We recently had someone pose this question:
I have a basement. Won’t it keep me safe and protect me from getting hurt by a tornado? Do I really need a tornado storm shelter?
Don’t count on it. There are all kinds of risks involved with being below ground with a whole house sitting on top of you. You aren’t protected from the house caving in and all the floors above falling down on top of you. Worse yet, if a tornado is strong enough it will simply pull your belongings out of the basement and could leave it empty. That means you could go flying out with everything else.
The jury is out on what the safest corner of the basement is, for those that do not have a safe room to protect themselves. A common belief is that since most tornadoes in the U.S. travel from west-southwest to east-northeast, the southwest side of the basement is the safest place to hide out.
John Park Finley, one of the first serious meteorological researchers, who studied hundreds of tornadoes in a career spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said you should never take refuge in the east side of a basement, and specifically warned against the northeast corner — he reasoned that debris from the house would be blown in that direction.
He was incorrect. In 1966 Joe Eagleman of the University of Kansas studied the wreckage of the EF-5 Topeka tornado of that year. He concluded that if you had a full basement, the northeast corner was the safest place to be and the south side was the most dangerous. Why? External debris knocked down southern walls and blew debris in through south-facing basement windows. When the tornadic winds shifted the whole house to the northeast, the southwest corner of the basement was where the upper stories fell in. It seems like even the professionals can’t agree, or change their minds later down the line.
We’ve even seen houses that were completely demolished by tornadoes and didn’t have even one side still standing or undamaged. See the photo here for a good example. Don’t worry about which side of the basement to hide out in and whether or not the house is going to fall in on you, or worse, pull you out when a tornado strikes. Protect your loved ones with a tornado safe room from Tornado Alley Armor.