
Save yourself and save others by getting to the nearest safe shelter. This is a serious threat to emergency response vehicles and traffic that must get through the mess. One hazard of lots of people crowding into an underpass is that they abandon their cars on the roadway, or at least leave them close enough to the road to be strewn across it by tornado-strength winds. Just one more note of caution (as if you need more) about staying away from underpasses in a tornado. Remember, too, that when the tornado passes, the winds will suddenly change again, and debris will go haywire. The company says that although some truck-specific GPS units may have low-clearance alerts. Route-1 is a database of height data on over 5,000 low clearance obstacles on both major and minor roadways in the United States and Canada. Even fine matter can cause serious damage (think vision loss if particles get in your eye), and we don't have to tell you what big hunks of rubble can do. According to a press release, the company has marketed a tool called Route-1 especially for large RVs. The wind tunnel produced by the underpass is a perfect atmosphere for flying matter, big and small.

This creates another underpass hazard: debris. That means that even if the tip of the twister is above the underpass, the winds below and around it have enormous power. Remember, it's not just the cone-shaped part of the tornado that causes damage the winds extend far beyond it. The result is that the wind in the underpass will be stronger than the wind above it or on the ground. And, really, an underpass' specific construction makes it particularly unsafe.Īs a tornado approaches an underpass, it will create a wind tunnel effect. But the key is that the shelter needs to be a well-constructed building or underground shelter. And in general, it really is a good idea to find a shelter in a tornado.

Honestly, it's not a crazy thought – as we said, large concrete structures seem like a great place to ride out a storm with winds of hundreds of miles per hour. In addition to emergency operations and repairs, the.
#Cool highway underpass manual
People have done it, but they're lucky sons of guns. The Federal Highway Administration sent the state an initial payment of 3 million, the head of the agency told a Senate committee Wednesday. Railroad Crossings For work involving railroad overpasses, consult the Rail-Highway Operations Manual for required agreements with or notification of railroad companies. It doesn't help that there are some famous anecdotal stories about weathering a storm in an underpass.

Before we get into why underpasses are pretty terrible places to hunker down in a twister, let's talk a little about the logic people employ when choosing these concrete tunnels as shelter. There are many reasons underpants would not be safe in a tornado – we'll assume you can figure out the big ones – but you might be surprised to learn that they'd make just about as good of a tornado shelter as an underpass. Perhaps you initially read this title incorrectly and thought the question was whether underpants were safe during a tornado.
