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I'm a huge 'weather geek' and tornado related stuff is my top interest. Tornadoes really don't suck human bodies into a funnel. Humans are heavy and not aerodynamic, people only get lofted with the building or vehicle they are in gets lifted and takes them with it. Even then it's not very high nor very far. When deaths occur a couple seconds into fast moving debris is long enough for fatal injuries. Tornado deaths are almost always due to either head injuries or bleeding due to puncture wounds.
The tornado we had back in the 1970s in CT, my coworker friend, a woman in her 40s, was sucked out of her car into the air into it, and as she flew, a bus flew by her, and she landed in a tree. She was pronounced dead. The coroner placed a toe tag on her, and her toe moved. Whoopsie. She was alive. She was out of work for months. When she came back she told me the whole story. She said it was horrifying. I remember it well. My Dad was near the storm in his van, and a normal 20 minute drive took him over 2 hrs because traffic was so crazy and diverted by emergency units. It destroyed our air museum. It destroyed the houses in Pequannock CT. My grandfather lived there and it bypassed his house but destroyed his neighbor's So bizarre and scary. https://www.city-data.com/forum/lexi...o-shelter.html
Stay calm when nature blows up a storm.
National Weather Service records show Fayette County receives a tornado every 13 years, on average. https://www.bereadylexington.com/tornado/
But, yeah if and when they do hit, they can be deadly. Having a basement can save your life.
It should also be noted that Fayette County is 199 square miles. The average tornado track is three miles long and fifty yards wide, or comprising in total an area of about 1/12th of a square mile. Which is to say that a given place in Fayette County can be expected to be hit by a tornado roughly once every 2400 years.
Having grown up on the Ms Gulf Coast, I've see a LOT of hurricanes. There's always plenty of time to lock down or flee from those. But here in Little Rock, we had a few tornadoes set down at once, and they destroyed a big area and sent dozens of people to the hospital.
I sorta poo pooed the whole idea of a tornado, but got to see what happens first hand. During the numerous tornado siren warnings, I happened to be looking at all the rain and wind from my top floor apt when suddenly it got very still, then went from 0 to something like 100 in seconds! Wow, there was almost no time to do anything.
The area it hit took not only the roofs off apartment buildings, it took their entire top floors! Cars were picked up (some w/ the drivers in them) and flung all over the place. I would definitely want a tornado shelter in any tornado area after experiencing that. Some of the houses were essentially completely destroyed. If you had been in a basement that was not accessible from outside a building, you may not have been able to get out from everything sitting down on the building's foundation.
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