Moore gets flattened again


Listening to news of OKC, Shawnee and Moore feeling Nature's whip again.

Meanwhile, we've got sunny and 72, expecting a half inch of rain tomorrow.

I'm sad for my old stomping grounds, but thankful that I didn't succumb to temptation in 2009. After one terrible winter here, I seriously considered moving back to the Plains. Would have been exactly the wrong time for that move. Since 2009 we've had one half-bad winter and three nothing-special winters, and lots of purely heavenly summers and falls. Since 2009 Okla and Kansas have been slammed with terrible tornados AND terrible snowstorms.

We give thanks for good sense or inertia or providence or whatever!

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Later: It appears that Okies have forgotten some hard-learned lessons about tornado safety, resulting in an unusually high death toll. Judging from the news reports, houses are being built without any sort of shelter. These are big new houses with wide roof spans and lots of expensive features, but without underground storm cellars. Wrong priorities! Back in the '50s most houses had either a partial basement or a separate storm shelter.

Makes me wonder.... did securitized lending cause lenders and insurers to abandon caution? When a banker expects to get a payback on his own money, he wants the borrower to stay alive. When the loan is splintered among thousands of investors, and all ratings are fraudulent, nobody cares if the borrower gets splintered.

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Later again: Death toll has been revised downward to a range that seems more Okie-normal, given the size of devastation. Apparent shortage of shelter still bothers me, though.

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And again: UK Telegraph finds a partial explanation for the shelter shortage.

Oklahoma City suspended a programme to subsidise safe rooms "due to insufficient federal funding" while the destroyed city of Moore put its plans on hold as it struggled through the process of applying for money. The Safe Room Rebate Programme is designed to allow families to apply for thousands of dollars to construct shelters in which to seek refuge during severe weather. It is funded through federal dollars made available when the president makes a major disaster declaration for a badly-damaged area.

Authorities in both Moore and Oklahoma City said that the relatively few disaster declarations [since 1999] meant there was little money available to help families build shelters.

Still not a good excuse. Builders and owners from the '30s to the '50s somehow managed to add cellars without being subsidized. These new houses obviously have lots of unnecessary square footage and fancy features. Could have included a safe room or cellar by eliminating the three-story Great Room or the 50-foot Florentine Marble Plasma TV.
  ¶ 5:05 PM