My correspondent responds concerning building strategies:
Yup, it’s definitely the scale in a lot of ways — which of course goes back to *ahem* population growth.
Yes, my hobby horse. Giddyup!
I disagree with your belief that my chances of getting hit by an F5 tornado are effectively zero. I probably should have said F4, nearly as violent. You do recall the F4 that was on the ground from about Comfrey to St. Peter [in Minnesota] in 1998, do you not? Or how about the F5 in 1992 near Chandler?
Not actually, no, but an event has to be horrific or in my face for me to vividly remember it.
But my point is that any particular residence in the state of Minnesota has a very small chance of being hit by a F4+ tornado in the next N years. I put together this chart, mostly for fun, although it’s not as useful as I anticipated:
(I wish I could find data in a usable form from earlier years. This gave it on a County basis – are you kidding? No more time for this search.)
I had some probably misguided notion to plot these vs the number of residences in the state, which would have been terrible given how residences are not nearly even distributed. Given the lack of F3+ tornadoes, I saw no point in doing so.
So in the last few years we’ve seen nothing worse than an EF2. Does that discredit my reader’s notion of building to withstand an EF5? The flip notion of studies of this sort is that the low-frequency is accompanied by an almost guaranteed high loss: potentially complete erasure of one’s home and the lives of you and your family.
This is why I think we should fund research into detection of and protection from Near Earth Objects (NEOs) – the frequency of impacts of civilization killers may be very low, but if we draw the short straw, we won’t even get to regret our penny-wise, pound-foolish ways. Here is a blog post on the European Space Agency’s work in this area.
My correspondent’s dilemma may be complicated by one more factor: if the construction required to substantially survive an EF5 also adds to the climate change problem, is s/he still justified to choose to go down that path? Indeed, what if those climate change gases are actually making tornadoes stronger and more numerous?
The answers are not easy.
