Filmed in Illinois on April 9th this year.
As many commenters on YouTube pointed out, the worst place to wait out a tornado is underneath a bridge, because air is sucked through the gap like a funnel. It can pick up vehicles and toss them as if they were made of paper. That man got lucky.
Peter
5 comments:
My understanding is that he had sheltered under the bridge for the hailstorm, before the appearance of the tornado.
With the road blocked by other stopped traffic behind him, his choices were
- staying put
- driving forward towards the tornado
- attempting a soft-ground median-crossing in order to flee via the other carriageway.
- leaving the car to shelter in a ditch, something that does not seem to be evident.
Or he could have just, you know, driven straight ahead out of the path of the tornado instead of giving play-by-play to his freaking phone. Instead he chose to sit there with his thumb up his third point of contact and wonder what was going to happen when it hit him.
Moron.
FormerFlyer
Camera angles can be odd, but it looks like he backed up to stay directly in line with the funnel travel. If the road was clear ahead, he should have run for it, as you can outrun most of them, especially if moving at an angle that diverges from the storms path.
Generally, if the vehicle gets lifted into the air and deposited elsewhere, you don't survive. Don't wait for it to hit, move!
Maybe it wasn't the best of choices, but he sounded a helluva lot calmer than I would have!
Antibubba
Actually, an overpass isn't a bad choice compared to being in the open. If was going to shelter under the overpass, best to abandon the car and climb the incline and get up under the bridge beams.
Having said that, he could easily have driven away from the tornado. They don't move across the ground very fast, and you can generally outrun them. (Best place to shelter from a tornado is where the tornado ISN'T....I.E. "Don't be there") From the video, he could easily have outrun it.
Three times I have been within a mile of those things. Twice, in a car, I simply drove out of their path. Cars can move fairly rapidly compared to a tornado.
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