When You Don't Make It

[Mortblanc]

Yes Paul we are all aware that you are a superior being, a god unto yourself, untouched and unfazed by the problems of us mortals.

You have a fixation with Americans and wooden houses Paul.

History/geography/environmental lesson for you, we have wood! You think there are forests in England, those are not forests, they are parks. To this day we have vast forests and harvest millions of board feet of wood as a renewable rescore. Almost 1/3 of the US land mass is forest. Better than half of North America total is harvestable forest.

One year of our lumber harvest would probably rebuild every detached house in the UK.

In every culture people built their homes with the materials available in their area; stone, wattle and daub, brick, logs, and in my general area, dimensional lumber.

Yes, once it was logs, because we had logs. Then a religious sect of Quakers, called the Shakers, invented the circular saw. That made sawing the trees into easily stacked and carried boards possible.

That trend of building with sawed up lumber began back in the late 1800s due to one historical event, The Great Chicago Fire. There was a woman milking her cow in the city of Chicago and she tipped over her lantern. The hay caught fire, the barn caught fire and within minutes the city caught fire.

Just as in the Great Fire of London, the entire city populated by millions had to be rebuilt. London was rebuilt with brick, that was what you had. It was used because it was fireproof, not stormproof.

Chicago was at the edge of the Northern coniferous forest of Michigan and Wisconsin, where wood was available, easily transported and cheap. Our present technique of "balloon framing" was invented in the reconstruction of Chicago as the fastest way to rebuild a structure.

That is why we build homes from wood. It is available, it is cheap, it makes construction fast and it is renewable. It is one reason why our houses are larger, and cheaper than houses in Europe'

You will find that modern houses in England are built the same way, with a single vainer layer of brick to give the impression of a "brick house". It is not built of brick, it is simply covered with a layer of brick. You just have to import your lumber from elsewhere.

As for the durability of a brick or stone home in a tornado, don't try to kid yourself. Perhaps a stone/brick house will withstand a gale with 100 mph winds, 120mph??? On a good day 150mph!!!

How about a stone house in a rotational wind of 320 mph that is not "blowing down trees" but is unscrewing them out of the ground and depositing them 50 miles away?

Every part of the U.S. is subject to the formation of tornadoes. It is the way our land mass is laid out and the direction of frontal system movement in the U.S.

It does not matter what you building is made from it is going down in an F5 tornado.

I have lived with these thing all my life. I have seen pencil sized twigs shot into one side of a mini-van and out the other. I have seen gravel picked up from the ground and driven into the side of a brick house to crumble the walls. I have seen vehicles turned upside down where they sat, every body panel shredded like a can opener had been at it, every piece of glass gone and oddly covered with mud and dead frogs! I have seen the long distance electrical transport pylons stomped into the ground like a Greek Titan had been on a rampage.

I have seen several banks, Financial institutions made of the stone or brick you think more durable, completely flattened except for the vault. Steel walls a foot thick, set into concrete with a 3 meter foundation surrounded by 1/2 meter reinforced concrete walls. That survived.

TWe do not prep for tornadoes, we prep for their aftermath. For the weeks it will take for the utilities to be restored, the water pumping and the roads cleared.

You don't prep for a tornado, you pray through one. And you do not pray that you live through it, You pray that it misses you!