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Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

reuters.com

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Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#291

Post by [deleted] »

romwell wrote: post #185
bmitc wrote: post #161

I 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…

>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…

[deleted]

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#292

Post by jandrewrogers »

bryans wrote: post #227
axiolite wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tornadoes aren't hurricanes... There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. You can't shut down for every thunder storm on the astronomical chance it'll turn into a tornado and head in your direction. The article did somewhat address your questions: "Amazon said all employees were normally notified and directed to move to a designated, marked shelter-in-place location when a site was made aware…

> There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. Every major weather and news organization was warning about "a very high likelihood of nocturnal tornadoes in the area" 12+ hours before they happened.

Have you ever lived in Tornado Alley? These warnings are ubiquitous several months out of the year, year after year. I must've received at least a hundred of those. In the entire time I lived in that part of the world, I saw a single tornado, and that is because I was lucky -- most people that live there decades don't see them. The false positive rate for the average person is extremely high, so it is no wonder people stop paying attention. Honestly, we had worse problems with severe lightning; your house might get hit once a year.

A "very high likelihood of tornadoes" is their Tuesday. That likelihood manifesting as an actual tornado that is a material risk to them is a once in a lifetime situation. You get used to it, like earthquakes on the West Coast. Nobody on the West Coast spends their days obsessing over the big earthquake that will inevitably hit them sometime in the next several decades.

Warnings like you are talking about are effectively useless because they virtually never materialize as a real threat to most of the people they are sent to.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#293

Post by danans »

dhosek wrote: post #269

I find it interesting that no one seems to be talking about the fact that we're having deadly tornadoes in December . This is not normal, especially if this was a multiple tornado event, but even one really big one would be way out of the ordinary. Maybe it's my northern Illinois upbringing, but tornadoes this time of year seems way unlikely.

It's pretty shocking. I found this paper which mentions the following, most of which I don't understand:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209471...

"Recent work has determined that peak, or maximum, tornado activity in the Great Plains has shifted earlier in the year by an average of 7 days (Long and Stoy, 2014) and 12–13 days (Lu et al., 2015) relative to the 1950s. Observed shifts in the seasonality in the Great Plains are accompanied by corresponding trends in convective available potential energy (CAPE) and the fourth power of storm relative helicity (SRH4), as well as their interaction, CAPE × SRH4 (Lu et al., 2015)."

The CAPE measurement above, which seems to be a measure of fuel availability for thunderstorms, is apparently predicted to rise with global heating:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020JCli...33.2025C/abstra...

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#294

Post by dotancohen »

throwawayboise wrote: post #231
cbfrench wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, there is a reason, after so many times of dropping what you are doing and rushing to the basement, only to have nothing happen, it becomes an annoyance and is not taken seriously.

  > after so many times of dropping what you are doing and rushing to the basement, only to have nothing happen, it becomes an annoyance and is not taken seriously.
Is that feeling widespread? In my area we have sirens for different a type of threat, but everybody that I know drops what they are doing and rushes to the shelter, even if it happens two dozen times day and night.

To what would you attribute the lack of compliance? Attrition? How often is "so many times"? I'm seriously interested because it seems to different - and indifferent.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#295

Post by jptech »

> It was unclear how many workers were still missing, as Amazon did not have an exact count of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said.

I find this hard to accept. They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#296

Post by techdragon »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #155
SECProto wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you're not in the habit of turning on the local station because of crappy programming (like me), then you should at least be willing to find a local station during weather. How would I even go about doing that? The only display devices I have are monitors. Even for radio, I would have to go to my car to listen.

Part of living in an area prone to certain disasters is being prepared to deal with them. Get a small weather radio.

But I would have to listen to its crap all the time waiting for the rare signal I actually want from it.

Edit: having continued reading more comments and googling what the fuck a “weather radio” is… I’m now deeply annoyed at the fact I have no equivalent living in Australia. I could look at a global weather service like Navtex but I’m actually not interested in the weather, i just want a way to get emergency broadcast warnings without relying on my phone. The system in Australia doesn’t use cell broadcast it uses a shitty alternative, they are tendering for a replacement that does use cell broadcast but who knows when that will actually be running. Since I have zero trust in the current system I’d like a way to get critical emergency notices without having to develop a habit of paranoid checking emergency websites or building my own fragile alert system using their RSS feeds or something like that.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#297

Post by edoceo »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

I 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…

You can also get a hand-crank emergency radio - does AM, FM and some other weird (NWS) bands. Once you know the emergency stations just write them on the radio with Sharpie.

Like these https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-hand-crank-radio/

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#298

Post by axiolite »

jptech wrote: post #295

> It was unclear how many workers were still missing, as Amazon did not have an exact count of people working in the sorting and delivery center at the time the tornadoes hit, Whiteford said. I find this hard to accept. They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??

> They keep track of workers' productivity by the second, but they don't know how many were working there at that time??

I'd say there's a good chance their on-site computer systems that keep track of employees and their productivity happen to also be out of commission ATM.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#299

Post by makeitdouble »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #292
bryans wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't hours and days of advanced notice. Only a few minutes. Every major weather and news organization was warning about "a very high likelihood of nocturnal tornadoes in the area" 12+ hours before they happened.

Have you ever lived in Tornado Alley? These warnings are ubiquitous several months out of the year, year after year. I must've received at least a hundred of those. In the entire time I lived in that part of the world, I saw a single tornado, and that is because I was lucky -- most people that live there decades don't see them. The false positive rate for the average person is extremely high, so it is no wonder peopl…

If I understand correctly, tornadoes are a part of the weather there, with any structure having a set probability to get hit once or more by a tornado in its lifetime.

So perhaps the issue would be on why the warehouse crumbled, if Amazon was aware of the structural risks, and how they reacted if there were any warnings on that front ?

> like earthquakes on the West Coast.

If it’s really so, earthquake zones have building codes and constructions have rating on what they can withstand. If for instance your workplace was to go down on M2 shake, there would clearly be an issue with the building and the contracting process, or maintenance.

Re: Six dead after tornadoes destroy Amazon warehouse near St Louis

#300

Post by jazzyjackson »

dave78 wrote: post #270
jfrunyon wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Tornado_...

That map is not showing "tornado alley", this one is (from the same Wikipedia article): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/To... Note that there's no formal definition, but most people would not consider Missouri/Illinois to be "in" tornado alley, despite regular tornadic activity.

I dont know who most people is, but the map is just an illustration, there are no official boundaries because tornado alley is not an official thing. I grew up in central illinois and we regularly drilled taking shelter in the school’s hallway when the tornado sirens were tested, and feel pretty strongly that counts as living in tornado alley.
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