Justice
An Ingenious Home Built to Battle Tornadoes
How to design disaster-proof places where people would actually want to live.
A tornado can dismantle the typical wood-frame house in four seconds. In the first second, it begins shattering the windows and scattering debris. Then air rushes in past the broken windows, under doors and through any other openings, inflating the house and popping the roof off. In the third second, without a roof, the walls collapse. By second four, anything inside the home – mementos, books, furniture – is now blowing away.
The speed of so much destruction poses a difficult design question for communities like Joplin, Missouri, that have been wrecked by tornadoes: How do you design a tornado-proof home that doesn't feel like a bunker on good days, outside of those four terrible seconds?