Hubby wanted to know why there aren't storm shelters in schools, especially in a place so prone to tornados.

I thought there were and that's why the children sheltered in place. Javachik told me that the land there is mostly rock, so it would be hard to build a lot of basements. But that doesn't mean schools can't have stronger design.

Zen mentioned that most storm shelters couldn't withstand a category 5 tornado anyway.

That reminds me that my school was a fallout shelter. I never knew where we would hide from fallout, though, because I never saw a basement. I used to have nightmares about what might be there and also the whole town having to be in there.

Congrats, Nora! That's awesome.

Hubby wanted to know why there aren't storm shelters in schools, especially in a place so prone to tornados.

I don't know about those specific schools (at least one report I read mentioned the kids sheltering in a basement, though I believe that was actually where several children died), but I know that M, who grew up in OKC, says almost none of the houses he spent time in as a kid had a basement -- not his house, not his grandparents' houses, not his friends' houses, etc.

Javachik told me that the land there is mostly rock, so it would be hard to build a lot of basements.

That was my guess -- some kind of geographical/geological impediment to building basements.

Woohoo, Nora!!

When I was a kid a big tornado destroyed my hometown's high school. They rebuilt it like a fortress, with huge oak tree-sized metal columns reinforcing the exterior (and also named the school teams the Hurricanes). That's where I'm headed if anyone starts shelling the city with artillery.

In my junior high building, the places we would take shelter from tornados was segregated by sex. The place where the boys were to take shelter had scalding hot water pipes above it.

Yeah, what I heard last night was that wind speeds were the highest ever recorded, and it was something in the neighborhood of a mile wide. I don't know that that's fact, but it suggests that it may have just been beyond what shelters could handle.

Beer writing! Follow your dream! I love all the sorts of jobs you had no idea existed when you were a kid and totally rock.

Maybe we can't jump up and down on the beds with abandon anymore, but we can write about beer and get paid for it. (By we I mean the Nora we)

I love that dongli shop on Etsy, thanks for the link

The skirt is exactly as pretty as I hoped. Shipping took a while--partly my fault for not responding to the seller promptly, but they're also shipping from China. 8 metres of chiffon! Whee!

JESUS JEHOSEPHAT. Surely you know if you have a screaming child in your house, no? And you know if you're on the phone? Why does it seem that someone always forgets to add one and one to get mute?

I know that a lot of northwestern Oklahoma has a few feet of soil over caliche, a soft limestone that forms in deserts. It takes blasting to build a basement. There was one storm shelter, built under the Elks Club, for the subdivision my family lived in for a year. The summer I lived there, we went to the storm shelter almost every week. Most memorable was the night that the Elks were having a luau night, and the shelter inhabitants were a mixture in kids in pajamas and drunken Elks in grass skirts.