballing (worster case=better press) let’s stipulate it’s three, on average. That’s one granite countertop, to use Malkin math.
Make it so, for all the storm replacement houses and any further new construction, and make low-interest retrofit loans for existing homes. Do it now, while you have some momentum and don’t take no for an answer. Contractors rule far too many towns and cities, don’t let them.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: Doesn’t make it any less true.
celticdragonchick
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Making jokes about an event in 1921 (The Tulsa Race Riot) while search and rescue is still looking for bodies from a natural disaster is exceedingly bad taste, to be as delicate as possible.
Your joke is exactly the sort of thing that Malkin or Erickson love to point to as evidence of how progressives are assholes and hate people in flyover country, and then spit on the bodies before they are cold after a catastrophe.
Tu Quoque arguments do not help. Just refuse to give them the ammunition.
Soonergrunt
@Amir Khalid: See my comment at #66.
As our understanding of these storms grows, and as the frequency of them seems to increase, there has been a major bump in interest in storm shelters. There are a number of businesses here that manufacture them out of steel for retrofit applications in garage floors or in the back yard of one’s house, close to the door. Some builders now offer them as part of the package in their homes. The higher end houses–which in this market means about $250K and up–frequently have them as part of the package or an already installed retrofit.
The realtors in the area will tell you that the way things are going, you will have to have a tornado shelter or concrete safe room in your house if you want to keep it from depreciating in value.
We didn’t get one built in because our builder said that we could do it cheaper and probably safer as a retrofit anyway. So that’s what we’re doing. I make too much money to get a grant from the government for it, but my credit union has a 0% interest loan available for this purpose.
A typical shelter for a house seats 4-6 people, and costs about $2500 installed in the garage floor. The one we are looking at would seat 8-10 people and cost about $3500. It mounts a 12-ton bottle jack with a 3-foot lift under the door for clearing debris off the door, and a hand-cranked ratcheted pulley system for opening the sliding top door, along with battery operated fan and lights.
Note that the part of town that the tornado hit is an older part of town. The houses
arewere all 50-60 years old, and populated by blue-collar lower-middle-class people. It is a sad fact that a tornado shelter is (or until this week, was) considered an amenity, and not a critical part of the house like good plumbing or a solid roof. But at some point, the homeowners who drop $2500 on a sprinkler system instead of a shelter will have to answer for that, if only to their own consciences.Higgs Boson's Mate
@celticdragonchick:
Thanks for the tips. Malkin and Erikson would both deem me to be an asshole because because I voted for Obama so I’m not very concerned about their opinion of me.
There would be a few less bodies if the good people of Moore had added a storm shelter to Plaza Tower Elementary School.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick:
Says the person who argued against gun control after the Newtown massacre.
celticdragonchick
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Something I agree with wholeheartedly, and I have had some heated arguments on that subject. We can make the case without cheap shots while funeral preparations for dead kids are only beginning.
We start by demanding that public schools in tornado high risk areas have underground shelters. No more damned two million dollar upgrades for the football stadium until 3rd grade kids can be put somewhere better than “The hall” while a major tornado is coming at them.
Do not bring race into it. Do not make jokes about anything at all, since dead kids are not funny in any conceivable sense. Demand shelters. Period.
Quaker in a Basement
Did the Gospel of Mark mention circuit breakers and grounded outlets?
If it’s not Common Sense, maybe it was the Federalist Papers.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
I assume you are talking about someone else, since I did not make any such argument.
Reading comprehension does wonders.
Shakezula
Maybe this guy is aware that there are nine zillion shitbirds out there who would have nothing better to do than send him hate mail calling him a freedoom hating liberal commie poop and he doesn’t want to deal with that noise right now.
Soonergrunt
@celticdragonchick: I agree 100%. And the newer schools, like Oak Ridge Elementary that my daughter attended, and Southmoore High School, where she’s going next year, are built to withstand a direct hit from an EF-4. The two elementary schools that were destroyed were built in the 1960s (Plaza Towers Elementary) and 1970s (Briarwood Elementary) and were not built to the standard that we would build to today.
Westmoore High School just underwent a retrofit of steel reinforced concrete cladding over the gym and auditorium. It was built in the mid-1980s and those two structures serve as community shelters. They are now EF-4 resistant.
School bonds always pass here. At least they have for every time they’ve come up for the last 17 years that I’ve lived here. All of the schools have all sorts of high tech gadgets for the Teachers to use, and the buildings are all very good buildings for the era in which they were constructed. The need for school buildings to be fully capable shelters has been all over the news the last few days, so I’ve no doubt that the replacements for Plaza Towers and Briarwood will be state of the art.
Please remember that Oklahoma, for all of our social backwardness and conservative assholery, is full of people who love their children just as much as anyone else, and people in other parts of the country also have older buildings that are not adequate to the regional threats by today’s standards. How long can a school in the pacific northwest protect the children from a forest fire? How many school buildings in Los Angeles and the surrounding communities could withstand a 7.8 earthquake intact?
The tornado that hit us Monday packed destructive power equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb. Debris has been recovered in Tulsa (110 miles) and Branson, MO (300 miles.) There’s only so much you can do with engineering and materials in the face of that kind of power.
FWIW, I happen to think that the state should require new construction to have adequate shelter designed in. And if the state won’t do that (pretty likely with our teabagger state government) then the city should do it, and the federal government should do whatever it can to make that happen as well.
RaflW
When our family moved to Tulsa in 1975, my mom insisted that we buy a house with a basement. We could afford an older home in the central area (but just south enough for a ‘good’ school – you know what that means) that had a genuine concrete wall basement. Came in handy a few times in the just 22 months we lived there, at least for peace of mind.
But the free market by definition means that the poors are much less likely to have safety. Weatherman here in MN said that something like 88% of MN homes have basements, and we average about 25 tornadoes a year, statewide. Basement prevalence has to do with soils, winter issues like frost heave, and (I think) cultural traditions. Walkout basements are common here too as some of MN is hilly, and a well constructed walkout with a windowless room away from the patio door can be enough at least in an F4 or less.
But I gather OK has like 25 or 30% basements. They also have much lower average house prices than MN. Lower HH incomes, too.
Overall, I have to say as someone who visits Texas a lot (family) and once lived in OK, that my free market response to the Perry “don’t regulate explosive factories” and Coborn “cut something else to pay for rescues” type pols is to live far, far away from there. But I have that economic and social liberty.
Many others don’t.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: Okay. Sure.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy: \
Also, you are a perfect example of the sort of epistemic closure that has utterly overwhelmed the GOP and is now regrettably creeping into the progressive community.
Thusly, when I argue that we need universal background checks for all gun purchases, gun owner registration as opposed to gun registration (an 18th century idea in keeping with the original intent on the 2nd amendment and possibly more useful) and probably some sort of licensure on military styled longarms, you and others label me as a “gun nut” (whatever that is) if I do not think that all of your policy ideas are helpful or even possible to implement…and even if I happen to agree with most of what you are saying.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: waah, waah, waah, waah, waah, waah
You’re a perfect example of a FYIGM toolbag.
Soonergrunt
@RaflW: A basement here in Oklahoma, such I had growing up in Wyoming and Colorado, would double the cost of the house. The ground in this area is clay with large rocks strewn in. I’m not a geologist so I can’t tell you what it’s called, but my dad is a retired city manager (had to know about building codes and costs and so forth) and he told me (and realtors and builders agreed) that a steel-reinforced concrete basement, properly built, would approximately double the cost of the house.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
Buh bye, troll. You have nothing of intelligence or interest to add here. Schoolyard taunts have not been of any relevance to me since 1982.
TF79
Keep in mind that 90 people or so die in the US from traffic accidents every day, so let’s not pretend that “zero” is the level of risk that people ultimately desire and/or accept. The seat belt example is a good one – the cost per life saved is somewhere well south of $100,000, which is substantially less than the ~$7 million value of a statistical life used by federal agencies. By any reasonable standard (by which I mean – not including FREEDUMB! arguments from libertarian college students in their dorms railing against the horrors of government intrusion) seatbelts are good public policy.
It’s not clear that mandating basements/shelters in private homes in OK makes as much sense (setting aside the public building safety issue). It’s true that OK is in tornado alley, but according to NOAA, from 1961-1990 the average number of annual deaths from tornados was 3 (http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cae/svrwx/tornadobystate.htm – couldn’t find more recent numbers). So if we take the $4000 cost to put in shelters/basements in all homes, which I would guess is around 2 million in thes state, that’s a cost of $8 billion dollars. Even over a 100 year horizon, and assuming the shelters would eliminate all deaths, that’s still something like a cost of $27 million dollars per life saved. So even if you don’t buy the whole “free market will provide” BS, it’s still not obvious this would be good public policy.
Lurking Canadian
@Fwiffo: Is there anything in Ezekiel about how the wrath of God descends on those who plug their hair dryers into non-GFCI receptacles? ‘Cause those people get smote worse than anything.
Mnemosyne
@TF79:
I’m starting to lean towards the people who say that what’s needed is more public shelters and mandated shelters for multi-family dwellings (including trailer parks) rather than mandating them for private homes. I think it would be a public good for the government to make it easy and (relatively) inexpensive for private homeowners to install them, but I’m not sure that’s where the focus should be rather than better public shelters.
mclaren
How about this for a concept?
Howzabout we stop building houses in tornado zones?
And while we’re at it, what about we stop building super-expensive luxury houses on the shore of Florida, where hurricanes will blast ’em to kindling?
How about that for a concept?
…Nahhhhhhhhh, makes too much sense. Better to build even more expensive homes with bank vaults inside ’em.
Mnemosyne
@mclaren:
Here’s a tornado map. All we have to do is have people stop building homes in Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Indiana and Ohio. Assuming we only concentrate on the states that get 25 or more tornadoes a year, that is. Brilliant!
? Martin
@Gin & Tonic:
Most policies don’t pay off. Other than a small policy to cover the cost of a loved one dying, people drop their policies once they retire since there’s no income that needs to be replaced.
Just Some Fuckhead
I shouldn’t be required to sit on a toilet bowl to do my business. I should just be able to walk it out wherever I am, like elephants do.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne: The story out of Tushka is a pretty compelling case for public shelters. Two shelters saved 200 people in town. $300K to build the two – or about $1,500 per resident. No way you can build a comparable shelter in a home at that price – and it works for people at work, school, shopping, who live in mobiles, who are homeless, and so on.
Float a small bond, put a temporary property tax out, pay it off over 20 years. Well worth it even if FEMA isn’t paying the tab.
opie_jeanne
@maya:
What is a Feng Shui house foundation? I mean, what does it look like?
jehrler
@Tim F.: You sure *can* mandate basements. That’s what is required here in my Minnesota county, even for a double-wide.
Also, as any northerner will tell you, you need a basement/crawl space to deal with frost depth.
So I am not super sympathetic when there are claims that this life saving addition is too expensive in the southern part of Tornado Alley when it is part of the normal cost of housing up here in the north.
scav
@Mnemosyne: Don’t forget to add in all the states / areas prone to flooding, earthquakes (does New Madrid count?), hurricanes, winter cold and summer heat (more deaths than many expect), volcanism, not sure about sinkholes and killer sharks . . dratted cicadas (slippery if stepped on), . . . . scary neighbors (whoops, there went the planet).
Higgs Boson's Mate
@celticdragonchick:
I won’t tell you what to put in your comments if you don’t tell me what to put in mine. Fair?
Mnemosyne
@scav:
Exactly. If people could only build in areas that had no possibility of a natural disaster occurring, we’d pretty much have to abandon the entire continent. And every other continent. Not very practical.
That doesn’t mean that there can’t be stricter building codes in places where a specific disaster is more likely, but declaring that we have to abandon 13 of the 50 states to avoid tornadoes is a little … extreme.
mistermix-test
Test comment for editing.
Roger Moore
@Soonergrunt:
For all that the Teabaggers and crazy conservatives hate the government, a lot of their hate really is directed at the higher levels. Distrust of government is largely built around the idea that government is being run by Them rather than by Us, and that tends to apply more to the more distant parts of government. Local government is usually seen as being Us*, and thus is more likely to get the kind of trust that the Feds don’t get. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s especially true when the things people are being asked to pay for are obvious and tangible, like new school buildings.
*Though things can get really, really ugly when there’s a substantial minority who distrusts the local government.
TAPX486
It just seems like it should not be rocket science when building a house to have one room (bathroom, walk in closet, utility room) that is in the core of the house and has reinforced walls and ceiling. It only has to be big enough for 1/2 doz. adults for 15-30 minutes. It’s not like a hurricane that can take hours to pass, the tornado is past in just a few minutes.
As for the schools, make the shelter area duel use – supply area, wood shops conference rooms, etc below ground level.
Pinkamena Panic
@celticdragonchick: Huh, I musta missed the day when Cole added you to the FP list. OH wait, that’s because it never happened. So don’t give people orders.
opie_jeanne
@celticdragonchick:
So far I’ve heard that the ground is too dry, too wet, too hard, and too sandy to build basements or shelters. I think they need to pick one excuse and stick to it.
A lot of older houses and churches in Southern California were built with basements by people who came from places where these were common and deemed necessary.
Roger Moore
@Soonergrunt:
That sounds like alluvium, especially if the larger rocks have undergone some water smoothing. It presumably means that your area is (or was, before people started messing with the local hydrology) subject to both seasonal river flooding and occasional flash floods.
Warren Terra
The other day, Charlie Pierce had a fantastically weaselly communique from a Moore, OK official basically saying that if someone was so foolish as to live in a trailer park their destruction was their own fault. No self-awareness – for example, no acknowledgment that zoning or other regulations could have required that every trailer park include an emergency storm shelter. Heck, this could even be subsidized from property taxes.
jehrler
@TAPX486: I totally agree. The cost of such a room, even a below ground one, I can’t believe would double the cost of a home. Sure a full basement might and that is probably what Soonergrunt’s father was referencing but that is not what would need to be required.
Assuming these below ground ones were in the ball park of up to $3000, then that would be in the neighborhood of what we in MN have to pay to build our houses to deal with the cold (and tornadoes…I think it was two years ago where MN had more tornadoes than any other state…though not EF-4 or 5s).
Seems to me that this requirement added to a building code plus a requirement for something similar in apartments/schools/mobile home parks would represent a reasonable and fairly cost effective way to minimize that deaths/injuries from these tornadoes.
It would be an interesting study to compare the cost in deaths + injury treatment + disability in Moore to what would have been the costs in death/injuries/disabilities if shelters had been widespread. Then you could evaluate the cost/benefit of shelters.
Trollhattan
@? Martin:
I read about them. Don’t they have one that’s a hundred years old, still in use? This stuff is relatively easy to do, only requires some will and attention span. Cripes, during the Cold War we had Civil Defense shelters freaking everywhere. We can’t do this now because kowtowing to our own big gummint is worse than Brezhnev? Fucking Bush had us stocking up on visqueen and duct tape for something that was never going to happen; tornadoes ARE going to happen.
Soonergrunt
@mclaren: Why must you talk out of your ass on every subject on which you comment? There isn’t a single piece of ground on this whole continent that isn’t subject to some kind of regionally-predominant national disaster. Fifth-graders get this simple fact better than you, apparently. Which is very much like most things you comment on.
And yet you make an ass of yourself because you have a pathological need to say something vicious and bitchy in my threads.
ETA: Or any other thread, for that matter.
Suzanne
Local codes can make storm shelters a requirement, even on existing structures or within existing neighborhoods. Basement construction is expensive, but so what? GCs and developers are cheap. Oh well.
Mnemosyne
@opie_jeanne:
I can see the “full basements are too expensive” argument depending on the soil — there’s a reason they stopped building them here in California (mainly, between our soil and earthquakes they’re more trouble than they’re worth). But I really don’t see how a “root cellar” size tornado shelter could double the cost of a house.
Though I think we can all agree that common shelters should be required by law for trailer parks and other multi-family dwellings.
opie_jeanne
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, a smallish shelter shouldn’t be prohibitive.. A full one these days is expensive, plus the fact that Californians really don’t need them.
The church my family attended when I was a kid had a full basement. I think the place was built in the early 30s. Lots of memorable potlucks and parties were held there. I have fond memories not just of Mrs Jackly’s fried chicken or Mrs Zugg’s 7 layer cakes, but of my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, Hallowe’en parties run by the teens for all of the kids, and playing hide and seek in the passages behind the choir rooms. Of course, the adults always got tired of us and shuffled us over to the Sunday School rooms where a thoughtful parent had set up a tv so we could watch Godzilla.
opie_jeanne
@Mnemosyne: Meant to add that the community shelter for clusters of houses and public buildings is a good idea.
(I can’t edit my remarks for some reason)
Trollhattan
@Mnemosyne:
Live in a Calif ’20s house with a quarter basement. Were we in a tornado area we’d only need to armor the two outside-facing stem walls (the crawlspace zone) and we’d be good to go. Some poor sods had to chip through about two feet of hardpan to dig it but back in the day, that’s where the furnace and HW heater went so every house in the ‘hood has one. Today if a backhoe couldn’t do it directly, they’d use an impact bit to break it up–the whole excavation would take a few hours, tops.
I did have to put in a sump to rid it of seasonal perched water, but other than that it’s done fine for ninty years–don’t even see any major cracks. But yeah, most area new construction is slab. In high-clay areas it tends to swll in winter and shrink in summer, which causes all kinds of hell if they didn’t prep the site correctly (which would neeeever happen). I know a few folks who’ve had decade-long fights with contractors for just this problem.
Full, finished basements are a whole other thing, and are super rare here.
Trollhattan
@opie_jeanne:
Mormons demand a year’s food; Lutherans demand a basement for potlucks. Every church I attended as a yout had a basement for socials and Sunday school.
TAPX486
@jehrler: What ever is done has to be practical. Most people, even in Ok. will never have a tornado go thru their neighborhood. It’s a bit different up in Minnesota, everyone gets lots of snow on the roof every winter. By combining the safe room with one that will be used on an everyday basis it seems like less of an imposition
agorabum
This article explains that serious defects were found in the area construction after the 1999 tornado, and nothing was done to fix it:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/tornadoes-in-america-the-oklahoma-disaster-in-context/276063/
NCSteve
@Frankensteinbeck: That’s a “because it won’t be 100% effective, nothing should be done” argument. I’ve had about all of that I one I can stand from the gun nuts.
Kyle
it’s too bad that only Stalinists want saferooms at schools like Plaza Towers Elementary. If the free market had demanded them, perhaps there would be a few more kids alive today.
Better Dead Than
RedRegulated.keestadoll
One of the first things I thought about wasn’t necessarily that all homes be rebuilt with storm shelters (really, against a tornado, let’s call them “bunkers), but perhaps rather the municipality build 10-15 person capacity in-ground concrete-reinforced bunkers within 200 feet or so from each other. There’s a lot of public space that got torn up too–easements, parks, and so forth. Why not do that in addition to making sure the schools have bunkers?
celticdragonchick
@Pinkamena Panic:
I wasn’t aware that I was giving “orders”.
So by all means, please go about looking like a jackass and making unnecessary racial jokes (which is what I suggested we stop doing) during a catastrophe and giving ammunition to the wingnuts to use against us. It helps our causes an awful lot dontchaknow.
celticdragonchick
@Roger Moore:
Poor sorting with clay, sand and larg-ish gravel/boulders…sounds like kinda like an alluvial fan deposit, no? I believe that is what you are suggesting? If the time frame here is late Mississippian, then I am thinking we are seeing redbeds coming from highlands associated with the Allegheny Orogeny, but that is a complete guess without having looked at any publications on that period of Oklahoma geology.
agorabum
@Soonergrunt: For California quakes, there was a disaster in Long Beach in the 30s (the Long Beach quake), and schools were some of the worst hit. Fortunately, it hit when school was out, but so many schools were destroyed that the state passed the Field Act mandating certain levels of earthquake resistance for schools and a new agency to review all school plans to make sure they meet a minimum standard. “Since 1940, no building constructed under the Field Act has either partially or completely collapsed, and no students have been killed or injured in a Field Act compliant building.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Act
‘Course, when the ‘big one’ hits, we’ll find out that what was good engineering in the 50s and 60s aint so hot anymore.
opie_jeanne
@Trollhattan:
This was the Methodists, and potluck suppers were a common event on Saturday nights in the summer. We had a group of separate buildings for Sunday School, probably added in the late 40s. The church building itself was a very nice Greek temple style. Two fools burned it down to cover the theft of about $200 worth of electronic gear (for the hard of hearing) in the early 70s.
opie_jeanne
@agorabum:
The school buildings didn’t collapse in the 1971 Sylmar quake, but light fixtures came down in a lot of classrooms and if school had been in session there would have been injuries.. They were those long egg-crate lights that were so common in the 50s and 60s schools.
At the time, my dad worked for the city of Los Angeles as an electrical tester for the city labs (like Underwriters), and they had what they called an Earthquake Machine, which they used to test the mountings for light fixtures. All of the mounting brackets for every light used in any public building was tested after that.
phil
@Soonergrunt:
I can’t think of any fire in the NW where that issue came up. It’s usually taken care of by location, exterior building materials, and keeping brush away from the building.
Many k-12 schools in CA have exterior hallways (example: Buffy’s school), you can just walk outside during an earthquake. Though many older city schools aren’t expected to survive a large earthquake, they manage to survive intact and still usable, the one’s we’ve had. The biggest difference is they upgrade the requirements in CA after earthquake as they learn more. My last house in San Jose had serious metal tying the roof to the foundation and metal surrounding the single car garage door opening. Since the conditions there were like Northridge, they wanted the buildings to withstand the uplift force.
batgirl
I have family in Israel where they mandate safe rooms in private dwellings (for completely different reasons.) You would barely know which room is the safe room in these homes. It isn’t a separate room. Homeowners just make sure that one room in the house is built with reinforced concrete. Now this wouldn’t make sense to mandate for all homes across the US but, heck yes, I think it should be for specific areas threatened by hurricanes. You could also require this of rental apt. buildings and require a shelter be built for trailer park communities.
SiubhanDuinne
@Just Some Fuckhead:
You don’t do that? I am very disappointed, truly I am.
JustRuss
@Trollhattan: There’s a diary about this on Kos, linking to a story with a contractor who said including a cellar when building a house would only run $2200. On a 30-year note at 5%, that’s $12 per month.
Oh.
The.
Humanity.
SiubhanDuinne
@Soonergrunt:
YEAH!!
Frank in midtown
I know there is no free lunch, so what is this “free” market about. This “free” market is costing me extra insurance premiums while homebuilder dude coins excess profits. “Free” market my a$$.