I've experienced two tornadoes. The first was an EF3 that tore through the 38k-person town I lived near and went to school in. I was in preschool at the time, this would've been 2005 or 2006. The preschool I went to was about 200 yards north of a small university. The tornado touched down in the center of town and immediately went north towards my preschool. Yeah, I can remember shit from back then.
The way our tornado plan went, we would go out into the hallway and take cover. The entrance to the school faced the path of the tornado. We watched as the tornado approached and tore up shit around it, mostly trees. At one point, a tomato from the nearby farmer's market got thrown and splattered against the glass door at the entrance. Jokes were made about this afterwards.
Some school's tornado safety plans are fairly retarded. I know mine were.
In elementary school, our tornado safety plan was much the same – pile all of us into the hallways and get into the position against the walls. In high school, on a particularly risky day, they piled us into an auditorium and told us to take cover under the chairs if a tornado hit.
These are probably two of the most dangerous places to take cover in a tornado situation. In the first case, look up any video clip of a tornado tearing through a school and you'll realize those long, narrow hallways are basically wind tunnels when they have any kind of high wind or tornadic storm bearing down on them. If you don't get slung from one end of the hall to the other, you'll probably get fucked up by all the debris that storm will be knocking loose from every which way. Auditoriums in general are also bad ideas because they're big, wide open interiors and not really structurally stable. That roof with all of its heavy equipment will probably be coming down on your head, more likely than not, and if not that, the walls coming in, or anything even barely loose inside the structure is just going to turn into something like a "rocks in a blender" type situation, and you're the squishy meat in the middle of it.
Not gonna lie, it kinda spooks me later in life now that I know just how unsafe the tornado safety plans were in school.
Another update regarding today:
Tornado Emergency currently in Iowa.
That correlation coefficient highlight is some seriously nasty business. Looks like some fairly significant rotation. Could be a rather sizeable debris ball on radar (i.e., debris being lofted into the atmosphere, so this would be stuff being flung together all at once several feet into the sky).
Just so everyone knows, be wary of any reports going out about EF damage until the NWS has conducted a survey in that particular area. Putting it simply, Enhanced Fujita is measured by formally observed damage of tornadoes AFTER the fact, and not DURING an active tornado.
