July 30, 2019 | Bobbi Dempsey
“Our home is a 28×80
four-bedroom, two-bath that we got used three years ago. It was in like-new
condition for a 15-year-old home,” said David Kelley, who lives in
Beauregard, a town in Lee County, Alabama, that suffered major losses during a
cluster of 34 tornadoes that caused 23 deaths on March 3, 2019. His mobile home
sustained significant damage. “The storm knocked it off its foundation and
cracked some of the metal piers underneath the house. It destroyed the roof and
rafters and busted some of the floor joists,” he said.
That storm was one of a record
1,263 tornadoes in the U.S. tracked by the National Weather Service in the
first half of 2019. Many of those storms have been concentrated in the
Southeastern part of the country, in a region dubbed “Dixie Alley.”
Tornadoes in the South can be
particularly deadly because there’s a relatively high percentage of the population
there living in mobile homes — and most of those homes are spread out in rural
areas, meaning lots of people with few options to escape the path of powerful
tornadoes.
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Alabama and the Carolinas are consistently
among the top five states with the most residents living in mobile
homes — as well as in modular or manufactured housing, which is intended to be
in a fixed location, but is similarly dangerous in severe storms. According to
the Manufactured
Housing Institute, residents of manufactured housing have a median
household income of just under $30,000 per year.
Protecting these low-income,
far-flung populations with limited resources from major storms isn’t easy. That
made them a subject of particular interest to researchers involved in a recent University
of Maryland studyexamining mobile homes.
The first challenge people
face is receiving critical information in time to allow them to take action.
The researchers found standard tornado warnings are falling short in protecting
residents. In particular, mobile home residents were less accessible on social
media and more dependent on their local TV meteorologist.
Researchers also found the
majority of mobile home residents had incorrect assumptions about what they
should do during a storm, with many believing myths and misconceptions that
could be dangerous like “if you’re driving, you should take shelter under a
bridge during a tornado.”
The researchers recommended
that National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices should work more closely
with local newscasters to address this information gap. Similarly, forecasters
could prioritize actions that mobile home residents can take to deal with
limited physical supplies and inadequate shelter.
But educational campaigns
can’t solve the problem completely, because residents (and the communities
where they live) face significant planning challenges due to lack of resources
and available services.
“Mobile home residents in our
study reported statistically significantly lower perceived access to shelter and
self-efficacy to take shelter compared to fixed home residents,” the
researchers noted. Developing emergency evacuation plans is challenging in
areas where many residents may lack reliable vehicles or other resources, or
may be reluctant to leave their homes and belongings unattended for what may
turn out to be a false alarm. It’s also hard to assemble an emergency kit when
you can’t afford things like weather radios, hand tools, back-up batteries and
chargers, or extra quantities of medications — let alone bigger items like
generators.
Kelley said that in rural
areas like his, residents often lack the time — and sometimes the
transportation or ability — to get to a community shelter, even if they know
where one is. “I wish every rural home had to have a storm shelter of
some sort. We had four and a half minutes warning with this storm,” he said.
We had four and a half minutes
warning with this storm.
“It’s great to have community
shelters available, but if people don’t have transportation to get there, or
wait till they have confirmation of an approaching tornado before they move,
the shelters are not effective,” said David Roueche, an assistant professor of
structural engineering at Auburn University — located in Lee County. He
specializes in researching wind damage and ways to make structures better
protected from high winds.
He led
a team that analyzed the impact of the March 3 storm, and specifically
looked at the 19 out of 23 victims who lived in manufactured homes. Their
investigation revealed that all of the manufactured homes involved either had
degraded anchors, had anchorage systems that apparently didn’t meet state code,
or lacked ground anchors entirely. Anchors are devices – generally made of
metal, sometimes coupled with concrete – that are used in conjunction with
straps or tie-downs to secure the structure to the ground.
“We know it’s a problem. What
can these people do? We can enforce stricter building standards to give people
a much better chance of survival in their home. We can install
micro-community storm shelters — as in, smaller shelters that serve a street,
or a cluster of relatives — but this all takes money that the residents don’t
have. So how do we prioritize the limited pre-event mitigation funding from
FEMA or other groups? What other funding mechanisms can we use? These are the
questions we’re asking right now,” he said.
While progress has admittedly
been slow, Roueche said he is encouraged by results seen in communities such as
Moore, Oklahoma, which adopted enhanced building codes to strengthen their
homes, with minimal impact on home prices. He is also a proponent of
storm-vulnerable inland areas adopting the same Department of Housing and Urban
Development building standards recommended in Florida and coastal regions,
since climate change and unusual weather patterns have increased the incidence
of extreme storms in a wider range of locations.
With nowhere else to go,
Kelley said his family has no choice but to stay in their home while it is
being repaired. “It is coming along slow but steady,” he said. He created a
memorial area on a section of his property, where he will plant 23 fruit trees
— one for each of the lives lost in the storm. The memorial also has a pond and
chairs where people can come and remember the victims or just enjoy some
peaceful solitude.
Kelley said he hopes it will
provide some comfort to local residents.
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