Mods - this truncated headline makes no sense, which is awful with such a serious story. It should be rephrased to: "6 Amazon workers killed after tornadoes destroy warehouse near St. Louis".
Reduce as in "reduced to ruble".
Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
211–220 of 367 posts
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the counter factual where the workers' don't risk their lives? My intuition is that an Amazon warehouse is safer than a typical home during a tornado. And many homes were completely destroyed during this event as well. With the benifit of hindsight, it would have been better if no one was at that particular warehouse. But we can only say that because we know where the tornado hit with an accuracy that is no w…
A warehouse is a very bad place to be... what kills you is flying objects, not the wind itself.
Or the roof could fall on you.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#213Are Amazon workers somehow special that they get upvoted on HN. What a bizarre, bizarre society we're living in.
There are five sure paths to the HN front page: 1. Material about Big Tech being evil. 2. Material about how to get hired in Big Tech. 3. "_______ written in Rust". 4. Cities good, cars bad, Elon's good. 5. Typography.
You forgot any opportunity to hate on crypto.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#214When there are Tornado Warnings in the area, are there any policies at big warehouses like this one (not just Amazon's others too) to take shelter? Is there enough time to get to a reinforced area? How long would staff have to stay in the reinforced area? Low probability, high consequence events are hard to plan for. Sad for all those who have died or are suffering in the wake of the storms.
Right? In a place called tornado alley who could have thought. If only a company like Amazon had some money to spare to figure local risks and plan to protect their people. In fact, its amazing Amazon is seen as so reliable since they couldn't foresee something like a Tornado in Tornado Alley killing their workers and disrupting business. You imagine a company which couldn't factor in that sort of risk goes out of bu…
St. Louis gets tornadoes, but it is not in tornado alley.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#215I don’t understand a few things, as they aren’t covered in the article, that I saw. Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? When I was working in the office, we were usually forced (literally security swept the building) to leave when severe winter weather was coming in a few times. Why doesn’t Amazon, in the middle of…
Amazon penalizes their workers for bathroom breaks and replaced their HR team with a chatbot. This is allowed by federal labor laws, and Amazon’s primary source of retail revenue is externalizing human costs. Our tech and business communities believe regulations are harmful, and American politicians are inept. So I don’t see how we can prevent their abuse unless something changes; yet, no one wants to be the one that…
> unless something changes
People will be replaced by robots, this is what will change.
It is already happening. McDonalds is canonical example of that.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Were there no warnings for the severe weather storm that would have prevented people coming in to work or allowed them to leave work early? There were warnings. Warnings that skipping work would get one fired[1]. And since the warehouse was not closed that day, the warning was: clock in on time, or else, weather be damned. >When I was working in the office... Well there's a difference between how office employees ar…
And because we keep buying from Amazon no matter what.
The solution is regulations and unions. If it's not Amazon it will be something else. Many people do not have time or money to look for alternatives. I never buy on Amazon but directly from the providers, but that takes time that I have but many people does not.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
years ago they would only call a warning when they had a confirmed visual on a touch down, I am not sure when they made the change but for at least the last few years (and probably longer) I have noticed them calling more and more warning based on radar signature alone
In part because the radar tech has advanced so much. Based on reflectivity, velocity, and correlation coefficient alone, they are able to make a pretty sound guess about whether or not a supercell or QLCS is capable of producing a tornado. There’s no reason why you would want to wait for visual confirmation of the radar output when it could mean the difference (potentially) between giving people in the path a long or…
There is a reason, which is that the new criteria for warning trains people to not take them seriously as they don't necessarily mean acute danger from tornado anymore.
As our radar technology has advanced, it's really a shame that warnings are less indicative of a tornado than they were a decade ago.
A better solution would be three categories of warning (watch, new possibly fake warning, and the old real warning) as each should prompt more response than the lower tier.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that really is the story. Homes are not exactly safer, and there was a tornado warning for all of Madison county. Perhaps you've seen photos of what these things do to small wooden structures. Yes, their home was probably ok from this particular tornado, but I think that has more to do with luck than safety.
Being alert and prepared is safer, and neither is all that possible while working.
Especially working where they track how long it takes to reach for a product and place it in a box, and that action is repeated multiple times a minute for the entire shift. All employees are on the edge of panic at all times.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Operating procedure at a former workplace in Texas was that during a Tornado Warning sheltering in a designated tornado shelter was mandatory. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29526164 It was mandatory where I worked too. That most people didn't seek shelter was not a fault of the employer.
It absolutely was the fault of the employer. There are plenty of things the employer could have done to make seeking shelter the more attractive option. Halt and Safe all the machines. Push back any imminent deadlines to account for the shutdown so the employees can avoid worrying about any consequences from a production delay. Provide adequate shelter that employees would feel comfortable with. Yes, you can't force…
In my job, shutting machines wasn't feasible (well, they could kill the Internet I suppose). As for the rest, no one would get hurt by imminent deadlines, etc. We worked on the timescale of months, not hours or days. I can assure you: Not a single person in my building was concerned about missing deadlines if they went to the shelter.
As I said, people are people. Most people I know drive over the speed limit, because everyone does it, and because the likelihood of it hurting them is low. Same principle here. I'm all for everyone going to the shelter, just as I'm all for severe penalties for going over the speed limit. Most people, though, are OK going over the speed limit but not OK with people not sheltering when there's a tornado. It's almost always the case that such people have never lived in a tornado zone and cannot comprehend the dynamics of the situation.
Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis
#220I slept through three tornado sirens last night. It was pretty wild. The first one, I thought it was a test. (We have tests every month on the 1st.) But it wasn't until a few minutes in that I realized it was for real. Then apparently I just... went to sleep? That wasn't the smartest decision I've ever made. It went off a couple more times. One strange thing was the realization that I had no idea where to turn for in…
Get a weather radio if you don't have one. For about 20-40 bucks, you can get one with rechargeable batteries and a charging cradle. Follow the instructions to set it for your regional station. It will wake up and sound the alert for any warnings in your area. Plus you can actively listen to it for the latest storm news.
As long as you still have power & internet, your local tv station will usually stream during weather emergencies. I've done this on more than one stormy day. Sat comfortably on the couch watching one stream on the iPad while another played on the television. Wondering if this was going to be the day when it finally hit.
On your phone, get RadarScope. It's highly worth the 5 or 10 dollars. It's a detailed radar app. Has many different radar products. Can see the usual storm views with warnings outlined. the relative velocity to see the spin. correlation coefficient to determine if there's a debris ball. Etc. Shows the estimated tracking path for storm cells. For the many storms in my area, this has been invaluable.
Probably the most important resource is NOAA's local prediction pages and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). During storm seasons, the SPC's Convective Outlook is worth checking at least once a day to see if anything's likely in the near future. Plus the mesoscale discussions are useful on the storm day to see how the forecasters think the events will play out.
For local reporting by locals, Twitter is surprisingly useful. Look for a hashtag that contains the two letter abbreviation for your state plus the letters "wx". I follow #kswx for Kansas storms.