For more international stories visit the CIOB’s global construction website GCR
A professor of physics in the US has proposed building massive walls in the region known as Tornado Alley to prevent the violent wind-storms that cause so much death and mayhem.
The walls, tall as skyscrapers and 50m thick, would help stop northbound warm fronts colliding with southbound cold fronts – the fateful clash that gives birth to deadly tornadoes.
Tornadoes form from “supercells” caused by the clash of warm and cold fronts (Wikimedia Commons)
They would cost around $160m per mile to build but the savings, in terms of human lives and billions in property damage prevented, would be worth it, argues Professor Rongjia Tao, of the Department of Physics at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Tornado Alley is a tornado-prone area running north-south in the middle of the US, encompassing northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.
The devastation wrought by tornadoes was exemplified in May last year when one struck Moore, Oklahoma, killing 24 people, injuring 377 others, obliterating more than 1,150 homes and causing an estimated $2bn in damages…
Read the rest of the article at GCR
Comments
Comments are closed.
Is this an ~April Fool story put out late. Its about as daft an idea as building big walls around Antarctica to stop the ice falling into the sea.
It would be better to leave that part of the US uninhabited. For thousands of years the people living there were nomads moving on as the seasons changed avoiding the tornados.
I am afraid if you want to go up against nature you have to expect a walloping every now or then.
Not every problem requires a physical engineering solution, sometimes it requires a social engineering one alongside or instead.
Please note that many of them do in fact “move”! Once they hear they tornado warning siren sound they go to where the tornado can do them and their families no harm!!! They simply take themselves their entire family and all their movable valuables underground into fully
habitable accommodation commonly called “Bunkers”!