Tornado and lightning safety

No interior room in a manufactured home is safe

NWS guidance on this is unambiguous. Manufactured homes — including newer, larger, and anchored ones — are not safe during tornadoes. This is not a statement about their construction quality for normal weather. It is a statement about the physics of tornado-force winds applied to a structure that is not anchored to a foundation in the same way a site-built home is.

The "safest room in a manufactured home" is still orders of magnitude more dangerous than an interior room in any site-built structure or a community shelter. Manufactured home residents in tornado-prone areas are at dramatically elevated risk if they shelter in place.

The action: identify the nearest sturdy building before tornado season begins. A community shelter, a school, a church, a neighbor's basement — any of these is a better option than staying in the manufactured home. When a tornado warning is issued, the time to reach that building is now, not after watching the storm develop.

If a warning is issued and there is genuinely no time to reach a sturdy building, the secondary option is to get as low as possible in a low-lying area — a ditch or depression — protect your head and neck with your arms, and do not attempt to outrun the tornado on foot or in a vehicle. A ditch, despite its hazards, is statistically safer than remaining in a manufactured home under direct tornado threat.

When thunder roars, go indoors. No exceptions.

NWS records about 20 to 50 lightning fatalities annually in the United States. Most are entirely preventable. The consistent pattern in lightning fatality data: the victim was outdoors when they could have been inside, and they delayed seeking shelter because the storm seemed far away or because they were almost done with what they were doing.

The 30-30 rule: if the time between the lightning flash and the thunder that follows is 30 seconds or less (roughly 6 miles or closer), seek shelter immediately. Do not wait for the interval to shorten further. Do not finish the activity first. Leave the field, the course, the pool, the beach, or wherever you are and get inside a substantial building or a hard-topped vehicle.

What lightning can do: it does not have to strike you directly to kill you. Ground current — the electrical charge that spreads outward through the ground from a nearby strike — can travel through the soil and up through a person who is lying flat or has both feet widely spaced. This is why lying flat is not a safe lightning position. The lightning crouch — crouching on the balls of the feet, feet together, ears covered, avoiding contact with the ground through hands or knees — reduces the ground current path but is a last resort only when reaching shelter is truly impossible.

Tall trees are not shelter. They are targets. Standing under or near a tree during a lightning storm is one of the leading lightning-fatality scenarios. The goal is a substantial building (not a gazebo, not a picnic shelter, not a metal awning) or a hard-topped vehicle with windows closed.

Wait 30 minutes after the last thunder before resuming outdoor activity. Lightning can strike from a storm that is already past, from a relatively clear sky in front of the storm, and in conditions that do not look threatening.

The device that works when your phone does not

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) — the alerts that make phones buzz even when silenced in some configurations — are the primary modern alert system for most Americans. But phones fail as the sole alert method in several common scenarios: the phone is on Do Not Disturb, the phone has been silenced by the user, cell network congestion prevents timely delivery, or the battery is dead.

NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards operates independently of cell networks and the internet. It broadcasts continuous weather information from local NWS forecast offices and sounds an alarm when a warning is issued. The alarm is loud enough to wake sleeping adults and children.

SAME programming — Specific Area Message Encoding — is the feature that makes NOAA Weather Radio practical rather than nuisance-prone. You program the radio with your county's SAME code, and the radio alarms only when a warning or watch is issued for your specific county. Without SAME, the radio alarms for every county in the broadcast area, which can include dozens of counties and create alert fatigue.

A battery-backup NOAA Weather Radio costs $25 to $50 and should be placed in the bedroom. The cell network is the first thing to fail during severe weather events. A NOAA Weather Radio works during the outage. NWS recommends NOAA Weather Radio as a critical redundant alert source precisely because it does not depend on infrastructure that may be unavailable during the event it is warning about.