Why do tornadoes almost always hit trailer parks? (1 Viewer)

[BrettB]

I took the liberty of posing the original question to a local Meteorologist here in OK. Here is his response.

Brett,
The fact of the matter is that mobile homes are simply not safe in even high winds much less tornadoes. Damage that occurs to mobile homes often looks similar to tornado damage that normally occurs to well built structures. Now, I do agree with you that it seems like many tornadoes affect mobile homes, but remember, if you have a well built home that gets hit by a weak tornado (F0-F1) then it may make news headlines, but if that same tornado hits a mobile home park you may hear that several people were killed and extensive damage occurred. So to answer your question, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to suggest that tornadoes somehow "seek out" mobile home parks.
Regards,
Michael Armstrong
Staff Meteorologist

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[chris_sharpe]

bleaching the gene pool
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MY POWER ANIMAL TOLD ME TO SLIDE.

 

[Scott_J]

I'd like to share a personal experience my family had a number of years ago (about 18 or so) when we lived in a suburb of Houston. It's semi-related to this topic.
I was an infant, about 1, I believe. My sister is 2 1/2 years older than me, so she would have been about 3 1/2. There was a tornado in our town. It knocked a tree on our house, which crashed through the roof of my sister's room. She was in there sleeping at the time. She had a ceiling fan in her room. The fan held the tree up and stopped it from falling any further (if it did fall all the way to the ground, it would have fell right on my sister). That night on the news, my mom saw that in a trailer park, either in our town or a neighboring town, that tornado caused a tree to fall on one of the mobile homes, killing the girl inside - who was the same age as my sister.
The day that that happened was my great-grandmother's birthday. She had died about a year earlier. My mom, to this day, thinks that my great-grandmother's spirit was watching over my sister that day and that was what stopped the tree from falling all the way to the ground.
I guess that story ties in with the response that Brett got from the meteorologist - that obviously, a tornado would cause more damage/death in a mobile home than in a regular house.

 

[John Besse]

I think it is written in the laws of physics
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