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You can get up to about 150-175mph wind ratings by following the Miami-Dade, Bahamas, or Cayman Islands building codes. Think hipped roofs, insulated concrete block, and impact-resistant glass. (A tornado doesn't give enough warning to get hurricane shutters fully down/unrolled and secured) The construction product used in those kinds of homes has to meet a pretty high design pressure threshold to get approved for hurricane code, and that should carry over to tornadoes to a fair degree. But no one is really going to have an above ground house that's designed to withstand a F5 tornado.
In general round structures do better than rectangles because they shed wind better. Just about the worst type of building is the typical stick frame you see flying to pieces in tornadoes.
This is about as close to tornado/earthquake proof as you can get for reasonable cost: Monolithic Dome
Build your house like "kill houses" at gun ranges. Build two walls about 9" apart (either cinder block or railroad ties) and fill the gap with gravel/cement. I think that's how they make them. You can drive a truck into it.
I was raised in the heart of Tornado Alley in Kansas and lived through my share of near misses and direct hits including the June 8, 1966 F5 tornado in Topeka, Kansas. I will never forget that particular tornado. Our friends had a home on the SE side, the area first hit by that tornado. Like a previous poster observed, there was nothing left of that entire housing area over several blocks except slabs or basements. Curiously one of those slabs had a fan shaped rose trellis right beside it still wholly intact with an undamaged rose blooming on it. Our state capitol building had an ancient cottonwood tree that was damaged by tertiary winds. In the heart of that damaged tree a wheat straw was driven deep like a spike from the sheer force of the winds.
Both my mother and father were involved in the immediate rescue and restoration (our grandparents were at our home and were stuck by impassable roads so they took care of us for a few days) being a nurse and state power plant electrician. My dad brought home several pop bottles one evening that he found intact in a destroyed store's cooler. The soda was gone, the bottle was dry as a bone, all of the contents being driven out by air pressure, yet the seal remained intact with the original hiss of opening. I recall the vast swath of damage too but it's those little things that drove home to me the awesome and unpredictable power of a tornado.
Like others that have lived through F5s, I firmly believe that there will be no above ground building that will be 100% tornado proof in the case of a direct hit from an F5 tornado. Resistant, certainly and round is the shape. Round grain silos often are minimally damaged (the tops mostly) when an adjacent barn is otherwise flattened. Underground shelters with a traditional home is really the only way to live a halfway normal life in tornado country. Everyone I knew had a basement or root cellar to retreat to. Even trailer parks of the time, those magnets for tornados, had centrally located underground storm shelters for their residents. I recall many a night in uncertain weather sleeping in our basement and I recall being posted as a lookout plenty often in weather likely to produce tornados.
Building underground or partially underground such as berm homes have advantages but are more expensive (concrete is quite expensive) and water tables, moisture build-up, proper ventilation and radon are concerns to be addressed. My advice for anyone living in tornado country, is either building a basement safe room or close by but separate underground shelter to retreat to.
So I moved out of the frying pan of Tornado Alley at age 20, into the fire of a high level and frequency earthquake location where the 2nd biggest earthquake in recorded history happened in 1964. I hear that Vermont is pretty safe from a natural disasters as a rule.
Good thread, but tornado proof is out of the economic reach of almost everyone.
What all would you do to make a NEW house (not yet built) tornado proof?
What could you do to make an existing one tornado proof?
How much would it cost?
IMO the old time "basement" house is both tornado proof & cheap to build. To make an existing house tornado proof there must be an underground storm cellar or basement.
So to be "tornado proof" any house must be an underground house.
Simple aerodynamics. You want to eliminate the things that the wind could "catch" on. That's easier said than done of course and you could basically forget having an attractive home while doing it, but it is theoretically possible.
It seems to me the difference between Hurricane and Tornado is water. In the Midwest we get wet basements, cropland that floods and rivers that overflow, but I've never seen a flood in the Midwest like Katrina brought New Orleans.
Three nights ago an F-5 hit Joplin, Missouri and destroyed a*3/4 mile wide path between 20th and 26th street and Bus 71 or about 30% of the town. The upper portion of one hospital was removed, a technical school and highschool were destroyed. Most of the schools are badly damaged but not beyond repair. The Walmart Super Center and a Kroger branded store were badly hit. Over a hundred are dead; no one knows how many are missing. One older child was sucked out of his grandfather's arms through a sun roof and a 16 mo old baby is still missing.
Joplin has has regularly seen tornadoes for 30 years that I know of. Nothing of this magnitude has ever hit before.*Tornadoes follow a path of least resistance like*five lane streets with wide shoulders and huge parking lots, and Interstate routes wbere natural forestests once stood. Tornadoes do not jump forests, high high hills and cliffs or large bodies of water. If engineers can't understand this then the City of Joplin should.
A second tornado hit in Sedalia about 100 miles NNW of Joplin. and Tornaodes are still in the Midwest from OK to TN. Baseballl size hail inside the City of St. Louis.
Three nights ago an F-5 hit Joplin, Missouri and destroyed a*3/4 mile wide path between 20th and 26th street and Bus 71 or about 30% of the town. The upper portion of one hospital was removed, a technical school and highschool were destroyed. Most of the schools are badly damaged but not beyond repair.
.......
From the pictures, you can judge that the hospital evidently was a sturdy, steel-framed, reinforced concrete structure. But even it suffered damage to some brick and concrete block walls. Of course the F5 winds shattered all the windows.
With all the debris about, I could not tell if basements or storm cellar rooms were common, or if most house were on slabs. What are the building codes like in small-town Missouri? It's not terribly expensive to put, say, a gravel-filled concrete block wall around a pantry or bathroom. Something on that order could increase one's chances of survival when the stick frame gets blown down.
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Slabs or basements
